I just had a thought like “What if some UFO aduction experiences people claim to have are actually people being kidnapped by the CIA” thinking-about-it

The kind of stories I’m thinking about often go like: “I was driving on an empty road in the middle of nowhere. I saw a bright light,” and then either “I remember nothing but had lost time” or “I remember being experimented on by aliens and then put back in my car.”

My tinfoil hat side is thinking like, these stories started happening around the time the US admitted to experimenting with abuse, torture and psychoactive drugs in Project MK-Ultra. Alien abduction stories were the most prevalent during this time. (CW: Just a heads up. If you want to read the rest of this post or anything else about MK-Ultra, be warned that it’s pretty horrible, and involves some of the most disgusting torture I have ever read about. Death to America.)

Of the surviving documents released to the public about MK-Ultra, the CIA admits to: “kidnapping people it deemed “expendable” to undertake various types of torture and human experimentation on them. The prisoners were interrogated while being administered psychoactive drugs, electroshocked and subjected to extremes of temperature, sensory isolation and the like to develop a better understanding of how to destroy and to control human minds.”

Part of me wonders how many of these alien abduction stories are just people being kidnapped, drugged with powerful hallucinogens, experimented on and then released with the suggestion conditioned into their mind that it was aliens.

The most famous alien abduction story is that of Barney and Betty Hill, an interracial couple that were both civil rights leaders, definitely people that the CIA would want to fuck with, especially during rising tensions with the Soviet Union, the US government was suspicious of minorities and anyone interested in their rights.

  • Ho_Chi_Chungus [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    the CIA backs and boosts absolute nonsense conspiracy theories like flat earth, tin foil hats, and Obama being a lizard to discredit the notion of conspiracy theory entirely

    • Owl [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Sometimes I wonder whether some of the very popular conspiracy theories are also this. The conspiracy theorists are super attached to 9/11 and the JFK assassination, but not to the incredibly suspicious shit that happened right after (Iraqi WMDs, Lee Harvey Oswald murder).

    • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      I absolutely believe this. It’s a low cost move that pays huge dividends in convincing “smart” people that conspiracies never happen.

      • umbrella@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        I remember seeing this described as a strategy in one of those declassified docs. This one is legit.

    • novibe@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      There IS evidence of that lol. All the domestic counter-intelligence and psyop point to exactly that. And they literally have memos saying they planned on turning the term “conspiracy theory” to mean “crazy nonsense”. Like actual documents saying: we’re doing this!

      • mayo_cider [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        CIA literally created the UFO conspiracy and drove people to mental breakdowns making them chase lights in the desert for decades to give cover for weapons testing

        • novibe@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          I mean I wouldn’t say that…. They certainly helped push the most crazy and less credible people and stories. Also discrediting the more credible ones. But I have seen shit that cant be easily explained, and I’ve read and heard many more stories as well.

          I think it’s part of their tactic. Just like the “evil pedo satanists” conspiracy, where actual regular evil pedos actually do run the world. Not for their pedophilia, or because of it, it’s still capitalism in the end. But like, push a crazy conspiracy to hide a real one y’know?

            • novibe@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              I mean, I can tell you but you have to promise not to look at me like I’m crazy lol

              Back in late 2020 I was living on the last floor of an old building with my girlfriend. We were getting ready to go to bed, which means my last cigarette of the day. So I went outside to a little area we had, like a miniscule terrace.

              I was smoking and looking over to the dark horizon, to a bridge near our home. The clouds that day were REALLY weird. They completely blanketed the sky and were really low and dense. But the night was not that dark, almost with a brownish light.

              Anyways, after a bit, I saw over the distance after the bridge a thing. It was far, but at first it looked like a bunch of black balloons floating. And the “balloons” got nearer and nearer.

              I’m terrible at measuring distances, but when it was maybe 100-150m away (I won’t convert to American measures soz), it started to shift in a weeeird way. The small roundish forms that were circling each other (like balloons) started to gather into a single shape. When this happened I ran and screamed for my girlfriend.

              I quickly went back to observe the “thing” and I saw the singular black blob continue to move closer. I could now see it wasn’t a shiny black sphere as I thought, it really looked more like a hole in the clouds. Like an endless black hole. It wobbled and shifted a bit, never a perfect sphere.

              Soon after my girlfriend arrived (both of us silent, mouths opened just freaking out), the blob “spit” out a smaller sphere. The smaller sphere started to perfectly orbit the bigger blob. And both continued to move closer.

              Eventually the two blobs were right above us, maybe 50m above. And THIS is where it starts to get really weird.

              The bigger blob shifted shapes again. And it looked like a human. Head, arms and legs. Then the smaller blob became a smaller human shaped thing. To highlight, my girlfriend is much shorter than me. In any case, after they shifted into human shaped holes, they started to dance. They held hands and danced around in a circle. Honestly seemingly very happy.

              The only thing on my mind at this moment was “this is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen”. I really think I was smiling.

              After maybe a minute, the shapes stopped dancing. The bigger one seemed to look directly at us. And then it waved. I waved back. I felt this was maybe the most momentous moment of my life. But I looked back, at my girlfriend, and she was crying in shock. That brought me down real quick and I was worried for her. I tried to calm her down. Then I looked back at the shapes.

              They looked defeated, arms and shoulders down. They slowly became spheres again, and the smaller one went “in” the bigger one. The now one sphere seemed to go up and up, slowly. But it really only looked like a small hole getting smaller. I kept looking at it for maybe 20 minutes as it disappeared completely.

              I asked my girlfriend why she was so afraid at that moment, and she said she felt they were going to take me away. I think I kinda felt that as well… but they didn’t want to make her sad I guess.

              Idk man, I really searched and researched for months after that. I still have absolutely no fucking clue what it was. I don’t think “aliens” in any way other than “non-human conscious intelligences”.

              • Doxatek@mander.xyz
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                1 year ago

                Damn thanks for sharing I asked because some people have these experiences but I never have. This is such a unique story you have as well. Really wild

                • novibe@lemmy.ml
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                  1 year ago

                  All I can say is look more at the sky dude. I look at the sky a lot and I’ve seen a lot of crazy shit. I also feel if you “want” to see them(?) they appear more. Idk. I really feel the problem of consciousness and UFOs (or the phenomenon) are related.

                  But yes this was by far the craziest thing that has ever happened to me.

          • mayo_cider [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            I meant that they created the concept of UFO conspiracy, the people researching UFOs were already there but CIA took advantage of them to discredit any sighting as ramblings of crazy conspiracy theorists

            Going as far as keeping active contact and feeding “leaked information” with prominent UFO researchers, sending literal men in black to their doors, and orchestrating UFO contacts

            Tbh most of this is shit I’ve picked up over the years from blog posts and youtube videos, but I’m like 75% certain this had actual sources, I’m just too high to verify anything

            • novibe@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              Ah we 100% agree then hahaahah

              And yes, even the stuff picked up from getting high and falling into rabbit holes. Tbh, after sometime it gets kinda easy to spot bullshit and psyops.

              I’m sure the truth about the phenomenon is not at all what the mainstream and even the “main” conspiracies portray it to be.

              What I always go back to is the foo fighters and similar phenomena, crop circles and the nuke orbs. Those are the hardest to explain away imo, and I feel they mean something more than other shit.

              But my personal experience also makes me think back to the ancient texts, the Vedas, ancient Egyptian and Sumerian texts etc. And idk, maybe the phenomenon is “angels and demons”. Or how I see it, weird non-physical or material stuff, in “higher” dimensions or consciousnesses. And not “aliens” with starships from other worlds.

                • novibe@lemmy.ml
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                  1 year ago

                  You can search for “Robert Salas UFO” to start the rabbit hole, but basically there are a lot of military personnel that worked near nuclear facilities or even transported nukes that say orbs appeared and disassembled or deactivated them. Sometimes even doing this to missiles mid-flight during testing.

                  There was video of this, I remember seeing it years ago. I tried looking for it, but just found dead links to deleted YouTube videos…

              • BelieveRevolt [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                1 year ago

                The thing that gets me is how many US UFO sightings were made in the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War. There has to be at least some “what if the Soviets have superweapons” type of thinking there.

                • novibe@lemmy.ml
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                  1 year ago

                  I think it has more to do with nukes tbh. The concentration of sightings around areas related to nukes is much greater (research facilities, test sites, where the nukes themselves are stored etc.).