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Sure, but in a lot of cases this leads to "random scientists not part of the conspiracy could find it". Again, many of the facilities that are built aren't in the USA. And if your conspiracy includes all high-quality scientists everywhere (e.g. the Science Adventure series of VNs), your conspiracy is isomorphic to the Illuminati.
Secret engineering projects are substantially easier to conceal than secret basic science, due to basic science being universal and thus independently discoverable.
Given the collective institutional support for transgenderism and the failure to call out the absurd state of the science behind it, I'd say either it's not isomorphic to the Illuminati, or the Illuminati must exist.
You and @FirmWeird do make a solid point. I would note that the dissent against TQ and blank-slate is substantially larger and higher-brow than UFOlogy despite the efforts to stamp it out, but this is a weaker argument than the one I made. Mea culpa.
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I don't think you really need to make that conspiracy isomorphic to the illuminati. The heredity of intelligence and other mental characteristics is nakedly obvious to everyone who even takes a cursory look, but research on the topic has been pretty effectively suppressed without the need for any kind of HBD illuminati.
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Playing devil's advocate here- are any of them built in countries that aren't core western allies(NATO+ANZAC+Japan+SK)?
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And yet, history is replete with nations making fundamental scientific discoveries before anyone else and using those to their advantage militarily before their competitors catch up. One way we know that this has happened in the US is that a scientist makes a breakthrough that could be militarily useful, that breakthrough is then immediately classified, and then other scientists are briefed in and conduct classified research and development based on the breakthrough. That can give you a significant first mover advantage because everyone else is still at the starting line, waiting to discover the fundamental breakthrough, and you're racing forward.
Also the entire premise of this situation is that it wasn't successfully concealed and China now has it as well.
Can you point to some in the last century? It's gotten harder over time, after all.
Atomic weapons and radar stealth are the two biggest examples.
I think laser-projected plasma generation is another that hasn't been declassified yet.
Atomic weapons are specifically the case I was thinking of where this wasn't true; the basic science of the neutron-induced-fission chain reaction was known to all parties in WWII (hence the Uranverein). The Manhattan Project was an engineering project to build a working device.
I don't know as much about the history of radar stealth.
What about plain old radar? AIUI the Brits kept it as a secret weapon from the Nazis for most of the war, to the point of deploying a very effective (continuing!) psyop about feeding their pilots carrots.
If I recall correctly, their breakthrough was that they had a radar system small enough to fit on a plane.
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Not actually sure with that one; did the Nazis not know that radio waves bounce off things? I'm pretty sure they knew they could be transmitted and received.
They (apparently) didn't know that you could detect & locate airplanes with them, which is kind of a biggie?
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