HIV being lab created is really, really difficult to believe just based on the technological requirements that would have been needed to do that back in the 1980's.

It is important to understand that the HIV virus eluded discovery for many years because of it's very small size. There were no microscopes in the world powerful enough to see it. So how could something be man-made, if it's too small to see? Top secret microscope? Meh, maybe, but that would only allow the virus to be seen. Then it would have to be manipulated using 1980's technology. The human genome was not even mapped at that time, and genetic manipulation of any kind of organisms was poorly understood by the science community, compared to what we know today. CAS-9/CRISPR gene editing tools were still 30+ years away.

Also, the family of virus that HIV comes from has numerous other extra-small virus in it that have since been discovered, and little is known about them. Science is still discovering new family relatives of the HIV virus in nature to this day. In short, there are a lot of technological hurdles that would have needed to be overcome to create HIV, and in my opinion it seems highly improbable that such a feat happened in the 1980's.