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Well, that implies that the purpose of those programs was definitively looking for psychics rather than simply just trying to either psyop certain individuals into believing in psychics, or stigmatizing the field even further. Hal Puthoff (one of the leaders of the CIA-contracted Stanford study of ESP) most probably conspired with Uri Geller to deceive Apollo Astronaut Edgar Mitchell to raise thousands of dollars for further research through making him think that Geller could spontaneously teleport lost keepsakes. The main weirdness comes in the personal anecdotes of outside-party observers whose soundness of mind would otherwise be assumed in good faith. Jacques Vallee, for example, wrote down in his private diary an example of Geller receiving hidden information psychically after Vallee sent other information the last second. Vallee otherwise notes (in the same diary) LLNL engineers allegedly measuring Geller's telekinetic abilities and receiving interference patterns on photographic machinery only possible through an external source of light that was otherwise absent, which lines up with other weird stories like Jack Sarfatti (PhD physicist, personal hippy friend of Lenny Susskind) talking to LLNL physicists throughout this fiasco and bringing up to them the fact that if Geller was actually psychic to the extent they were claiming, he would have no issue in activating or neutralizing nuclear weaponry remotely, to the group's horror. The resulting conclusion would be that either the entire program was able to convince highly-technical observers individually and in groups upon personal contact that ESP was real when it actually wasn't (up to and including the President, as Jimmy Carter stated that remote viewing found a downed aircraft when prosaic means couldn't) for some unknown ulterior purpose, or that this entire operation of conmanship was operating on some foundation of otherwise hidden knowledge of ESP or crashed spacecraft or whatever. Vallee personally came to the second conclusion, thinking that Geller was a genuine psychic who also engaged in widespread fraud for whatever reason. It should also be noted that Geller was discovered and brought to America in the first place by a MKUltra doctor who also brought psychedelic mushrooms to America, whose sessions of hypnotism made Geller think that he was empowered by an artificially superintelligent computer onboard an alien spacecraft from the future, but that's neither here or there.
As you can tell, all these very people involved in the ESP research fiasco for the government are also the very people involved in the modern UFO "cover-up" scene. Hal Puthoff himself was good friends with a Lockheed Martin Vice President (James T. Ryder) who was also a Luciferian theosophist, and people around Puthoff (including the people who work for him) all claim that this Vice President literally handed over a flying saucer that Puthoff's team broke into and looked inside. This is the event that David Grusch talks about when it comes to the 'crash-retrieval program'. The purely fascinating aspect of this is that either there actually exists some sort of supernatural thing everyone is acting totally fucked-up around, or we have hugely powerful and influential people in our governmental black programs roleplaying about parapsychological things for no apparent reason other than to psyop their own black-world colleagues. It makes absolutely no sense.
For what it's worth, I appreciate the long effort post response and all the links. Though I do feel a bit um.. Gish-galloped/Eulered. I don't really know what to say in response to all this. I feel like I would have to do a very long deep dive into 1970s psi research to really respond properly, and I'm not prepared to do all that right now. But still, thanks.
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Highly capable people acting kooky is nothing new.
Critical thinking is completely uncorrelated to intelligence.
And of course, the barren cheerlessness of the materialist, Darwinian worldview promotes grasping at straws behavior from people who evolved to be kooky animists.
The above does not seem to me to be mere ‘uncritical thinking’, but some sort of memetic disease or contacted mental illness. It’s one thing to imagine that there may be UFO programs because of uncritical thinking, it’s another thing to probably earnestly believe that a Lockheed Martin VP handed over a flying spacecraft which you broke into and looked inside. The thing that ‘did not make sense’ that I referred to earlier is that either there is something there, or there is a mass-psyop going on similar to what happened to Paul Bennewitz, just on a higher scale, whose motivation I cannot make out whatsoever. That opaqueness is the main thing that is confusing me, as otherwise I am willing to believe that there might be a ‘UFO phenomenon’ simply due to the fact of my own theory of mind and the fact that people I trust have seen unexplainable things.
You can't? Well..
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It makes perfect sense. Even the most intelligent powerful people get swept up in religious cults and movements. Some might have schizophrenia-esque disorders, or even low key schizophrenia. Others might just be the kind of people easily swept up in this kind of thing. Some of it is fraud and some of it is true belief.
There isn't anything that needs explaining about people getting swept up in religious cults. We have countless examples throughout history that haunt the world to this day. Just accept that the supernatural isn't real and that people are in general prone to schizo-reasoning. From Siberian shamans, to West African witch-doctors, to psychics in 20th century America.
I did not mean that the dichotomy did not make sense, just that the reasons behind both hypotheticals would not make sense to me even if they were true. The government is not acting the way I would expect it to if the supernatural existed, and even then, they are acting in a way that I would not expect them to even if I thought they were trying to make the supernatural seem to exist even when it didn’t. My hypothesis space for what the ‘UFO psyop’ is is completely barren, especially when you look deeper into UFO lore.
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