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In Dan Carlin's Hardcore History series King of Kings, he recalls that his college professor once asked "What influence has magic had upon history?" Meaning that, while we know today that magic doesn't exist, the ancients thought it may have existed. Due to this, the ancient Persians disseminated propaganda boasting about their powerful mages, which may have scared their enemies such that the Persians had an edge on the battlefield.
I think the USA's handling of alien technology is similar. It's designed to scare our potential enemies (foreign or domestic) into thinking we may have alien military technology, or at least to create enough public doubt such that our enemies need to waste time considering whether or not we have alien technologies. If this is the case, the U.S. military would have an incentive to cultivate this belief, which they could accomplish by releasing doctored footage of mysterious spaceships or by having ex-military guys claim that they saw alien technology.
One problem here is that the Chinese or Russians or whoever else has access to the other publicly available knowledge that we have via physics and astronomy and access to telescopes (and they have their own of course). Trying to convince Putin that Spock is giving us technology runs into very precisely the problems that astronomers and physicists in this country have with UFOs — namely that nothing we’ve discovered in deep space points to a spacefaring civilization. If Putin talked to his physicists and astronomers, they’d tell him that.
Don't underestimate the stupidity of supposedly intelligent people. Remember that the CIA (or some element of it) seriously studied psychic powers after believing that the Soviets had them. If 9/10 Russian science advisors say "no UFOs" but one says "yes absolutely UFOs we need to study this it could be the end of us!", I'd say the chance of Putin listening to the UFO guy is greater than 1/10 thanks to how human psychology works. Those odds might be worth it.
For the record, I don't believe there's a concerted UFO psyop, but I think it is likely at least some of the US intelligence apparatus is happy to let the believers run with it a bit for the counterintel effect. There are enough wacky people already, you don't need to plant evidence.
Are we sure they actually did that? If you’re talking about remote viewing, it seems like much the same issue as radar. They needed an excuse for being able to see things that they shouldn’t be able to. In WW2, we told the Germans our pilots could see better because they ate carrots. It turned out that we had radar. If our spy satellites can see into Soviet territory, and you don’t think they know about the satellites, saying “we have psychic powers that let us see stuff from an aerial perspective” covers the gap.
I don't think the CIA was telling people they had psychics, but they spent quite a bit of time researching it https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/ask-molly-did-cia-really-study-psychic-powers/
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They wouldn't have just thought it would have existed, thanks to the placebo effect it actually would have existed in a real way. If you were a medieval scientist who did a study comparing the outcomes between people who received magical healing and those who did not, the people who received magical healing would most likely show better subjective outcomes (objective too most likely, but good luck measuring blood concentration levels in 200 BC) and recovery rates. When you remember that the placebo effect exists and you can even see people getting (placebo-equivalent) results from faith healing in the modern day, I think that believing in magic is actually entirely reasonable for the ancients - after all, a double-blinded study would actually provide evidence for the efficacy of magical healing in those times, so I don't feel like judging them too hard for believing what would actually be statistically significant and easily replicable phenomenon in their context.
One of the other uses for magic, divination, was useful because it essentially functioned as a random number generator - and if you're trying to make sure that your opponents cannot predict your movements, literally throwing the dice and picking at random is often the optimal strategy. There are actually real, adaptive reasons for the ancients to believe in magic, it would have been a useful tool in their lives and the experiments they were capable of performing would indeed show that magic was real for them.
Why would magical healing prove more effective than a placebo in a double blind study, where, by definition, neither the doctor nor the patient knows whether the patient receives the “real” treatment or a placebo?
I may have been being a bit glib - my mind automatically translated "most effective research technique we have for dealing with placebos and magic in the modern day" and simply transposed it to the past. I meant more that their most effective research techniques would actually produce repeatable and consistent evidence that magical healing worked.
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