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To add to this, I've noticed a lot of the material that gets declassified, that is purported to be evidence of aliens/psychics/magic/etc, is in the form of field notes or case studies that either contain full quotations or summaries of what someone else claims is true, but are not actually experiments or demonstrations of what is claimed.

For example, you might have a declassified CIA document that's being distributed as evidence of psychic phenomenon, but upon further inspection, you'll find isn't the case. What you instead see is documentation along the lines of "someone made a claim about X, here's what they say about X" where X can be "I can read minds" or whatever. At no point is there an actual scientific test of this, the document is just acknowledgment that someone said some outlandish things to government investigators. Then years later those notes are declassified and somehow become evidence that X really happened.

It's like reading a police report about someone who took too much methamphetamine and ran around claiming that they could fly, and then using that police report as evidence that the government knows people can fly.




When they first released the CIA psychic documents I clicked a few at random and my impressions were much different. The papers I read were very much "We're conducting this experiment on remote viewing. Here are our procedures and results."


The government threw a lot of money at that and did direct experimentation, but dig deeper into the weird claims some of those that were adjacent to remote viewing were making/continue to make outside of that and you start getting into that territory. Things like aliens, teleportation, levitation, pyrokinesis, etc.

I remember seeing one document that was about a person claiming to being able to do some kind of teleportation of objects through containers, so the investigators went to see them do it and it appeared that it happened. That's more of a magic show than a real experiment, but because the investigators described what they appeared to see on government letterhead, believers in the paranormal upgraded it to fact instead of field notes.

Same thing happens with reports of UFOs or aliens, their portrayal of evidence of conspiracy rely heavily on twisting testimony, descriptions and appearances in the text into "facts confirmed and approved of by the government."


I hope you've taken the time to read The Men Who Stare At Goats, which is definitely solidly in the "tax dollars went where?!" genre.


And great experiments like randomly dosing Americans with LSD and torturing war prisoners to death.


This is a different thing. The CIA's experiments were done with at least an attempt at doing science (and didn't work).

The parent is talking about field reports, not an experimental program.


And the results were...


...that there's a guy who says some other people told him that it totally worked.




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