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.

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

    I strongly believe that a lot of the internet is dead and that it’s just chugging along with a digital Potemkin village of activity and relevance, with no further input from living people needed or even wanted.

    Much like how “oops, the stonks-down did a fucky wucky today so livelihoods must end” tea leaf reading is just taken for granted as meaning something, way too many people just trust “googling it” or whatever a Wikipedia entry says and go with whatever is then put in front of them.

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

      Since returning to reddit a few months ago after a hiatus of a few years I’ve definitely started to wonder. So much of that site is so circle-jerky, they just talk about the same shit over and over again. Is it because they’re just redditors, they’re bots, or is it a little of both?

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

        I strongly believe that it’s bots normalizing bot-like behavior from the bazingas that still post there that want to fit in with others that are already talking like bots after following the behavior modeled by bots. I think that’s where the “um, it’s almost as if I like it that (thing that enrages them)” smuglord format became standardized.