Report from Iron Mountain demonstrates a thorough understanding of academic procedure and style. Whether real or fake, whoever worked on it had to have been quite adept at the conventions of scholarship. Still, I could point you to a number of academics who would view it as BS on so many grounds, and on so many levels. For starters, war doesn’t bring people together. It tears them apart, both metaphorically and literally. Furthermore, wars leave behind scorched Earth, unrealized human potential (a private killed in combat might have one day found the cure for cancer had she lived, for instance), the draining of economies, and the total wrecking of infrastructures. Sure, people rebuild after conflicts. If they live in a more stable civilization afterwards, it’s only because they have come to the realization that they don’t want to go back into combat.

The only way Report from Iron Mountain could be valid is if, as Jim Marrs points out, you add one proviso to it: war stabilizes civilization only in the sense that it preserves the distribution of power within that society. In that light, and only that light, does Report from Iron Mountain make any sense. For those at the top to maintain the status quo, there must be war and more war on top of that. After all, the numerous no-bid contracts granted to Halliburton and other favored companies didn’t help the global economy one whit, much less that of the United States. In fact, it simply channeled tax dollars into the hands of fewer people, thus making them wealthier and stronger in terms of their position in overall society.

War’s good for something else. It can provide the basis for public manipulation by authorities. Control through eternal conflict served as the overall theme of Report from Iron Mountain. But the concept didn’t originate there. A RAND Corporation research memo published seventeen years earlier came to the same opinion.

Dated April 14, 1950, “The Exploration of Superstitions for Purposes of Psychological Warfare” summarized the issues involved with the use of superstition in PSYOPS. Looking back at sociological trends during World War II, the author, Jean Hungerford, noted a correlation between the uncertainties of war and superstition. The more the air raids knocked holes in the English landscape during the Battle of Britain, the more important soothsayers, palm readers and astrologists became in everyday life. She also saw a special susceptibility in totalitarian societies because, as she implied, such regimes either eliminated or restricted religion in deference to a quasi-spiritual belief in the state. Even though people from all walks of life might be vulnerable to superstitious beliefs and behaviors, she found a greater degree in correlation to class and education. In other words, the poorer and less educated you were, the more superstition played a role in your life.

Most important, the tendency to resort to superstition increases during a period of sociological distress—e.g., natural disasters, armed conflict near one’s home, economic downturns, et cetera.

During the 1950s, the West certainly faced stress from Cold War pressures, most notably the possibility that nuclear war could happen any second—a scare that not only led to record sales for home bomb shelters, but influenced culture in any number of ways. At the same time, during this period, the powers that be seemed more concerned with maintaining order at home, whether that entailed Senator Joseph McCarthy accusing the State Department, the Army and Hollywood of being Soviet fifth columns, HUAC investigations into rock and roll as a symptom of societal decay, or southern law enforcements repeated attempts to quell opposition to Jim Crow.

Hungerford’s memo, as the title suggests, focuses on the ability to exploit superstition within an enemy. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the US government often treated its citizenry as the enemy, as evidenced in such escapades as Operation CHAOS, Project MK-ULTRA, and the FBI’s COINTELPRO. But as she asserts later in the eighteen-page memo, the key to finding a workable superstition lay in finding one that actually resonated with the targeted society.

PSYOPS Policy Statement #36, prepared by the Joint United States Public Affairs Office (JUSPAO), concurred with Hungerford’s last finding, and elaborated upon it. Dated May 10, 1967, “The Use of Superstitions in Psychological Operations in Vietnam” cautioned the potential psy operator to:

(1) Confirm that the belief is real among the target population--Westerners might profess a belief in Santa, or Father Christmas, but we don’t take it seriously past a certain age.

(2) Confirm that the PSYOP will lead to the intended result—make sure your enemy will run from zombies, not pump them full of lead.

(3) Confirm that the belief is homogenous in the society—no matter how powerful among believers, never use a superstition that a significant portion of the population dismisses as hogwash.

(4) Prepare for credibility tests--if you try to convince an enemy that you’re a powerful magician, you’d better be able to pull a rabbit out of your ass.

(5) Balance the success of the PSYOP with the risk of exposure—form a Plan B if your attempt winds up exposed, either by incompetent execution, media disclosure, or by repeating the trick so often the enemy figures it out.

(6) Individual operators/combat personnel must not decide on their own to use superstition PSYOPS—“No PSYOP campaign in your area of superstition will be undertaken without JUSPAO/MACPD [Military Assistance Command Political Warfare Advisory Directorate] approval.”

(7) Respect the beliefs and superstitions of friendly forces.

“The Exploration of Superstitions for Purposes of Psychological Warfare,” PSYOP Policy #37 and the iffy Report from Iron Mountain all agree that the potency of a superstition PSYOP lies in its believability among large segments of the population. At the same time, the superstition has to fall in line with the beliefs, values and culture of the target.

Finding a controllable superstition in a post-industrial, post-modern, well educated, logocentric culture such as ours might prove challenging. After all, most of us no longer believe in elves, imps, unicorns, sprites, leprechauns, fairies, satyrs, headless horsemen or bugbears. That’s because we have an implicit belief in science--culturally, if not individually. Whatever superstitions we possess would have to have a scientific or quasi-scientific basis.

So what’s easier for us to believe? That a bunch of little green men come out of the rainbow and leave us with a pot of gold? Or that a bunch of little gray men come from outer space to stick probes up our noses for the sake of research? That a bunch of elves and fairies zap into and out of our existence into a supposed state of non-existence, or that an intelligent race could have reliably exploited the wormholes described by Albert Einstein, and traveled to Earth from lightyears away?