| > There's no obvious reason to keep such information secret One very obvious one, actually: if this is a weapon, then there's strategic value in concealing how much the gov't knows about it. This should be obvious, because it's been true for decades, if not centuries - the less your enemy knows you know about their weapons, the better. For instance, if (again, if it's a weapon) the gov't knew how it worked, and how to counter it, then the developer would begin to develop the next version of the weapon, and so any mitigations now would be useless - conversely, if the government didn't know how to counter it, then the developer could continue to deploy it with impunity. For another concrete example of this principle, look at the Cold War bomber gap[1]. And the government wouldn't have nearly as strong of an incentive as you would think. The creators (China? Russia? Cuba? Kekistan?) could (and do) always claim that the US is just making stuff up and it's not them (and people like yourself would believe them). From the lack of response to the continued cyber-attacks from various countries over the past few years, it doesn't seem like the public would care very much, either. Or, the public might not believe the government - the white house released documents that claim that Edward Snowden was a compulsive liar and not the hero that the public believes him to be (although there's already good reason to believe that's the case even without those documents - just look up the fraction of leaked documents that were actually related to spying on US citizens), and everybody just says "oh, they would say that, wouldn't they" - so what's the point of revealing strategic knowledge to your adversary just to try to convince a public that's already made up their minds? > The simple explanation is that it is psychosomatic No, the simple explanation is that there is something physiological going on. Assuming mass hallucination (or whatever) is the convoluted, complex explanation. You want to explain how people's dogs are having these psychosomatic episodes[2]? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomber_gap [2] https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/04/mysterious-health-at... |