What you're looking at

What you're looking at. Vulnerability to Covert Attack is a 1959 report film from the U.S. Army Chemical Corps. The archive.org description says it covers how population centers could be hit with covert biological warfare and what nerve gas and psychochemicals such as LSD do to animals and humans, and that "soldiers are shown attempting to march in formation before and after ingesting LSD." The abstract is credited to the U.S. National Library of Medicine, which holds the print.

The part in this reel. The narrator introduces "psychochemicals, or K agents being developed by the chemical corps" as "a new family of incapacitating agents" (11:50). A lab cat that normally hunts a mouse is given "a minute quantity of lysergic acid diethylamide, LSD" in aerosol form, and is "no longer interested in catching the mouse, and in fact appears to be afraid of it" (12:08–12:38). Then the film turns to people: "enlisted volunteers were asked to take part in a carefully controlled test" (12:52). "During a break, each of the volunteers, except the drill sergeant, received a minute dose of the psychochemical in coffee. And about thirty minutes later, the squad was ordered to fall in" (13:10). Men who drilled "with precision" are now "relaxed and carefree," unable to "control the impulse to laugh," and finally "confused, irrational, and uncontrollable" (13:25–13:53).

Where it came from. According to Wikipedia, from 1955 to 1975 the Army Chemical Corps ran classified human-subject research at the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, in which about 6,720 soldiers took part in tests of more than 250 chemicals. The film does not say where its squad was filmed, so this reel does not claim it was Edgewood. The same article says the Medical Research Volunteer Program was discontinued in September 1975, that a Senate finding was that informed consent and follow-up were neglected in efforts to maintain the secrecy of the tests, and that in 2013 a federal judge found the Army has an ongoing duty to warn those test subjects of new information affecting their health.

Why it looks strange now. The film treats all of it as routine science: a calm narrator, a cat, a drill squad. Near the end it lists a different Army achievement in the same voice: "the basic scientific groundwork for mouth-to-mouth resuscitation was performed by the chemical warfare laboratories" (24:09).