The question that always comes to mind when reading about conspiracy theories like
the Montauk project is: how much of this is borrowing from pop culture, how much of this kind of stuff is people twisting the narratives around whatever kernel of true Weird Shit happened to them into what existing stories condition them to expect, and just what
is in the middle?
I mean, sheesh, one of the Montauk-related accounts I just read has a young girl being taken against her will into a door under a hill, where the strange people there do strange things. Much later in life a mysterious bit of metal is extracted from behind her ear.
Taken under the hill and elf-shot.
Now and then I run across descriptions of victims of Secret Mindfucked Operatives. Vast structures of involuted, abused personalities hidden behind "normal" ones, with elaborate keywords based on the Oz books - sometimes just the movie, sometimes the whole series of Baum's stuff. Sometimes other fiction like Alice, but mostly Oz. Clearly there's one source document to this that people are retelling and elaborating on. (Oh, and Wikipedia suggests that
there is.)
I wonder if there's anyone out there poking at this stuff as folklore, as comparative mythology, as cultural detritus. The loop is already closed: the main story of the Montauk base might just well be inspired by "Forbidden Planet" and "Time Tunnel"... and how many video games use this sort of thing as their backstory, nowadays? How much of the "revised facts" of things like the Roswell Incident are revised by people slowly eliding the exaggerations that came back around to them into what they think is the truth about what happened to them?
I've felt this happening to me: there's a certain life-path that's the Transsexual Narrative, and I've caught myself looking back at my own life and trying to twist it to fit this myth, to help convince myself that a sex change was and is the right thing - even though there are some major discrepancies between my own life and the Standard Transsexual Narrative. Myth is powerful, even when you're half-conscious of its power.
Conspiracies are comforting because they suggest that someone, somewhere, actually knows what the fuck is going on, and has it under control. Even if they're malign, or terribly self-interested, or Machiavellian. Someone's in control, somewhere; the world is not flying off to some unintended direction as the result of the Brownian motion of everyone's individual, unthinking stupid monkey decisions.