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.
I'm of the belief that the contemporary existence of foot fetishes was the result of some shady scheme by some group (fuck knows who).
Yeah, yeah I know that there's examples erotica involving feet dating back as far back as ancient Greece, but hear me out:
In 1998, a study was carried out analysing porn magazines released between 1964 and 1994. They found that women's feet became a much larger focus when the HIV/AIDS epidemic was in the public consciousness and drew a comparison to a spike of foot fetishism in the European continent during the syphilis epidemic of the 19th century, concluding that foot fetishism is connected to fears of catching STIs.
I disagree, by focusing specifically on porn and not the larger cultural milieu, they had missed the mainstreaming of foot fetishism in the movies and TV that predates the epidemic.
MASH, held the record for the most watched episode of TV in its final episode (so big in fact, that there was a surge in toilets flushing shortly after the episode ended that did lasting damage to New York's sewer system). Now MASH is a comedy series that frequently falls back on joking about how foot obsessed its main cast is, to the point that one episode even has a subplot of Hawkeye being assigned to inspect everyone's feet and reveling in his fetish.
This is but one example, media of the time was full of the stuff. And it wasn't just you Americans who were being indoctrinated into worshipping at the altar of feet. You can find foot fetishism emerging in culture all around The West™ at the time.
Two questions, then, remain:
Who is responsible for this media blitz?
And,
Why did they do it?
My theory is that it was a collaboration between the CIA and MI5 to try to determine just how deep their propaganda can effect people by implanting a fetish into the larger public zeitgeist.
ok this one's wild, one of my favorites in this thread so far
Incredible post. Why feet, though?
There is some speculation that the feet and hands are right next to the genitals in the brain centers. So wires can cross real easily. If you watch women's tiktoks you see they are hig into hands. It isn't much a stretch