♪♪ -Ow.

♪♪ -Tonight on "Retro Report," understanding the present by revealing the past.

First, can a decades-old murder shed light on the way we react to violence on the Internet?

-38 of her neighbors watched the woman die.

And when it was over, they all went back to bed.

-40 people viewed the Facebook Live video, but not a single person called police.

-We're all bystanders on social media.

-A drug that shook up the status quo in the '60s... -Turn on.

Tune in.

Drop out.

-...is now upending modern medicine.

-It just was me back.

-Then sexual assault in the military... -And you idiots still don't have it.

-...and the boatload of garbage that fueled the recycling movement.

-I thought it was a very good idea and still do.

-Plus, Andy Borowitz, humorist for The New Yorker magazine.

-I'd like to celebrate a group of brave Americans who haven't gotten their due -- moon-landing deniers.

-I'm Celeste Headlee.

-And I'm Masud Olufani.

This is "Retro Report" on PBS.

-They have stunned the world.

-Oh, my God!

-More secrets exposed.

-When today's most popular social-media platforms were invented, tech companies said they would create a sense of community and bring people closer, but it didn't take long for the dark side of human nature to show up online, from bullying and shaming to explicit violence.

-And with all of this streaming live on our phones, there's growing alarm about people just watching, becoming bystanders instead of intervening or calling the police.

But it turns out our tendency to just stand by isn't unique to the digital age.

It was revealed decades ago after an infamous New York City murder case, long before social media ever entered the picture.

♪♪ -Am I live?

-What up, peeps?

-We are live from Phuket Walking Street.

-Two months after the public launch of Facebook Live in 2016, more than 800,000 people tuned in to watch an exploding watermelon.

[ Crowd shouting ] The app, described by the company as a great medium for sharing raw and visceral content, has been used to stream events from the silly to the serious.

-Everybody move out.

-But then it captured the aftermath of a fatal police shooting... -He let the officer know that he was -- he had a firearm and he was reaching for his wallet, and the officer just shot him in his arm.

...and then this.

-A 15-year-old girl sexually assaulted by four or five teenage boys who streamed what they did on Facebook Live.

-Professor Desmond Patton studies the relationship between youth violence and social media.

-We now have a window into what's happening in communities where trauma and stress and violence are everyday occurrences, and so Facebook Live captures those moments inadvertently or advertently.

-In the sexual-assault case, Chicago police charged two juveniles with taking part and using their phones to share it online.

-There is this thing that happens around celebrity and, "Who's seeing this?

How far can it reach, and will it make me famous?"

-Authorities say at least 40 people viewed the Facebook Live video, but not a single person called police.

-It just disgusts me.

-But police went out of their way to chastise another group, what might be called the digital bystanders.

-Where are we going?

What are we doing as a society that people will actually look at those crimes taking place and not pick up the phone and dial 911?

-But that troubling question is not unique to the digital age.

Take a case from the 1960s in New York City, where 28-year-old Catherine Genovese, or "Kitty," as she was called, lived with her partner, Mary Ann Zielonko.

-She was very outgoing, very gregarious, very people-oriented.

We were sort of closeted.

I just never thought about it, you know?

It just was my life.

-They shared an apartment in Kew Gardens, Queens.

-We just both tended bar, lived a very quiet life.

The area was very, very nice.

It was rather artsy in a way.

Kew Gardens was really very safe.

-But late one night in March 1964, Genovese drove home from the bar she managed, unaware she was being followed by a serial killer.

As she got out of her car, she saw Winston Moseley and started to run.

-This is where the killer must have started to catch up with Kitty Genovese.

She didn't quite make it halfway down the block before the killer drove a knife into her.

-She screamed, "Oh, my God.

He stabbed me.

Help me.

Somebody help me," and she goes down on the ground, and she continues to scream.

There are lights going on in the apartment houses, windows going up, and a man looked out, and he yelled, "Leave that girl alone."

-Witnesses saw Moseley, startled by the noise, run away, but none of Genovese's neighbors came to her aid, even as she staggered into a nearby doorway, screaming again for help.

-As she's lying helpless on the floor and the door opens, it's her attacker.

He stabs her multiple times.

Then he cuts off her clothing.

He sexually assaults her.

Winston Moseley flees.

A police car pulls in.

-But it was too late.

Kitty Genovese died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.

Her partner, Mary Ann, didn't hear the news until later when the police knocked on her door.

-I felt, well, she was so close, and I was sleeping, and I didn't know what happened, that I could've saved her, you know?

That's what I really think still.

-At first, the murder was not big news, but two weeks later, after a tip from police, The New York Times published a chilling front-page story that began, "For more than half an hour 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman."

-The story was absolutely and utterly shocking.

No one could imagine that not only would people fail to call the police, but that they would watch the murder take place over half an hour.

-One witness was quoted as saying, "I didn't want to get involved."

The story became a sensation, and the public reacted with disgust and fear of city life.

-Tell me why you felt it was necessary for you to carry a knife.

-The Kitty Genovese case where no one came to her rescue even though she begged for help.

-38 of her neighbors watched the woman die, and when it was over, they all went back to bed.

-In the aftermath of the murder, the 38 witnesses, who were not involved in Kitty's murder but were only witnesses to it, had been portrayed almost worse than the murderer himself.

-29-year-old Winston Moseley was picked up by the police and confessed to the killing.

-The detectives asked the killer, "How could you attack this woman in front of so many witnesses?

Weren't you afraid?"

And the killer said, "I knew they wouldn't do anything.

People never do."

-Genovese's death became a metaphor for public apathy and moral decay, but two young social psychologists, John Darley from NYU and Bibb Latané from Columbia University, had a different take.

Their idea became known as the bystander effect.

-What struck me and struck John as we talked about it is that 38 might not have been just a coincidence.

It might have been a cause.

It might have been what made it happen, that it might have been that each of the people was actually concerned but somehow was misled by the idea that other people were watching.

-Using students, Latané and Darley designed experiments to test their counterintuitive theory that the more people who witness an emergency, the less likely it is that any of them will intervene.

-I would like to thank the two of you for being here today.

-A student was told she was speaking privately over an intercom with one other student who suddenly said he was having a seizure.

-If somebody would -- would give me a l-little help.

-Hello?

-She quickly got up and ran for help, as did most of the subjects who thought that they alone knew someone was in trouble.

-Anybody here?

Help!

We need some help!

We've got somebody hurt!

Hello!

-But look what happened when students were told there were others listening to the conversation.

-Somebody g-give me a little -- little help here.

I'm having a real prob-- problem right now.

-In repeated experiments, the majority of them just sat there and didn't help.

-You think that if there are many people who witness something that other people certainly already have done something.

Why should it be me?

-New evidence in the Kitty Genovese case has emerged showing that details of that shocking New York Times story were exaggerated.

Two neighbors did call the police, and while dozens heard her screams, only a few actually saw the attack take place.

-We can look back and say that it wasn't entirely accurate, but the fact is that it was a powerful change agent for society.

-911 emergency.

-In the wake of the murder, the 911 phone system was created to make it easier to report a crime, and more states passed Good Samaritan laws to encourage people to help, but tougher measures, so-called duty-to-assist laws, are not widespread.

-It's the law in many, if not most, states that there's no criminal penalty for failing to get involved, for failing to help someone who's in dire straits or an emergency.

-Others watching the violence take out their cellphones and record it without intervening.

-But the age of violent videos taken by bystanders has led to calls for new kinds of laws.

[ Indistinct shouting ] That happened in California after a 14-year-old boy suffered a concussion during an assault by one teen while another filmed it and posted it on Snapchat.

-Why would you do this?

For a laugh?

For a like?

-The boy who threw the punch was given probation.

The teen who filmed it was not charged.

-Taking someone's worst moment and making it your best moment on social media is expanding exponentially, and we need to do something about it now before it gets out of control.

-California has since passed a law that allows additional jail time for those who take part in a crime and video-record it, but what about those watching online?

-Viewing things around rape and beatings and murder are extreme cases that are actually rare on social media, but what do you do when you see negative things?

Should you report it like you would a physical situation?

Should you call 911?

Should you call a community-based organization?

I think that police and schools and parents and technology companies could come together and really put forth some ideas on what people should do.

-Under fire for not anticipating how its platform would be used, Facebook has hired thousands of people to remove offensive material faster so its users don't become unwitting bystanders to violence.

-We will keep doing all we can to prevent tragedies like this from happening.

-But social scientists say the bystander effect, taught in textbooks worldwide, is a much broader phenomenon, as ingrained in us today as when it came to light 55 years ago in the Kitty Genovese case.

-What we now understand is that this observation and not knowing what to do is something that we've done for a really long time and that technology has not shifted that.

It just puts a finer point on what we've already been doing, and I think we should stop there and think about, "Why are kids doing this to other kids?"

And social media gives us an opportunity to really dig into that, and so that's where I think our attention should be at this moment.

♪♪ -There's been a groundbreaking transformation underway in the U.S. military, as combat roles have opened to women.

Women now drive tanks, fire mortars, and command Army units in war zones, jobs previously open only to men, and if they can pass rigorous tests, women can join elite forces like the Green Berets or the Navy SEALs.

-But the first steps towards rethinking women's role in the military can be traced to the aftermath of a disturbing episode that shook up military culture.

It was a sexual-assault scandal in the early 1990s known as Tailhook.

The shocking revelations by one female Navy officer showed how hostile to women the military could be and put the Pentagon on notice.

♪♪ 1991, the U.S. launches a ground and air war in the Persian Gulf.

Among the troops are 40,000 American women, and not all the men like the idea.

-I don't know exactly how these women are gonna handle this.

I think this should be, you know, a man's war here.

-By law, women were not allowed in ground combat or fighter jets or combat ships, but many coveted those jobs, including Navy lieutenant Paula Coughlin.

-I grew up in a Navy family where we all understood you could do whatever you wanted to do in life.

You just had to be hardworking and set your mind to it.

-Coughlin wanted to be an aviator like her father, but as a woman, she was allowed to fly only support aircraft like helicopters.

She excelled and landed a plumb job as an admiral's aid.

-I was really confident that I would have a pretty long and successful career.

-It was in the company of her boss that Coughlin attended the Tailhook convention in September 1991.

She remembers this panel discussion where a question came up that was front and center for Navy women at the time -- whether women would ever be allowed to fly fighter jets like the men.

-I was wondering, sir, when you plan to implement that and if it's gonna be soon.

[ Men murmuring ] -The male pilots in the audience started jeering even before they heard the answer.

By not condemning the outburst, Coughlin believes the admiral sent an ominous message.

-"Women are second-class citizens, and whether they can fly a jet or not, let's party and have at it," and that's really how it all kind of played out.

-It all played out on the hotel's third floor, where convention after parties turned ugly.

Drunken aviators roamed the halls exposing their genitals and attacking unsuspecting Navy and civilian women.

When Lieutenant Coughlin entered this corridor packed with partiers, a crowd of male aviators surrounded her and pounced.

-People were actually closing in and trying to pull my clothes off.

I got knocked to the floor, and I kicked, and I punched, and I actually bit somebody who was reaching down my blouse.

-She eventually escaped and later told her boss, Admiral John Snyder, about the incident.

He promised to report it.

Coughlin remembers him saying something else, something Snyder denies.

-He told me, "That's what you get when you go down a hallway full of drunk aviators.

That's what you get."

-I chose to meet with her 'cause I was appalled that nobody on behalf of the Navy had apologized, you know, to Paula and said, "I am sorry this occurred."

-Barbara Pope was then the Navy's first female Assistant Secretary.

She says from the start of the Tailhook investigation, the Navy's top men weren't taking what happened seriously.

-They thought it was misbehavior, you know, some behavior that got out of hand, and they missed assault.

You know, my point was that assault is criminal, you know?

There's no acceptable assault.

If you are manhandled against your will, it's assault.

-Charges of sexual harassment by women who say they were manhandled at a gathering of Navy fliers.

-Behind the specific assault lies a macho culture which belittles women.

-Seven months after Tailhook, the Navy issued its report.

1,500 officers were questioned, but only two were named as suspects because most of the Navy men involved refused to cooperate.

The investigation was led by Admiral Duvall "Mac" Williams.

-I said to Mac, "I'm not buying that nobody's talking," and Admiral Williams had said, "Well, you know, some of these women were kind of bringing it on themselves," and that started my outrage, my indignation, and I said, "Nobody brings assault on themselves," and he said, "Men and women cannot work together.

It all comes down to sex."

This is the man who was in charge of the investigation.

-In the wake of an apparent whitewash, Paula Coughlin took a radical step.

-Until one woman came forward and said, "Enough," there was a very good chance it was going to be covered up.

-Dressed in her uniform, Coughlin went on national television to demand that the men who had attacked her at Tailhook be brought to justice.

-Not every man in the Navy behaves like that, but those who did shouldn't remain in the Navy or the Marine Corps.

-Coughlin's media appearances transformed Tailhook from a Navy embarrassment to a national scandal.

The Secretary of the Navy was forced to resign, and Congress temporarily froze 4,500 Navy promotions.

-Sexual harassment will not be tolerated, and those who don't get the message will be driven from our ranks.

-The new Navy secretary, Sean O'Keefe, instituted gender-sensitivity classes, closed officers' drinking clubs, and set up a commission to study whether women should be allowed to serve on combat ships and planes.

The changes made Paula Coughlin a hero to many women but a pariah in the Navy.

-I had to walk into a room full of naval aviators that felt like I had betrayed their tribe.

I had to listen to a live talk show about how I had ruined the Navy and what a slut I was.

I just was treading water and trying not to kill myself.

-What really happened at the Tailhook convention finally emerged in a blistering Pentagon report -- 90 victims in all, 140 officers facing possible punishment, but in the end, while dozens of military careers were damaged, no one was criminally prosecuted, and with that, Paula Coughlin quit the Navy.

-It's been more than four years since the infamous Tailhook incident.

-Tailhook exposed the sexual-assault problem in the military, but the reforms did not end it.

Navy Petty Officer Jenny McClendon was shocked at what she faced in 1999, just a few years after Tailhook.

-I presumed that I was going to join a group of people who were my comrades.

When I got to the ship, it was a while before -- It was probably a couple of months before we went from harassment to the groping, and the groping eventually culminated in several physical assaults and a few rapes.

-She wasn't alone.

In 2008... -Women serving in the U.S. military today are more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire in Iraq.

-...largest sexual assault... -And in 2012 came news that 62 female recruits were sexually assaulted by their Air Force instructors.

Paula Coughlin, who had married, started a business, and put Tailhook behind her, felt compelled to step forward again.

-We represent over 500,000 veterans... -Working with the group Protect Our Defenders, she helped pressure Congress to hold hearings on the issue.

-We have been trying a number of programs, a number of training activities, a number of educational initiatives.

-Since then, there has been some progress.

Service members are reporting sexual assaults more often, over 6,000 in 2018, but that's still a fraction of the 20,000 assaults that the Pentagon estimates took place that year.

-We know that this is an underreported crime.

-Buried in the data is another striking fact -- of those 20,000 assaults, 7,500 of the victims were men.

-Rape is a crime about power and control.

The military is very much about power and control.

-Navy Petty Officer Brian Lewis says he was raped by a superior officer at knifepoint on a submarine base in 2000.

He says he told his command about the rape, but men rarely do.

-A lot of it has to do with gender norms, that men cannot be victims, that you're serving in the military and you're able to defend yourself against this aggression.

And a lot of it is just -- A lot of it is shame at having had this happen.

-Lewis says his case was never investigated.

-I was given a general discharge for... -He told Congress that he was retaliated against and discharged with a diagnosis of personality disorder, something he says happens to many sexual-assault victims.

-I'm here today because I am not alone.

My story is all too common.

-It's like seeing America's youth and the way that I used to be, so completely virtuously enamored with the idea of serving your country and then being so desperately betrayed.

-Earlier this year, military officers were called back to Capitol Hill after revelations that sexual assaults at the service academies had nearly doubled since 2016.

And at one hearing... -Like you, I am also a military sexual-assault survivor.

-...Senator Martha McSally, a retired Air Force colonel and the first female pilot to fly in combat, told her story.

-I was preyed upon and then raped by a superior officer.

I was horrified at how my attempt to share generally my experiences were handled.

I almost separated from the Air Force at 18 years over my despair.

-The Department of Defense insists it prosecutes every case where sufficient evidence exists, but less than 3% of the incidents investigated last year resulted in a conviction.

-I think that prosecuting rapists in the military is pretty vital to eradicating rapists in the military, and I know that sounds almost remedial, but it's what's not happening.

Someone who commits a criminal offense in the military like driving drunk or doing drugs or stealing hand grenades, boom, they go to jail.

They get kicked out really quickly, but if you rape a woman or you assault a man, you -- "Oh, wait a minute.

You're okay."

-Tailhook forced the military to begin addressing its sexual-assault problem, but it had another unexpected legacy.

The Pentagon commission formed in the wake of the scandal recommending lifting the age-old restrictions on the kinds of jobs women could hold.

And within two years, the Navy and Air Force opened combat jobs to women.

Since then, the Army and Marines have done the same.

-Today, 40 women Marines checked into the Marine Combat Training Battalion at Camp Pendleton in San Diego County.

-With all occupations now open to women, the military is seeing healthy increases in female enlistment.

Former Navy official Barbara Pope says credit for much of that progress goes to Paula Coughlin and Tailhook.

-It forced the Department of Defense to look at, could women fly?

Could women be commanding officers of warships?

And so the Navy will be forever indebted to her for, you know, forcing those changes.

I mean, sometimes you have to have a crisis to speed up change, and Tailhook was that.

-For a long time, I said, "I was in the hallway.

I was in the wrong place at the wrong time," and I thought that for, I don't know, 10 years at least, and then I started considering that maybe I was in the right place at the right time.

Somebody had to be there.

Somebody had to be the one to start the ball rolling.

♪♪ -Tens of millions of Americans suffer from depression and anxiety, and many don't respond to available treatments, so finding new medications has become a priority, but some of the drugs now showing promise aren't new at all, and they come from surprising places.

-This year, the FDA approved a form of ketamine, also known as the club drug Special K, for treatment-resistant depression.

And then there's psilocybin, a psychedelic -- it's the active compound in magic mushrooms and a chemical cousin of LSD.

Medicine probably isn't the first thing that comes to mind when you think of psychedelics.

They're far better known for their place in 1960s counterculture.

When Sherry Marcy was diagnosed with Stage III endometrial cancer, her life changed overnight.

-I'd been an athlete all my life, so to suddenly have cancer was shocking.

I think I looked up from the phone call and said to Nancy, "I'm stunned."

-After Sherry's diagnosis, even prior to treatment, it was just like this doom had descended on her and then subsequently on us.

-It took away my whole identity.

I wasn't who I used to be, and I wasn't the person that Nancy, you know, formed a life with.

It felt like I sat on the couch and did nothing all day.

-Then Sherry read an article about a study for cancer patients struggling with depression.

They were given an unusual treatment, psilocybin, a chemical cousin of LSD with one important difference.

-It comes down to the spelling of psilocybin.

It's a hard word to spell, but at least it's not spelled LSD, which is a very strong word that people react to.

-♪ Old child, young child ♪ -That reaction can be traced back to the 1960s, when LSD burst onto the scene.

-CBS News, without any flowers in its hair, is in San Francisco because this city has gained the reputation of being the hippie capital of the world.

-It was January of 1967, and thousands of young people gathered in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park to celebrate a counterculture based on peace, love, and psychedelic drugs like LSD.

-It was political speakers.

It was countercultural speakers.

It was rock music, and, yes, the LSD flowed like wine.

-A psychologist who had taught at Harvard named Timothy Leary praised the power of LSD, an increasingly popular mind-altering drug.

-Turn on.

Tune in.

Drop out.

-Timothy Leary had an insight that if you changed yourself, it would change the world and change the society.

-When people say, "What's the use of LSD?"

I translate that into, "What's the use of my head?"

And that's a fascinating problem.

Yeah.

Suppose man can use more of his brain.

-People that took the drug felt if everybody can have this experience, the world will be a profoundly different place, a much better place, and within months, this drug, this sensibility, this countercultural revolution, if you want to call it that, attracted mass media from around the planet, and that blew it up.

-♪ Everything, turn... ♪ -The city of San Francisco has been warned of a hippie invasion come summer in numbers almost too staggering to comprehend.

-I think a lot of people intuited in the establishment that LSD was a direct threat to industriousness.

-I mean, what, you want to drop out, not get a job, you know, just go and live on the street in San Francisco?

I think this was seen as profoundly threatening to the social order.

-The kids who take LSD aren't gonna fight your wars.

They're not going to join your corporations.

-Psychedelics are not growing, okay?

Psychedelics are dangerous.

-Former New York City Police Commissioner Howard Safir was an undercover narcotics agent in the late 1960s.

-Back then, everybody thought LSD was for hippies until suddenly kids who looked like they were straight showed up in emergency rooms.

-There is a steady flow into San Francisco hospitals of young people who have freaked out and been picked up by the police in a state of desperate terror.

-I had seen people on the street who had no idea where they were.

I'd arrested people on LSD who were incredibly violent, so it wasn't the peaceful, nonharmful, easy drug that Timothy Leary professed it to be.

-There is nothing smart, there is nothing grown-up or sophisticated in taking an LSD trip at all.

They're just being complete fools.

-Headlines warned of additional dangers.

-Instant insanity.

-Chromosome damage.

-It may affect your unborn children.

-After Diane Linkletter fell from a sixth-story window in 1969, her father, TV personality Art Linkletter, blamed LSD.

-Anybody who has said anything which would encourage my daughter to take LSD was unwittingly a part of being her murderer.

-I think that raised public consciousness probably as much as anything that happened in the '60s.

-President Nixon went to the Narcotics Bureau today to sign a drug bill.

-In 1970, the Controlled Substances Act made LSD a Schedule I drug, the class of dangerous substances with high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use.

But it turns out that until that point, researchers had been testing the medical use of LSD in the lab, with some promising early results.

-It was all legal in those days, nothing controversial about it at all.

-Bill Richards helped conduct scientific research with LSD and other psychedelics as a young researcher in the 1960s.

He says the early experiments in the 1950s were rudimentary.

-You'd simply be given the drug and see what happens.

-Do you find any difference between one half of your body as opposed to the other half?

-Well, I have a sort of a wavering tendency.

I don't know which half is trying to get into the other half, but somehow or other, I seem to be going like that.

-Most people got mildly psychotic, and the thought then was that it might help us understand schizophrenia or other severe forms of mental illness.

-The CIA investigated LSD as a potential truth serum, and the Army tested the effect LSD might have on soldiers in battle.

Some early test subjects had bad reactions, and some scientists began to use LSD in a more controlled manner as one step in an ongoing program of psychotherapy.

-There was a lot of excitement about the potential of psychedelics in treating alcoholism, and then we moved into working with terminal cancer patients, treating anxiety and depression.

-Gosh, you've taken head-on the biggest thing that's bothered you.

-The LSD experience was closely monitored and guided, with music and eye shades used to calm and reassure the patient.

-At the end, I felt a great weight had been taken off me.

-There was an incredible spirit of excitement, international conferences, papers published on LSD and psychotherapy.

-But as the 1960s progressed and as people like Timothy Leary spread LSD from the laboratory to the counterculture, the drug's potential for therapy was overshadowed by stories of its dangerous street use.

-I'm a pretty black-and-white guy.

There was never any thought in my mind that there were positive uses for LSD.

I saw the results, and the results were not pretty.

-And after LSD was declared a Schedule I drug in 1970, funding and support for psychedelic research dried up.

-There's really no other example that I can think of in science where an entire area of research was put on the deep freeze for decades.

-Today, the psychedelic glow of the 1960s has faded, and recreational use of LSD, which is still illegal, has fallen to low but steady levels.

But in the world of science, a new age is dawning again.

-Folks are studying a lot of things with psychedelics now.

-In recent years, several dozen academic studies have investigated the use of psychedelic drugs and therapy to treat problems ranging from addiction to treatment-resistant depression and anxiety in cancer patients.

Sherry Marcy took part in one of them.

-There was sort of a ceremony about taking the pill, and then I was there for six hours reacting to the pill, and I process by talking, so something I really learned about myself then, because every now and then, they would say, "Now, why don't you stop talking and just feel?"

But what happened to me was that I ended up getting totally reconnected, first to Nancy.

Nancy and I had a wonderful life together, and it could go on, and I hadn't known that before, and then also my kids, getting reconnected to them, so there was this family dynamic that just reformed, and that was just great.

-She was just lighter, immediately a difference.

And then we came home, and it persisted.

-Today, Sherry, who is now cancer-free, says the psilocybin study helped her re-engage with life.

-It wasn't like it was psychedelic for me.

It just was me back.

I don't know how it did that exactly except to broaden out, you know?

It's like you lift up your head and you take a good long look and you start seeing things again.

-Brain-imaging studies have investigated the impact of psychedelics.

They found that both LSD and psilocybin foster connections between parts of the brain that normally work independently.

-It's an exciting area in neuroscience right now.

More and more groups are jumping in, and it's only just begun, but people should really be aware that there are potential dangers.

-Those dangers can range from a temporary bad reaction to the triggering or worsening of an underlying psychiatric condition, so caution is a guiding principle in today's research.

But it turns out that not all of the claims made about LSD in the 1960s were true.

Studies have found little evidence that it damages chromosomes or causes birth defects, and Diane Linkletter's autopsy found no drugs in her system when she died.

On the other hand, Sherry Marcy says Timothy Leary didn't get it right, either.

-I think the emphasis was wrong.

I mean, the "turn on" doesn't have to be emphasized at all.

The "drop out" is an absolute mistake, but the "tune in" is crucial.

I tuned in -- tune into the world, to me, to things I used to love, to my relationships, to my family.

Tune in is what it's all about.

♪♪ -Today, recycling is practically second nature.

Separating plastics from paper is routine, but it wasn't always this way.

-Recycling on a mass scale can be traced back to the 1980s, when it was fueled by growing public awareness and a story about a barge filled with New York trash that got turned away at every port.

-No one we know is particularly fond of taking out the garbage.

How about the prospect of not being able to get rid of it at all?

-In 1986, a once-successful Alabama builder named Lowell Harrelson was headed for bankruptcy when he heard about an opportunity 1,200 miles away in Islip, New York.

Islip's landfill was nearly full, and town officials were desperately looking for a new way to get rid of their trash.

-They seemed like they were willing to cooperate, and we agreed to make a test run, one trial run, to see if my grand idea was really workable.

-Harrelson's grand idea was simple -- to ship Islip's garbage by barge to landfills in the South, but he needed help for this man, Tommy Gesuale, owner of the only private dock in New York City licensed to barge garbage.

-They had no one who knew anything about barging and garbage, so they come to me, and they ask me, could I barge garbage for them?

-Gesuale also lined up investors, chief among them, the Mafia captain Salvatore Avellino.

With $300,000 backing his plan, Harrelson just needed a couple of boats.

-I had friends in Louisiana in the maritime business, contacted them, and was able to lease me a tugboat with a big barge, the Mobro.

-The Mobro left port in March of 1987, just after Harrelson found a landfill in North Carolina that seemed willing to accept its cargo.

Like a magnet for refuse, the barge by now had collected over 6 million pounds of trash from all over Long Island and New York City.

-Everybody's garbage.

Everybody had a problem getting rid of their garbage, and we were the best game, I guess, at the time.

-At that point in time, everything looked so good.

It was the start of something that I had great hopes for.

-Harrelson predicted profits for disposing of the Mobro's load in the first place and eventually for generating electricity for the methane gas created as the garbage decomposed.

-It was an idea that I had read about.

A lot of experts said, "It's a coming thing," so I just arbitrarily on my own decided to give it a whirl.

-But on April Fools' Day shortly after the barge docked in North Carolina, a local TV news reporter was at the scene and sparked an outcry.

-The first call we got was, "You're shipping New York City's rats down to us."

And I said, "No."

First, there was no rats on it.

-No one said, "A barge load of waste."

It was, "A barge load of New York waste."

-As Gesuale remembers it, the pivotal moment came when a state environmental official spotted a bedpan on the barge.

-And they claimed because of the bedpan that the barge had hospital waste, so we were told to get it out of there.

-The barge then headed for a landfill in Louisiana, but when it got there, state officials again barred it from unloading.

-It could be infectious waste from hospitals.

There could be hazardous waste.

-A homeless garbage barge.

-That's when the story exploded.

-Dripping brown ooze of possibly infectious material.

-The governor of Louisiana threatened to send out the National Guard if the barge tied up there.

-The vagabond barge has become an international issue.

-The most watched load of garbage in the memory of man.

-Six ports have already refused the refuse.

-The barge has been chased away by the war planes of two nations, and now it's anchored here five miles off the coast of Key West, Florida, still loaded with tons of garbage, still unwanted.

-It was like a brush fire, you know?

It was fun to belittle this barge full of garbage.

-Take your barge up into the Gulf of Persia, and there is Iran.

Dump it right there.

[ Cheers and applause ] -Then, in early May, a team from the EPA inspected the barge in Florida and reported finding trash from hospitals but nothing that was truly hazardous, so the Mobro headed back to what seemed like its last best chance -- New York.

-For here to there and back again.

-But when it reached New York Harbor, two court orders blocked it from unloading.

-Nobody in an elected position could afford to take this tainted, mythologically frightening load of who knew what into their community.

-We don't know what kind of tropical vermin is in that garbage.

We don't know -- It's been sitting in the sun for six weeks.

-Beyond the health worries, the media and experts often portrayed the Mobro as a symbol of a growing national problem -- that landfill space was becoming scarce and we were fast approaching a point of crisis.

-We've about run out of places to throw away our throwaways.

By 1990, according to one federal survey, at least 27 states will be critically short of space to dump garbage.

-When the county board in Sussex last month proposed opening a new garbage-collection site, the residents were outraged and showed it.

[ Indistinct shouting ] -We are running out of places to dump.

-But then a place to dump the Mobro's load appeared in, of all places, Islip, the same Long Island town that had originally banished the trash.

-We'll take it because we think, for a one-time situation, we should do it and get it behind us.

-But before Islip could take the Mobro's load, a judge ordered that it all be burned in a Brooklyn incinerator, and that's what happened over five months after the barge left port.

-Harrelson has become the butt of jokes and ridicule, and today, in frustration, he gave up.

-The only thing I could do is get out of the way and let it go back to Brooklyn, New York, to the incinerator and die its death, be done with it.

-In the end, when we unloaded the barge, it was essentially scrap paper, newspaper, cardboard.

I found this pink plastic yo-yo, and that wound up in the newspaper.

It made clear how overblown everybody's fear had gotten.

-It also became clear over time that the fears about declining landfill space were overblown, too.

What really set off all the panic were new regulations that had forced thousands of small polluting garbage dumps to close.

-We were saying, "Oh, my God.

We went from 10,000 to 5,000, from 5,000 to 2,500 landfills.

They're disappearing," so it really did seem like a crisis, but it wasn't, because as these smaller open dumps were appropriately closing for environmental reasons, larger regional landfills existed and were being built.

-But the attention given to garbage paid off on another front.

A month before the trash was burned, Greenpeace activists hung a banner -- "Next time, try recycling."

Until the mid-'80s, the amount Americans had recycled had climbed slowly.

Then, with rising public awareness, in part because of the Mobro, it shot upward, more than tripling in the years since.

-I think that the whole experience was extremely useful in getting people to say, "Oh, I actually have to worry about what happens to the trash after I put it out the back door, you know?

I mean, somebody's gonna do something with it or fail to do something with it?"

-Over time, as Americans recycled more of their waste, about 68 million tons today, much of that recycling was exported to China for processing, but that changed in 2018.

-China, the world's largest buyer of these goods, is making drastic changes to what it will accept.

It's a decision that's creating new problems here at home.

When material like this, like all this paper, can't get recycled fast enough, it can end up going to a landfill instead.

-Facing a volatile global market, communities are grappling with how to handle the new realities of recycling.

-Say goodbye to recycling if you live in the city of Deltona.

With rising costs of recycling, the city decided to suspend its recycling program.

-Some experts say they hope this shake-up in the recycling business serves as a wake-up call about America's consumption habits, just like the Mobro did.

-Our waste is gonna wind up someplace.

Look at what you use.

There's a lot of opportunity to reduce the amount of waste that we produce at the beginning.

-A growing movement aims to do just that.

-Spend the day with Kathryn Kellogg, and you'll see a shopping spree free of waste.

-Setting its sights beyond recycling, it hopes to fundamentally change how Americans think about waste.

-The move toward zero waste is catching on.

-The movement is not new but has gained momentum through social media and images like this.

It's two years worth of trash.

-Cities like San Francisco are trying to send as little waste to landfills as possible.

Other cities have taken aim at plastic straws or banned Styrofoam.

-We definitely say no to Styrofoam!

[ Cheers and applause ] -As for Lowell Harrelson, the Mobro debacle nearly ruined him, and in 2001, his reputation took another hit when he was sentenced to five months in prison for evading taxes and lying to a grand jury.

But in hindsight, Harrelson's plan to make electricity from garbage looks downright visionary.

-I think that he was actually trying to develop a model that could be replicated, a commercial model that was, frankly, I think, ahead of its time.

-Today, over 600 landfill gas projects generate energy nationwide.

In 2018, more than 16 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity were produced.

-Oh, I do sometimes read about the scale of methane usage today, and my first reaction is not one of remorse.

I wish I could've been in it, obviously, but my reaction is more like, "Wow, I really underestimated that opportunity."

It was far greater than I had pictured it to be at the time.

-At age 85, Harrelson's ambition shows no signs of fading.

He plans to move to Bolivia, where he hopes to mine and ship iron ore on barges like this one, 15 times larger than the one he made famous in 1987.

-Hopefully I won't have another Mobro experience.

-50 years ago, Apollo 11 landed on the moon, but is that the whole story?

-New Yorker humorist Andy Borowitz explains.

-Mass destruction.

-Sexual relations.

-Potato.

-Fear.

-USA!

-Aah!

-Hello.

-Aw, damn it.

-None of it makes sense.

-Maybe you guys should get a sense of humor.

-[ Laughs ] -He knew this is gonna wind up in a crazy place.

-50 years ago, man first stepped on the moon, but I'm not here to pay tribute to the Apollo 11 astronauts.

-Oh, it's beautiful, Mike, really is.

-Instead, I'd like to celebrate a group of brave Americans who haven't gotten their due.

[ Party horns blowing, fireworks popping ] Without the moon landing, we wouldn't have moon-landing deniers, valiant theorists who've inspired us to see that science is merely a suggestion.

-It is my personal belief, and I totally believe this after all the years of research I've done on this, that NASA never landed a man on the moon.

-If it were so easy to go to the moon 40 years ago, there would be bases there by now.

-There's overwhelming proof that it didn't happen.

It's sometimes translucent.

You can see through it, right?

-As the scientist right next to the moon-landing denier makes clear, there is room for doubt.

JFK gets all the credit for getting us to the moon.

-We choose to go to the moon!

-But we shan't forget the JFK of moon-landing deniers.

-Men have never landed on the moon.

-Bill Kaysing is an undersung American hero.

In the mid-1970s, Kaysing had the courage to assert that we never went to the moon in his cleverly titled book We Never Went to the Moon.

The moon hoax theory exploded in 1978 with the release of the classic film "Capricorn One."

-This is Capricorn control.

We're at T-minus 15 minutes and still... -Telling the story of a faked mission to Mars, the film appeared on the surface to be mindless entertainment, but astute conspiracy theorists saw it as a documentary worthy of Werner Herzog.

The super-realistic special effects and the acting chops of O.J.

Simpson... -These people, they're capable of anything.

-...made viewers absolutely certain that we never went to the moon.

In 1980, the president of the Flat Earth Society lent his prestige to the burgeoning moon hoax movement.

Now, you could argue that the flat-earthers were just pissed at Apollo 11 for sending back pictures like this, but moon hoax whistle-blowers remained unfazed.

In the 1990s, a new scientific invention posed an existential threat to conspiracy theorists everywhere... -I took the initiative in creating the Internet.

-...the Internet.

Verifiable facts could now reach more people, threatening the future of unproven speculation.

Luckily, moon hoax evangelists were able to share the gospel faster than you can say... -You've got moon.

-Bold voices were willing to question missing NASA footage and other truth-adjacent theories, eventually making their way to respected media outlets and Fox.

-For NASA to come out and say that all the tapes were erased, I mean, you must -- It's incredible.

-There are a couple of questions that I do have from time to time.

Who shot the footage?

-I see a lot of footage that gets doctored.

-How in the world do you erase the tapes of the most historic event in 2,000 years?

I mean, it's not like it was a bar mitzvah.

-Full disclosure -- my parents did erase the tape of my bar mitzvah, and adding insult to injury, this is what they taped over.

-We're in too deep to stop now.

-It's time to finally give America's intrepid conspiracy theorists the credit they richly deserve.

Blessed with the gift of cojones, these deniers are bravely willing to ignore scientific findings and video evidence in favor of an America where everyone is free to ask questions until the science matches their feelings.

-My current opinion about vaccinations is that they have never been safe.

-Evolution, Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the devil.

-I just don't think climate change is real.

-Climate changes.

Asking question is good.

There are no dumb questions.

-Right.

-In the face of mounting evidence, is there ever a time to stop challenging accepted science?

For the final word on that, I'll turn to supposed astronaut Buzz Aldrin.

-Why don't you swear on the Bible that you walked on the moon?

You're the one who said you walked on the moon when you didn't, calling the kettle black.

-Will you get away from me?

-Saying I misrepresented myself.

You're a coward and a liar and a -- [ Cheers and applause ] ♪♪ -History is full of surprises if you know where to look.

-"Retro Report" on PBS.

Thanks for watching.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -This program is available on Amazon Prime Video.

♪♪ O0 C1 -Next time... -You are fake news.

-President Trump's war with the press may seem unique.

-We're gonna find the leakers.

They're gonna pay a big price for leaking.

-But his legal strategy is surprisingly familiar.

-The public has no right to know secret documents.

-And the baseball player who started free agency.

-This is Curt Flood, baseball's Bolshevik.

-There were death threats.

-Plus, humorist Andy Borowitz.

-The great American tradition of public apologies.

-Mistakes were made here.

-Mistakes were made.

-Mistakes were made.

-Next time on "Retro Report."