When the CIA poisoned an entire French town
"Some of my friends tried to get out of the window. They were thrashing wildly... screaming, and the sound of the metal beds and the jumping up and down... the noise was terrible."
Over 70 years ago, a French town was hit by a sudden outbreak of hallucinations, which left five people dead and many seriously ill. Leon says he would prefer to die than endure the 1951 events again.
On 16 August 1951, postman Leon Armunier was doing his rounds in the southern French town of Pont-Saint-Esprit when he was suddenly overwhelmed by nausea and wild hallucinations.
"It was terrible. I had the sensation of shrinking and shrinking, and the fire and the serpents coiling around my arms," he remembers.
Leon, now 87, fell off his bike and was taken to the hospital in Avignon.
He was put in a straitjacket, but he shared a room with three teenagers who had been chained to their beds to keep them under control.
"Some of my friends tried to get out of the window. They were thrashing wildly... screaming, and the sound of the metal beds and the jumping up and down... the noise was terrible.
"I'd prefer to die rather than go through that again."
Over the coming days, dozens of other people in the town fell prey to similar symptoms.
Doctors at the time concluded that bread at one of the town's bakeries had become contaminated by ergot, a poisonous fungus that occurs naturally on rye.
Biological warfare
That view remained largely unchallenged until 2009, when an American investigative journalist, Hank Albarelli, revealed a CIA document labelled: "Re: Pont-Saint-Esprit and F.Olson Files. SO Span/France Operation file, inclusive Olson. Intel files. Hand carry to Belin - tell him to see to it that these are buried."
F. Olson is Frank Olson, a CIA scientist who, at the time of the Pont St Esprit incident, led research for the agency into the drug LSD.
David Belin, meanwhile, was executive director of the Rockefeller Commission created by the White House in 1975 to investigate abuses carried out worldwide by the CIA.
Albarelli believes the Pont-Saint-Esprit and F. Olson Files, mentioned in the document, would show - if they had not been "buried" - that the CIA was experimenting on the townspeople, by dosing them with LSD.
The conclusion drawn at the time was that one of the town's bakeries, the Roch Briand, was the source of the poisoning. It's possible, Albarelli says, that LSD was put in the bread.
It is well known that biological warfare scientists around the world, including some in Britain, were experimenting with LSD in the early 1950s - a time of conflict in Korea and an escalation of Cold War tensions.
Albarelli says he has found a top-secret report issued in 1949 by the research director of the Edgewood Arsenal, where many US government LSD experiments were carried out, which states that the army should do everything possible to launch "field experiments" using the drug.
The local hospital where some of the victims were taken in 1951 has been closed
Using Freedom of Information legislation, he also got hold of another CIA report from 1954.
In it an agent reported his conversation with a representative of the Sandoz Chemical company in Switzerland.
Sandoz's base, which is just a few hundred kilometres from Pont-Saint-Esprit, was the only place where LSD was being produced at that time.
The agent reports that after several drinks, the Sandoz representative abruptly stated: "The Pont-Saint-Esprit 'secret' is that it was not the bread at all... It was not grain ergot."
Written by Mike Thomson, originally for the BBC in 2010.