An effectively infinite budget free from public scrutiny is a helluva drug.
That’s what they want you to think. In reality the psychic goat explosion test worked, but there’s a catch. It only works on goats.
Get a small monkey or child to ride a goat towards the designated target. Problem solved
The British army has yet to develop a helmet that can stop shrapnel from a mind-exploded goat.
I don’t think the KGB felt like the CIA were always ahead of them.
Aldrich Ames is an interesting character to read about for example.
Context?
The CIA is often attributed great cunning and intelligence, both in popular culture and by their enemies.
In reality, they were busy during the Cold War dosing up on LSD and trying to cultivate psychic powers, including tests to try to kill goats with mind-powers
Counterpoint; you’re more likely to only hear about the things that didn’t work.
…the things that do work are important, so kept quiet.
You joke but this is actually what like 99% of classified documents actually involve, not conspiracy shit, just methodologies that worked that the relevant agency doesn’t want people finding out about and developing countermeasures to.
This is why Edward Snowden is on an extended stay in a Russian airport right now, not for exposing a conspiracy and making the US government look bad, but for basically handing the playbook over to the public leading to adversarial countermeasures against the techniques and exploits they use.
If you ever see those “how to not be identified at a protest” posts, that’s more or less what the letter agencies are trying to avoid people being able to make more of.
Well, there was also the MKUltra thing.
I’m sure it was just a coincidence that the first attempted assassination of MLK was made by a schizophrenic black woman ranting about the things the CIA hates while they had a secret program for brainwashing disenfranchised schizophrenics into assassins and spies.
They were both. They were the organization that both spiked their own punch bowl with LSD and that overthrew several democratically elected leaders for American interests.
Oh, I’m not saying they’re not shitty. I’m only saying they aren’t nearly as competent as people think.
There was an excellent movie called The Men Who Stare at Goats that’ll get you up to speed, just remember it’s a 100% factual documentary.
Now that I think about it, if NCD had to make a movie, it would end up exactly like The Men Who Stare at Goats.
The movie is a loose adaption of Jon Ronsons book and documentrary series which is a 100% factual documentary.
The CIA didn’t just spin their wheels, they knew something.
They knew if they didn’t use up the budget they’d lose it for the next year
If they were a business or a public school maybe. But it’s an intelligence agency in a nation that gives its military so much money that said military is begging for cuts, but no one’s listening because “Well I own stock in a weapons company and I’m in congress, lol.”
DoD: “We have a recruitment problem, not an equipment problem. Allocate money properly please?”
Congress: “Where’s the profit in that? You can’t get kickbacks from the enlisted!”
There was a time when human psychic powers were a legitimate line of scientific inquiry. The ultimate conclusion was “nah, never mind”, but the CIA probably got a whiff of the more mainstream research and wanted to know how to weaponize it.
From what we know of Mk Ultra, their “experiments” barely deserve the term. No controls, no good statistical models, and not even a clearly described hypothesis. It’s unlikely they figured out anything of value, and probably caused unnecessary human suffering along the way.
You do realize that more recently evidence for Psi is actually proving valid, it’s merely being resisted - https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/out-of-the-darkness/202302/why-some-scientists-resist-the-evidence-for-psi
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/debunking-myths-the-mind/201804/the-biology-telepathy
tl;dr Psi is real, it’s just being held to an unfair standard.
Utter garbage article from a pop sci rag. It does the same thing a lot of garbage science does: spends all its time attacking “mainstream science”, none of it defending their own positions, and hoping the reader doesn’t notice.
And here’s the thing: the article focuses its attack on physicalism, but there’s nothing necessarily contradictory about physicalism and human psi ability. Some kind of biological radio could very well exist. We simply lack any evidence that it does.
