Historian Links Satanic Ritual Killings to Vietnam Veterans and CIA Operation Phoenix

What was said

"The tendency of army officers who have been through hell to become uh or to get recruited into the occult seems to be a phenomenon. We saw this after after the Vietnam war where there was a massive spike in satanic ritual killings and this is what led into the satanic panic. But the satanic panic in America was being done because there actually was this greater preponderance of actual satanic ritual activity all across America...And a lot of that seems to have been correlated to the return of broken men who had to do terrible things, you know, like Operation Phoenix which was overseen by who? Colonel Michael Aquino, the second in command of the Church of Satan."

Matthew Ehret connects the 1980s spike in satanic ritual killings to traumatized Vietnam veterans, specifically linking CIA Operation Phoenix to Colonel Michael Aquino, second-in-command of the Church of Satan. Ehret claims Aquino oversaw the Phoenix Program that tortured and killed at least 40,000 Vietnamese civilians, then returned to establish the Temple of Set and influence US military intelligence programs. He argues the 'Satanic Panic' was dismissed as hysteria when actual occult criminal activity had genuinely increased.