The sinister Harvard experiments in Netflix’s Unabomber were real, but a key detail was changed

The new film Unabomber depicts both the FBI’s manhunt for the titular terrorist and the earlier life of Ted Kaczynski as he heads to Harvard and undergoes sinister psychological experiments led by Professor Henry Murray.

This is, for the most part, true. In real life, Kaczynski began his nationwide bombing campaign in the US, which killed three people and injured 23 others between 1978 and 1995. Following a nearly two-decade manhunt, he was finally captured by the FBI. 

Kaczynski was handed multiple life sentences, and died in prison in June 2023 at the age of 81. Prior to his capture, he published a lengthy manifesto in which he argued that the industrial-technological system was destroying humanity, an ideology that formed the basis of his bombing campaign. 

The Netflix film spends more time on Kaczynski’s earlier years and how his mind began to form this line of thinking. As is depicted in Unabomber, the real Kaczynski was a genius and graduated high school at the age of 15 – the same age he was accepted into Harvard. 

He attended the university on a scholarship in 1958 at just 16, studying mathematics. During his second year, he participated in a study led by the real Harvard psychologist Henry Murray (played by Russell Crowe in the film). 

Around 22 male students participated, committing roughly 200 hours over three years to the wider research programme. As part of one experiment, the students wrote essays outlining their personal beliefs and philosophies and were led to believe they would debate these ideas with another student.

Instead, they were confronted by a law student working with the researchers, who had been prepared to aggressively attack their arguments and beliefs while their reactions were recorded.

As author Alston Chase said in an essay for The Atlantic, “Through research at the Murray Center and in the Harvard archives I found that, among its other purposes, Henry Murray’s experiment was intended to measure how people react under stress. 

“Murray subjected his unwitting students, including Kaczynski, to intensive interrogation – what Murray himself called ‘vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive’ attacks, assaulting his subjects’ egos and most-cherished ideals and beliefs.”

So yes, what you see in Unabomber is derived from real accounts. Kaczynski really did participate in Murray’s research, and the deliberately hostile interrogation depicted by the film was based on genuine reports. 

Netflix’s Unabomber changes one key detail about the experiments on Ted Kaczynski

Sam Chalsen, who co-wrote the script alongside Nelson Greaves, told Netflix’s Tudum that the close and intense relationship between Murray and a young Kaczynski (Jacob Tremblay) is largely rooted in speculation. 

You see, in the film, Murray is joined on the assignment by his professional and romantic partner Christiana Morgan (Annabelle Wallis), a skilled scientist who was also a real-life psychoanalyst employed by Harvard.

Early on, Murray proves to be a mentor to Ted, recognising his intelligence and gaining his trust alongside Christiana. Ted slowly but surely opens up about his struggles to fit in, but Murray later uses these insecurities against him for the experiments. 

Ted starts to realise he’s essentially being studied rather than listened to for his great ideas, leading to their relationship becoming increasingly hostile. Ted continues to attend the sessions, but only as a way to challenge and manipulate Murray.

The climax sees Murray diagnose Ted with schizophrenia (FYI, in real life, defence psychiatrists who evaluated Kaczynski concluded he had paranoid schizophrenia, but not until after his arrest, and even then the diagnosis was debated.)

In return, Ted reveals that he’s been deceptive to Murray, having written flattering letters supposedly sent by other academics to play on his ego. 

There’s no evidence that the real Murray diagnosed him while he was at Harvard, or that Kaczynski secretly sent his professor the fake letters depicted in the film. So while he did participate in the experiments, the writers have been open about taking creative liberties with the relationship we see develop between the pair.

“That’s definitely inspired by true events,” Chalsen said. “We’re not suggesting that [the real] Ted had this specific relationship with Henry Murray that had all these turns. There’s no evidence of that.”

Were the experiments part of the CIA’s Project MKUltra?

Although it’s widely speculated that Murray’s experiments were funded by the CIA and its MKUltra program, there’s no definitive proof that this is true. Unabomber leans into the government connection, but it stops short of explicitly naming MKUltra.

For the uninitiated, MKUltra was a secret CIA programme launched in 1953 to research behavioural modification and methods of manipulating human behaviour. It involved numerous projects including the use of drugs and hypnosis, with some experiments carried out on people who didn’t know they were being used as test subjects.

This famously included the covert administration of LSD. The programme and related research were later exposed and investigated by the US Senate, with the CIA facing widespread condemnation over the lack of informed consent and violation of its subjects’ rights.

Here’s the thing: Murray did have a background in US intelligence. Although he never worked directly for the CIA, during World War II he served as a lieutenant colonel in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) – the wartime intelligence agency that preceded the CIA.

In the Netflix film, it’s a little more explicit, showing a member of the agency pressuring Murray into producing results, “especially considering we’re the ones footing the bill.” But when Ted confronts him later on, Murray insists it’s still his own research. 

Ted also confronts Christiana, demanding to see his case file. She explains that he’s part of “something much bigger than you” and that “this was never about ideas. This was about subjecting young men to stressful situations and seeing what made them submit.”

“After the war in Korea, a group of prisoners of war came home changed. They had somehow been reprogrammed to support the communist cause,” Christiana says. “So the CIA asked the professor to design an experiment to figure out what happened. How they were broken.”

There is some truth behind these comments – or at least the concerns. The US government really was worried about reports of American prisoners appearing to embrace communism during and after the Korean War, with fears over Communist “brainwashing” helping to fuel the CIA’s interest in researching methods of behavioural manipulation.

And this really did fuel the MKUltra program. A recent Harvard Kennedy School paper describes how it was “motivated largely by the belief that Chinese, North Korean, and Soviet authorities had successfully subjected political prisoners and American soldiers captured during the Korean war to brainwashing.”

But despite the parallels, there’s no definitive evidence that Murray’s Harvard experiments were funded by the CIA or formed part of MKUltra. And there’s something else you should know – although some of the sessions were traumatic, Kaczynski himself said they were, for the most part, unremarkable. 

In one letter sent by Kaczynski in 2017, he described the belief he was “subjected to psychological ‘torture’ as part of an ‘MK Ultra’ mind-control experiment conducted by the CIA” as “all bullsh*t.”

“There was one and only one unpleasant experience in the Murray study; it lasted about half an hour and could not reasonably have been described as ‘torture,’” he wrote. 

“The Murray study consisted mostly of interviews and filling out paper-and-pencil personality tests. The CIA was not involved. This legend to the effect that the Murray study was some sort of CIA mind-control experiment was started by an irresponsible article that Alston Chase published in The Atlantic around 1999–2001.”

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Featured image credit: Netflix