There’s also the issue that a lot of otherwise reasonable, educated people believe in the supernatural and woo science, or at least some of it. That means in a large organisation like the CIA, with dozens of senior officials over many decades, some of them will too and might act on it. Heck even as a doubter,I can accept it might be worthwhile investigating, just to prove it wrong.
The fact is human beings are both rational and emotional beings. It's even possible for someone to 'rationally' know that it's bunk, but still receive and appreciate emotional benefits from something like that. It’s funny how people can profess they believe something, but persist in acting as though they don’t.
Investors are the poster child of that behavior. No one knows the future, no one can really predict the market, particularly short term. So traders follow all sorts of superstitions like chartism, market proverbs and oracles (talking heads in financial news channels).
There are people trading based on lunar and solar cycles, the justification being that they have subtle effects on human behavior that emerge at the scales of large groups.
