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Comment by jonhohle | Hacker News Reader

I've been developing a theory about abduction stories overlapping with MK Ultra-type experimentation. There seem to be a fair number of parallels in the type of activities done to subjects of the MK projects (allegedly) and casting the alien abduction story on the victims makes deniability straight forward.

I haven't thought much about UFO sightings. I always find the ones with video, especially from arial sources interesting.

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Abduction stories fit very well within suggestibility + sleep paralysis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis), before aliens it was demons or other things. When I've suffered from it I've had my dog ripping my face off and intruders entering the house, no alien probes yet but apart from that the experience sounds identical.

This is my conclusion as well. I grew up in a very religious household and so all of my sleep paralysis episodes revolved around some sort of demon entering my space and attempting to do something to me. Sleep paralysis is connected with lucid dreaming and so the dreams are incredibly lifelike. I could see someone dreaming about being abducted.

Once I moved out of the house, became a bit more secular, and did some research online about sleep paralysis, any rare episodes I had I knew weren't demons or anything of the sort.

Now that everybody has a cellphone camera there are fewer UFO sitings instead of more, so it seems.

In what way does it seem like that? There are many, many more _sightings_ in the current decade than the last, with a repeating pattern for about 50 to 70 years or so. Cellphone cameras are partially responsible for that, but unfortunately camera quality of most phones kinda sucks. That represents a different set of problems.

> but unfortunately camera quality of most phones kinda sucks.

This excuse died years ago. Cell phone cameras are on par with regular mainline digital cameras these days. Sometimes far superior.

Now everyone has a smartphone maybe they're looking down instead of up.

But people still capture things in the sky if there's something to see. Plenty of footage exists of low flying aircraft and meteors, for instance. People aren't looking down at their smartphones all the time, completely blind to the peripheral universe around them. And there are also dashcams, security cameras, etc, to consider.

Then the dashcams would capture it. Just like they did for that Russian meteorite.

It wouldn't be a conspiracy talk without someone bringing up MK Ultra...

We can tick off the flowchart as the conversation progresses. - https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-NUv7tx-DOTQ/UXKqqtaZ7CI/AAAAAAAAE...

For good reason. We know that the CIA dosed people with LSD without their knowledge, which alone would explain most bizarre phenomena, and we know that the CIA claim to have destroyed most of their records of what they did in the program. Pretty easy to link anything to the program, and it's often one of the least strange options.

We also know that MK ULTRA and programs very similar to it, have been continued to present day.

Source?

> We also know that MK ULTRA and programs very similar to it, have been continued to present day.

Do we though?

People assume so, because it fits a paranoid narrative that allows them to "mind control" people, but I'm not aware of any actual proof that MK ULTRA or "programs very similar to it" continue to the present day. As far as I know the program was a failure, like experiments in remote viewing and attempts to surgically implant microphones into stray cats hoping they would wander next to the Soviets.

On the other hand, it would be naive to assume that an agency that once performed such experiments would have compunctions about performing similar experiments today.

Though I won't support the claim you're replying too, we know that as of ten years ago there were still projects with a similar end goal as MK ULTRA, broadly developing "enhanced interrogation techniques." Not as easy to connect to any unexplained phenomena though.

That theory doesn’t seem compatible with the apparent existence of similar UFO reports from before the 20th century, unless there were other similar programs.

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