For example, Project Serpo, some conspiracy theory about a secret space mission in the 1960-1970s. Somehow decades later this convinced a well known former CIA employee. Who later claimed he was naive to be associated with them.
This led to an unusual case of a current CIA employee leaking emails denying that the former DDI and Chairman of the NIC was involved with the Serpo hoax or the other CIA employee.
That employee quit the CIA in 1982 but was later affiliated with the DDI through medical research.
In the emails, described a meeting at CIA that occurred after the 1988 NBC broadcast of UFO: Cover-Up Live. Mentioned with two Colonels and the dubious AFOSI character who allegedly ran the original Serpo hoax for the Air Force. This person is the focus of the documentary Mirage Men. He also worked for Robert Bigelow and employed the chief scientist to Tom DeLonge’s company.
That scientist was introduced to DeLonge by the former CIA employee who fell for the later Serpo hoax.
The story is confusing but who would spend all this time on this? If you look closely, all the scientists involved even the Stanford guy, are kind of true believers. The rest are con-artists or deceived by a quest to uncover a great secret or technology.
Here is the 1988 broadcast, Falcon and Condor are around 1h10m. Falcon is the Serpo hoaxer AFOSI agent and Condor is a retired Air Force captain. There’s no covert conspiracy here, just a bunch of weird people who claims fantastic things. There’s no prime mover just human nature (ie disinformation, intelligence traps and scams)-