Hey everyone!
Welcome back to Top 5 Scary Videos!
You’re probably wondering, hey, whose this new lady?
Well, I’m Kelly Paoli, and I’ll be jumping onto the channel to help out Courtney and
Jack with all these terrifyingly spooky stories.
Today we’re taking a look at the darker side of humanity with the top 5 scary human
experiments that will haunt your dreams.
And, be warned, the stories on this list are pretty disgusting
and despicable.
You’ve been warned.
5 Stanford Prison Experiment Starting off
our list with something a bit tame yet unsettling in the least, The Stanford Prison Experiment
is one of the most notorious social psychology experiments to occur in the United States.
In 1971, a research group at Stanford University, led by professor Philip Zimbardo, used volunteering
college students to conduct an experiment on the psychological effects of perceived
power.
It was even funded by the US Office of Naval Research.
The 24 male students were assigned to one of two groups; the prisoners or the guards,
and placed within a mock prison in which professor Zimbardo acted as the superintendent.
Prisoners were arrested at their homes and brought to the mock prison beneath the university.
Lasting a total of 6 days before being shut down for using unethical practices, students
quickly embraced their roles, with guards using extreme authoritarian tactics that inflicted
severe psychological torture to the prisoners, many of which accepted the abuse.
Some of the prisoners reportedly went ‘crazy’, there was a solitary confinement area that
was a dark closet that prisoners were left within, and many of the guards exhibited ‘genuine
sadistic behaviour’.
There’s been a few film adaptations of the story to emerge over the years, including
the 2015 movie The Stanford Prison Experiment, starring Billy Crudup, Ezra Miller and Tye
Sheridan.
4 Mustard Gas Experiments During World War 1, one of the most startling
innovations was the gas that German soldiers had released on the Allies; it was a new kind
of chemical warfare that was unprecedented, and the Ally forces were unprepared.
Eventually, masks were developed and improved upon to help soldiers survive gas bombings.
In 1943, mustard gas was still a problem during the Second World War, and the US Navy begun
testing the effectiveness of new clothing and gas masks that were meant to protect their
men from its threat.
But these experiments were incredibly unethical.
Boys who were aged 17 to 18 were brought in after boot camp as participants in an experiment
that they were told was to help shorten the war.
When they arrived at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, they found out it had to do
with mustard gas, and were exposed to it, many of which suffered internal and external
burns.
After it was done, the Navy pretty much ignored what had happened, and even threatened some
of these men with the Espionage Act.
During the experiments themselves, if the men protested, they were threatened with an
immediate court martial and 40 years in prison.
In 1991 the files about the experiments were declassified and taken to Congress.
The worst part was, the experiments were for nothing.
The Allies only used mustard gas once in WW2, and it was by accident, resulting in over
1000 civilian casualties.
3 Sexual Reassignment David Peter Reimer was known for years anonymously
as the “Joh/Joan” case.
In 1965, he was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, to a Mennonite couple, and due to complications
with a circumcision, his penis had been burnt beyond surgical repair.
His parents brought him to the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore to see psychologist
John Money; a man who was building a reputation in the field of gender identity and sexual
development, who believed that one’s gender identity is developed as a result of social
learning.
Money advised David’s parents that what would be best for him, at 22 months of age,
was to have him undergo a sex reassignment surgery, as he believed the child would be
more likely to achieve successful, functional sexual maturation as a girl rather than a
boy.
Since David was born a twin, it provided Money with the ability to test a case for his theories,
with one twin being raised a boy and the other a girl, and that the child was too young to
have formed any notions about their gender at that age.
The experiment continued onwards as David grew up, and he and his brother were forced
to rehearse sexual acts and engage in genital inspections, which, according to Money, was
to help develop a “healthy adult gender identity.”
David would go on to transition into living as a male at the age of 15m and committed
suicide after years of suffering severe depression at the age of 38.
2 Unit 731 Unit 731 was a covert biological and chemical
warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army’s during World War
2.
The unit participated in lethal human experimentation, and operated under the official name, the
Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army.
Approximately 3000 men, women and children who were war prisoners were experimented on,
being euphemistically referred to as ‘logs’, with the experiments ranging from vivisection
(surgery conducted on a living organism) that involved injecting prisoners with various
diseases and removing organs, germ warfare attacks, frostbite testing, syphilis, rape
and forced pregnancy and weapon testing.
Most of the prisoners were Chinese, but prisoners also consisted of European, Soviet, American,
Korean and Australian prisoners of war.
1 Nazi Human Experimentation Hitler’s Nazis committed some of the most
atrocious crimes during World War 2.
At many of the concentration camps that the Nazis used during the holocaust, they would
also conduct medical experiments on prisoners of all ages, including children.
Prisoners were forced into taking part, and often these experiments resulted in death,
disfiguration, and permanent disabilities.
At Auschwitz and various other camps, doctors were select prisoners to participate in hazardous
experiments that were designed to help German military in combat and to design new weapons.
The experiments consisted of bone, muscle and nerve transplantation experiments, injecting
bacteria into bone marrow, head injury experiments in which young patients would be hit with
mechanized hammers and driven insane.
There were freezing experiments, malaria experiments, mustard gas experiments, experiments in which
patients had their lymph nodes removed and were injected with tuberculousis.
Sterilization experiments.
This list goes on, and it’s disguisting.
Other experiments, like the ones of Josef Mengele, had no connection to ‘military
necessity’; his work consisted of experimenting on twins, to study the differences and similarities
in their genetics, and to see if the human body could be unnaturally manipulated.
Mengele performed experiments on almost 1,500 pairs of twins at Auschwitz, and only about
200 of those individuals survived.
These experiments would range from injecting dyes into the eyes of the children to see
if they would change colour, to sewing the twins together in an attempt to create conjoined
twins.
If one twin died, the other would be brought in and killed as well, with the doctors then
examining and comparing their bodies.
Well, that was a lot to take in.
There’s a lot of messed up stuff that’s happened at the hands of humans over the years,
but here’s hoping that we’ll never see the likes of some of these horrifying experiments
ever again.
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It’s a good ol time.
Anywho, thanks for watching everybody!
I’ll catch you all in another video.