>>9052One school of thought says that fictional stories would create plausible deniability for similar hidden projects. However another school of thought says that it would popularize conceptual awareness and make it more likely for people to pick up on a actually existing patterns in the real world.
I guess it depends on priorities:
1- people know about it, but think it's not real, in that case the goal is to discredit people who speak out, and attributing their claims to a popular TV show probably works.
2- people don't know about it and it's a secret, in that case the goal is to avoid spreading any information about it.
The easiest way for average Joe to figure out about secret projects is to learn a language of a foreign country that has reason to spy on such things, and just read what's being written in foreign specialty publications. Other governments intelligence usually de-cloak top-secret stuff pretty quickly.