Review: Was Charles Manson Carrying Out a CIA Experiment?
Errol Morris' new Netflix documentary explores alternative theories of the Manson cult's infamous 1969 murders.
One of America's more famous documentarians, Errol Morris, was intrigued by Tom O'Neill's Chaos, a 2019 book delving into the mysteries around the murders committed in 1969 by people associated with the hippie cult leader Charles Manson.
In a new Netflix feature documentary exploring O'Neill's theories and findings, Morris shows his work, and we hear him telling O'Neill on camera he isn't quite buying the story O'Neill is selling.
Partly because of his connections to the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, which was haunted by CIA-associated mind control researcher Louis Jolyon West, and partly because of the mysterious leniency in how the legal system treated Manson before he was eventually arrested for the murders, O'Neill thinks it likely Manson was either a confidential informant and thus under the law's protection to some extent, or carrying out a CIA-planned experiment using something like West's techniques to turn his "Family" into mind-controlled murderers.
O'Neill certainly provides fodder for both theses, the first seeming more likely if only because it's less baroquely sinister. But alternate explanations require a differently cynical view about government than O'Neill's evil one: that perhaps California law enforcement was lazy and incompetent, or that West's claims about his experimental brainwashing powers were exaggerated to keep the CIA money flowing.
The facts that Manson did eventually face justice and life in prison and never hinted at any of this, and that the world does not seem crawling with people with this brainwash-to-murder power, indicates that some skepticism about O'Neill's thesis is warranted. But he presents it with dogged research powers—and a fair assessment of what he has and has not proven.
