> Interest in the potential exploitation of polymetallic nodules generated a great deal of activity among prospective mining consortia in the 1960s and 1970s. Almost half a billion dollars was invested in identifying potential deposits and in research and development of technology for mining and processing nodules.

And in a few cases they actually succeeded in extracting some metals:

> In the late-seventies, two of the international joint ventures succeeded in collecting several hundred ton quantities of manganese nodules from the abyssal plains (18,000 feet, 5.5 km + depth) of the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean. Significant quantities of nickel (the primary target) as well as copper and cobalt were subsequently extracted from this "ore" using both pyrometallurgical and hydrometallurgical methods.

A lot of R&D money was sunk into this before it even had a hope of commercially viable (and it still isn't to this day), but it wasn't a hoax either.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manganese_nodule#Proposed_Mini...

Were the authors that were listed on these papers CIA employees with a fake cover job, or just completely made-up names?

Source?

With everything stemming from one big organization, the question is never if the government did it, but which government agents are the ranking officials responsible, and what are they up to?

When you have a non-totalitarian government, where officials are lesser celebrities if at all, and maybe such a government that acts as a referee for the rest of its citizens, the way it behaves gets weirder, and less predictable.