Project MKUltra begins in the early 1950s as a Central Intelligence Agency program aimed at finding ways to control human behavior and alter brain function, and this film lays out what the surviving record shows about it. Researchers dosed unwitting American and Canadian citizens with LSD and subjected others to hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, and abuse, running the work through universities, hospitals, prisons, and pharmaceutical companies, often using front organizations to hide the CIA's hand. The program consumed roughly six percent of the agency's total budget at its height before being scaled back in 1964 and 1967 and shut down in 1973, the same year the CIA director ordered its files destroyed. The film covers how the 1975 Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission investigations had to rely on participant testimony and the few documents that survived, until a 1977 Freedom of Information Act request turned up another 20,000 pages and forced fresh Senate hearings. Much of the program remains classified, and the film treats that gap as the reason MKUltra still generates speculation.