Y’all are missing the point about the CIA thinking the locals were superstitious. They didn’t care whether anyone believed attacks were actually vampires. They just cared that they all had a cohesive narrative to ground discussion of the events in. Like I could have a discussion with a lib about Russian bots where we’re basically talking about the same phenomenon but with me not believing in the explanation they do. This entire website is skeptical of Russiagate and yet we still use “Russian bot” as a shorthand for blatant ops.

If you leave a dead body in the town square, it can send a million messages. If you leave a dead body drained of blood with bite marks on its neck in the town square it sends a single message: “don’t go into the forest”. It’s about leveraging limited knowledge of a culture. Think literal white supremacist Americans reading pamphlets about the Philippines like the ones you make in grade school and trying to wage psychological warfare on that basis. By latching into that shared cultural shorthand, you’re controlling the narrative in a way that even children can understand immediately