From: rpattree2@gmail.com   
      
   ‘What types of superstitious appeals will be best adapted to the various   
   audiences to be propagandised?… A study of local supserstitions as relected   
   in popular folk lore might be profitable in providing answers to these   
   questions.’    
      
   When they weren’t designing rocket ships or calculating how long it would   
   take to cook the world with nuclear warheads, the RAND Corporation kept   
   themselves busy working out how best to scare the hell out of ‘peasants, old   
   people and… ignorant    
   workers’, particularly in the Soviet Union. That anyway, was the aim of this   
   fascinating 1950 paper, The Exploitation of Superstitions for Purposes of   
   Psychological Warfare (PDF here).    
      
   ‘It seems likely that superststitions flourish in an atmosphere of tension   
   and insecurity’, writes its author, Jean Hungerford, and her timing   
   couldn’t have been more perfect. The paper was published for the US Air   
   Force on 14 April 1950, just as    
   Cold War tensions were first reaching levels of serious discomfort. In the   
   previoust six months, the Soviets had detonated their first atom bomb, China   
   and the USSR had signed a pact of allegiance and Los Alamos physicist Klaus   
   Fuchs had confessed to    
   passing atom bomb secrets to the Soviets. While, curiously, no mention of it   
   is made in Hungerford’s paper, America’s enthusiasm for flying saucers was   
   also ratcheting up to dizzy new heights, one sighting at a time.    
      
      
   The previous December had seen Donald Keyhoe’s electrifying ‘Flying   
   Saucers are Real’ article appear in True Magazine,  just as the USAF, doing   
   its best to keep the lid on a boiling pot of saucer stew, had published its   
   own internal Project Grudge    
   report, which recommended seriously downplaying flying saucer reports and   
   keeping military sightings out of the public domain. The critical point, the   
   Air Force realised, was to halt the spread of exactly the kinds of   
   superstition and fear-mongering that    
   Hungerford was writing about before things got out of hand.    
      
   Although Hungerford doesn’t mention flying saucers directly, her discussion   
   of the use, or abuse, of superstitions in psychological warfare (or   
   Pyschological Operations, PSYOPS, now MISO), is critical to understanding the   
   role that PSYOPS played in the    
   development of the UFO mythology, and recognising the phenomenon’s potential   
   operational value to the military and intelligence agencies.    
      
   The paper discusses PSYOPS missions that successfully exploited local   
   superstitions; for example in the 1920s on Afghanistan’s Northwest Frontier,   
   the British planted loudspeakers in planes warning tribal peoples that God was   
   angry with them for    
   breaking the peace with India, while in World War II the Germans projected   
   imagery (though it doesn’t say what) onto ‘drifting clouds’. Hungerford   
   goes into some detail on the use of chain letters to clog up enemy   
   communications networks (does this    
   sound like the SERPO spam attack?), and the use of bogus fortune-tellers and   
   false astrological data to dampen morale amongst both civilians and their   
   leaders, a technique used extensively by both Allied and Axis powers during   
   WWII.    
      
   Hungerford also references the activities of Captain Neville Maskelyne, the   
   wartime illusionist most famous for his inflatable tanks and making the port   
   of Alexandria ‘invisible’ to German bombers. In his 1949 book Magic Top   
   Secret, Maskelyne    
   gleefully describes other devilish antics that he and his team got up to:    
      
   “Our men…were able to use illusions of an amusing nature in the Italian   
   mountains, especially when operating in small groups as advance patrols   
   scouting out the way for our general moves forward. In one area, in   
   particular, they used a device which    
   was little more than a gigantic scarecrow, about twelve feet high, and able to   
   stagger forward under its own power and emit frightful flashes and bangs. This   
   thing scared several Italian Sicilian villages appearing in the dawn thumping   
   its deafening way    
   down their streets with great electric blue sparks jumping from it; and the   
   inhabitants, who were mostly illiterate peasants, simply took to their heels   
   for the next village, swearing that the Devil was marching ahead of the   
   invading English. Like all    
   tales spread among uneducated folk (and helped, no doubt, by our agents), this   
   story assumed almost unimaginable proportions.”    
      
   Researcher Nick Redfern, who first drew my attention to the RAND paper,   
   wonders whether Maskelyne’s scarecrow was an ancestor of the 1952 Flatwoods   
   Monster. I would also suggest that famed cold warrior Air Force Colonel Edward   
   Lansdale, a former    
   advertising executive turned intelligence operative, read the RAND paper   
   before being deployed in the Philippines to quash the Communist uprising there   
   in the early 1950s. As well as broadcasting the ‘Voice of God’ from a   
   plane (as the British had    
   done in Afghanistan), his team exploited local superstitions about a   
   vampire-like demon called the Aswang, a ploy that successfully drove the   
   Commie guerrillas from their jungle stronghold.    
      
   Hungerford advises PSYOPS operatives to research the superstitions prevalent   
   amongst their intended targets to learn how best to scare the crap out of   
   them:    
      
   What superstitions are peculiar to Eastern Europeans, to Russians, to the   
   various nationalities of the Soviet Union. What superstitions are prevalent   
   amongst peasants, among combat troops or airmen, among civilians? What   
   evidence is there that given    
   members of the enemy elite are addicted to certain types of superstitions?   
   What evidence is there that some types of superstitions lose their credibility   
   after enjoying a brief vogue?    
      
   While the paper makes no explicit mention of flying saucers, it’s hard not   
   to draw parallels to the craze that the USAF optimistically thought it had put   
   a cap on. The saucer problem would soon flare up again in spectacular style,   
   reaching its first    
   climax with the July 1952 Washington DC ‘overflights’ that, I suggest,   
   appear to have been a staged operation. Could Hungerford’s paper have played   
   a role in changing the USAF’s mind about how best to deal with those   
   unstoppable flying saucers?    
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
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