I’m really into this excerpt from a Jacques Vallee interview I found the other day.

In some cases the UFO community may be simply used in a sociological experiment because they are a convenient group of people to see how they would react to different rumors. [Suppose the government loses a nuclear weapon over a foreign country.] You still have to go and recover that thing. And you can’t tell people what you’re doing, so you have to be able to very quickly plant a story. You might plant a story that this was a flying saucer from Venus. That would be so ridiculous that scientists wouldn’t go check. You might have a few journalists there, but you can tell them whatever you want, and you can give them photographs of whatever. And so all you need is to distract everybody for two or three days, time to bring the equipment, get everything out, recover whatever was scattered and go away. I think there are cases where exactly that has happened. And those are sort of the great UFO stories that people still tell around campfire.

But I think there was no UFO there. I think the UFO story was invented– I was saying earlier it’s healthy to be skeptical. I respect people who have a skeptical argument there. Jim Oberg, who is a specialist in the Russian space program, pointed out to me that some of the sightings that I published from the Soviet Union–a strange yellowish crescent seen going through the sky by many people in the Soviet Union–that those were rocket tests that were illegal under the Salt agreement; and obviously, they couldn’t hide it in the sky. . . so the government planted the story that there was a flying saucer, and that got into the newspapers.

Again, the UFO research community is a useful laboratory in which to observe the effects of propaganda and disinformation, since it is driven in large part by an intent to expose “the coverup.” This creates an opportunity for people to masquerade as good guys and “reveal” all sorts of unverifiable rumors. They meet with a receptive audience because the context is one of “independent inquiry of original, bold, nonconformist ideas.

I’ve actually wondered about this sort of topic before: that is, that conspiracy theorists are intentionally manipulated by intelligence organizations. More specifically, if you want to bury an embarrassing fact, simply dress it up in a gown of absurdity, and send it off to the Conspiracy High-School Prom. I’ve heard people level just such a claim at Mike Ruppert, who runs a pretty popular site about things like Peak Oil, and how the government runs the international drug trade to keep our economy afloat, and other fun shit like that. And see, that’s exactly the beauty of conspiracy-mindedness. Once you really set foot in it, it becomes an infinite regress. You start thinking about meta-conspiracies, and meta-meta-conspiracies, and like inverse-meta-conspiracies and all kinds of kooky funhouse antics. I have to say I like it though, and it’s a lot more interesting and entertaining than watching the latest episode of Cop/Doctor/Lawyer Saves the Day! on MSNBCNNABCBSFBINSA.

PS. Here’s a site called Ministry of Lies, the owner of which asked me to plug a while back. He doesn’t seem like a G-man, but who knows, maybe I really am just helping the real Ministry of Lies get its message out.