The Men Who Stare at Aswang

How did I go 52 years into my Filipino-American life and not know Aswang was used as a PSYOP by the CIA in the Philippines??

Wait, was that where the trope came from…?

Believe it or not, back in the Cold War craziness of the 1950s, a CIA operative in the Philippines took advantage of aswang superstitions to scare off communist rebels. And how he did it — puncturing a victim’s neck with two vampire-like holes, hanging them from a tree and draining them of their blood — might have been even scarier than the aswang legend itself.

I’ve even been to The Aswang Project website before, and somehow I still missed it!

Now I’m waiting to be visited in the night–not by an aswang but by someone looking to revoke my Filipino card.