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.

    • EmmaGoldman [she/her, comrade/them]M
      ·
      10 months ago

      My favourite part about this joke theory is that it's an actual conspiracy theory from the time just turned up to 11. KAL007's passengers were just... Gone when they recovered the plane after it had been shot down and the two competing theories as to why the passengers were missing were that they'd been eaten by crabs, or that there were never any passengers and it was a fake flight designed to provoke a military response from the Soviet Union to test its readiness.

      I laugh at the crab attack so I don't have to cry at the war attempt.

      Interestingly, it's basically the reason that civilian access to systems like Glonass and GPS happened: if the pilots hadn't miscalculated the flight path and had been able to accurately calculate their position during the flight, the tragedy would have been avoided. The proliferation of satellite navigation as a public good has prevented hundreds of events like this since. Pretty wild.

      • emizeko [they/them]
        ·
        10 months ago

        wow the crab theory sounds totally insufficient to explain this, no luggage... this is a weird one

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007_alternative_theories

      • Collatz_problem [comrade/them]
        ·
        10 months ago

        if the pilots hadn't miscalculated the flight path

        IIRC, they had a pretty weird flight path that seemed to use magnetic compass to keep course instead of a shortest path like commerial airlines use. Someone could have fucked with their equipment in Ancoridge.