Society of the Psyop, Part 3: Cognition and Chaos

The way I’ve told the story here is slightly fictionalized. The exact timing of the ghost plane operation in the context of the Cuban Missile Crisis isn’t known. The account here is based on the recollections of Gean Poteat, “Stealth, Countermeasures, and ELINT, 1960–1975” →.

See Tyler Rogoway, “Adversary Drones Are Spying on the US and the Pentagon Acts Like They’re UFOs,” The Warzone, April 16, 2021 →; and “Are Some of the UFOs Navy Pilots Are Encountering Actually Airborne Radar Reflectors?” The Warzone, December 1, 2019 →.

The literature on this is numerous. Some examples include Andy Clark, The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality; Donald D. Hoffman, Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See and The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from our Eyes.

For the intersection of psychology and magic, see Peter Lamont and Richard Wiseman, Magic in Theory: An Introduction to the Theoretical and Psychological Elements of Conjuring.

Bruce Wexler, Brain and Culture: Neurobiology, Ideology, Social Change (MIT Press, 2006), 39.

Bernard Claverie and François du Cluzel, “The Cognitive Warfare Concept” →.

Bobby Allyn, Sylvia Goodman, and Dara Kerr, “Inside the TikTok Documents: Stripping Teens and Boosting ‘Attractive’ People,” NPR, October 16, 2024 →.

David Z. Morris, “Ashley Madison Used Chatbots to Lure Cheaters, Then Threatened to Expose Them When They Complained,” Fortune, July 10, 2016 →.

Sébastien Bubeck et al., “Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early Experiments with GPT-4,” arXiv, March 22, 2023 →.

Kevin Roose, “Can AI Be Blamed for a Teen’s Suicide?” New York Times, October 23, 2024 →.