Oswald was a Decoy Copyright (C) 2003 David Fischer "Oswald was a decoy. Kennedy wasn't even the target, he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. The whole operation revolved around some nutjob who convinced some Air Force brass that he had been contacted by aliens, and we had to get them on our side before the Soviets did. They were giant glowing cats, so we had a slight advantage, as they were pissed at the Russians for launching dogs into their realm, but we had to act fast. Somehow JFK became expendable and the Pentagon jumped the gun. There were no aliens of course, but even considering that, it was one of the more successful operations of that period. Just compare it to the fiasco of the missile 'Crisis', with US ships painted up as Soviet vessels, trying to sneak Nazi gold to Castro and the Soviets blocking it with hijacked US Navy ships! And yet no one lost their job over that. It's amazing. That whole period was weird though. You thought the fifties were fucked up, with the von Neumann cloning project? The 60s were worse. We lose the Scorpion to the Atlantians and blame the Soviets, while agreeing to absolve them to the press and say it was just an accident... while the Soviets lose a sub to that religiouos cult that wound up committing suicide down in South America - the People's Temple or whatever - and they blame the lost ship on us, but agree to keep quiet! There's so many layers of deception and politics, you begin to wonder if there's really anything in the middle. That's policy though. Global sleight of hand, decoys, distration, dilution. Dilution is a fun trick - the best example of that would be crop circles - they're actually really straightforward and easily decoded, but we don't want people to realize that sentient wheat is trying to communicate with us (and I WON'T tell you what they've threatened us with! My God!) so we send out wacky college kids to modify their writings. The kids think they're pulling pranks on the media, and I guess they are, but they have no idea why. That's effective dilution. Shit, just glance at the front page of the paper you've got stuck under your arm - there isn't a single item in there that isn't part of some psychological warfare operation or another. Any major conflict has complete decoy operations. The White House aren't idiots you know - they have the best scientific advisors on the planet, and they fully understand the advantages of modern laboratory procedures. We've had entire wars waged under double-blind conditions. 'Need to know' has been taken to extremes you couldn't fathom. For example, the faked moon landing. Not that we didn't make it to the moon - we did. But then they faked it as well and leaked the 'fake' to a few target individuals - some scheme or another - but the interesting thing is that everyone involved in each of the Apollo programs thought they were the only ones. That's the only way to hide your plans from modern interrogation techniques - the people involved should be absolutely certain of what's going on - but wrong. Every one of our guys that the enemy captures should reveal (truthfully!), a set of completely contradictory plans. Sometimes it's best to just hide things in plain view. You've heard of the 'slave uprisings' of the early 1800s? Those weren't rebellions - those were breakthroughs in anti-gravity research. Right under the noses of those Southern Gentlemen, with their whips and blood-soaked plantation fields, some of the best research in theoretical physics of the past three hundred years was taking place. Of course it's in the textbooks! It's in code, sure, but it's there. Read a little more closely. The secrets are implied. The main problem with the Apollo program was financial actually. It went so far over budget that the federal government was actually in talks with the Swiss about a complete buyout at one point. Things picked up when the Japanese completely decimated their main fishing grounds and drove the Tuna to extinction. If G.E. hadn't scored the contract to built the schools of robotic fish to keep that disaster away from the press, the US economy might not have climbed back out of that hole. Generally the media repeats whatever we tell them to. Occasionally someone reports on some little sliver of the truth, but out of context, by itself, it's always unbelievable outside the tinfoil-hat crowd. Even with all the decoys and deceptions, we work hard to keep everything secret. The falsehoods get just as much protection as the truths of course. For one thing almost no one knows which is which - and anyways, we're not the only ones who understand the concept of traffic analysis. Oh, the acres of supercomputers at the NSA are mostly mythological. Sure, they're there, but they're mostly working on other things. A huge amount of pure research goes on there. The biggest name in crypto sits on the shelves of grocery stores. Back in the early 50s, the crypto division at Ovaltine, working on a replacement for their caesar cipher secret decoder rings, stumbled across a new technique for factoring large integers, by encoding the values in complex carbohydrates, and performing the calculations with chemical breakdown and enzyme interaction. We still don't know how they recover the resulting factors from the general population, but there's your answer - assuming your question is 'Why is Ovaltine still on the market?'. NSA funding can cram any beverage down the throats of this nation's young. I have no idea why it sells in other countries though. Pop culture and the free market are weird - just look at Michael Jackson - buying up the copyrights to all those Beatles songs at the request of ODESSA. What the hell was he thinking?" "Dunno." "Yeah. Michael Jackson is weird."