Aberration in the Heartland of the Real: The Secret Lives of Timothy McVeigh

by Wendy S. Painting

Pilkington noted that the decision to intervene in the UFO debate and discredit (sometimes maliciously) those who claimed to see strange, unexplainable aircraft in the sky, stands as an example of one of many early acts of Cold War “ontological aggression” leveled by the U.S. government against its own citizens and foreign populations alike. These perception management efforts became aggressive and began in earnest in 1951 when President Harry S. Truman created the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB), whose purpose was to intervene in American popular culture and religious and intellectual domains in order to promote “the American way of life” and neutralize “doctrines hostile to foreign objectives.”