I just had a thought like "What if some UFO aduction experiences people claim to have are actually people being kidnapped by the CIA" 
The kind of stories I'm thinking about often go like: "I was driving on an empty road in the middle of nowhere. I saw a bright light," and then either "I remember nothing but had lost time" or "I remember being experimented on by aliens and then put back in my car."
My tinfoil hat side is thinking like, these stories started happening around the time the US admitted to experimenting with abuse, torture and psychoactive drugs in Project MK-Ultra. Alien abduction stories were the most prevalent during this time. (CW: Just a heads up. If you want to read the rest of this post or anything else about MK-Ultra, be warned that it's pretty horrible, and involves some of the most disgusting torture I have ever read about. Death to America.)
Of the surviving documents released to the public about MK-Ultra, the CIA admits to: "kidnapping people it deemed "expendable" to undertake various types of torture and human experimentation on them. The prisoners were interrogated while being administered psychoactive drugs, electroshocked and subjected to extremes of temperature, sensory isolation and the like to develop a better understanding of how to destroy and to control human minds."
Part of me wonders how many of these alien abduction stories are just people being kidnapped, drugged with powerful hallucinogens, experimented on and then released with the suggestion conditioned into their mind that it was aliens.
The most famous alien abduction story is that of Barney and Betty Hill, an interracial couple that were both civil rights leaders, definitely people that the CIA would want to fuck with, especially during rising tensions with the Soviet Union, the US government was suspicious of minorities and anyone interested in their rights.
That 99.9% of the time social media "virality" is just admin from YouTube and TikTok manually choosing which of their favorite influencers are forced upon users. I'm not even talking execs here, just low-ranking code monkeys and paper pushers on a power trip.
That most Meta workers abuse their power and read users' DMs. Pretty sure this has been confirmed, though not by Zuck and the gang—just random ex-employees. I knew a guy who worked for Facebook who my gut-instinct says was cyber-stalking me. He let a piece of really personal info about me slip during a convo. It wasn't a dark secret, just something that I'd barely told anyone. I assumed that maybe my friend had told him, but she said she'd hardly spoken to him.
Btw this is workers in like every industry with access to user data. Tesla workers sharing car video recordings amongst each other for laughs https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/6/23672760/tesla-employees-share-vehicle-recordings-privacy
One of my friends while working for our university also looked up the transcripts of her friends and even took requests for lookups on anybody from her friends
This is so wild to me. I used to be a sadmin (a sysadmin with more depression) and the culture of the trade where I worked was extremely rigid. We had the power to read everyone's emails, spy on financials etc whatever we wanted but if you didn't diligently practice the art of unseeing when digging around to fix something, or ever mentioned something you should not know you were instantly a pariah and fired shortly afterwards.
Even the goofiest people that liked to laze around and play office pranks would become rigidly formal and serious if it seemed like someone's privacy might be about to get violated. Similar to doctors/lawyers clamming up.
Idk if that was just the culture of the past, when the position was more of an estoteric thing you were inducted into? or if the company I worked for was uniquely good about it. Everyone I met at conferences was like that too though.
I think you cracked the code on Justin Bieber's origin story.
Imo, late-2000s YouTube was organic compared to what it’s become.