So are we just being jerked around by Hollywood?
Even worse.
(and forgive me for bumping an ancient thread, I hope you find this interesting)
So, I was reading through the Project Stargate docs on CIA Vault a year or so ago, as one does, and as it happens, I was involved with some Stargate SG1 licensing some 15 years or so back so I'm very familiar with the property, both tv and original film.
You always have to sift through a bunch of junk with these declassified docs, and... not that I buy into it, but when I started seeing references to work done by WW2-era Bell Labs supergenius Claude Shannon, I started to get more interested. They'd at least put some effort into making it convincing, if nothing else. Far from a household name due in no small part because much of his work was classified for a fair amount of time (and supposedly some still is), Shannon is... well, I think one can make a pretty good case that he's the smartest man ever born in the United States. To use the cliche, a true outlier.
Even so, there's plenty of different explanations for what this actually is. One of the classic ones is that we were doing it simply to make the Russians think it was real. I've got no idea. It seems to have been pretty involved for that to have been the case, but... who knows.
Anyway, the docs are pretty interesting, and I'm reading along and then there's a doc that says basically "oh hey looks like there's a reporter going around trying to interview some of our guys". They knew they'd been discovered, and had time to figure out what to do about it.
What they did about it was the original Stargate movie, and all that followed. Reading through the docs, I spotted so many matches that I eventually made up this graphic. But there's MUCH more. This is an example of "cognitive dissonance" propaganda. They put another thing in the public's mind that is "similar yet different" than the thing they want to hide. It is very, very effective. It is difficult to hold the two things in your mind at once. So you're watching the news... "Project Stargate... wha? This sounds like the movie I saw. Are they talking about that movie....?" And by the time the news gets around to the local sports scores, it's slipped away.
And so it came to pass that the US govt spent tens of millions of dollars with the aim of developing psychic agents -- and actually deploying them in the field! -- and when the public found out and congressional hearings were held...
Nobody cared. At all.
Within 2 weeks, the news of it was relegated to a sentence or two on page 40 along with those $400 hammers the Pentagon likes. And soon, a punchline.
And about those Goats. Jon Ronson has a longtime association and friendship with a) notorious propagandist Alex Jones, and b) counterculture uk media anarchist Frank Sidebottom, over whom GCHQ was recently 'brought in' to crack the codes he created for his fanzine as (cough) "a light training exercise". It was reported they didn't find anything meaningful from the result (to which I say: GCHQ either has a very bad team of researchers or they just might have a habit of lying to the media
. I found the one result they did release to be pretty interesting indeed)... in any case... it's possible this gives added context to Goats.