In 1953, the then-Director of Central Intelligence officially approved project MKUltra. Originally intended to make sure the United States government kept up with presumed Soviet advances in mind-control technology ... MKUltra has gone down in history as a significant example of government abuse of human rights. The intent of the project was to study the use of biological and chemical materials in altering human behavior," according to ... official testimony. Under MKUltra, the CIA gave itself the authority to [experiment on] unwitting test subjects, like drug-addicted prisoners, marginalized sex workers and terminal cancer patients. "The covert testing programs resulted in massive abridgements of the rights of American citizens, sometimes with tragic consequences," concluded a Senate hearing in 1975-76. MKUltra wasn't one project, as the US Supreme Court wrote in a 1985 decision. It was 162 different secret projects that were indirectly financed by the CIA, but were "contracted out to various universities ... and similar institutions." In all, at least 80 institutions and 185 researchers participated, but many didn't know they were dealing with the CIA. Many of MKUltra's records were destroyed. But 8,000 pages of records - mostly financial documents that were mistakenly not destroyed in 1973 - were found in 1977. Nobody ever answered for MKUltra. Two lawsuits related to the program reached the Supreme Court, [writes Melissa Blevins for Today I Found Out], "but both protected the government over citizen's rights."