Mark Pilkington's Mirage Men, a book about paranoia, technology, psy-ops, and "UFOs"

I first met my friend Mark Pilkington, the UK journalist and publisher of Strange Attractor Press, a few years ago when he was visiting San Francisco researching a new book about UFOs. Mark (smartly) wasn't trying to find out if UFOs are "real" in the extraterrestrial sense. Rather, he was exploring what I think is much weirder territory: the story behind the UFO story -- a history of disinformation, paranoia, hoaxers, espionage, and weird psy-ops. Mark interviewed dozens of characters across the country, from kooky ET enthusiasts to former air force officers whose truths, if you believe them, are far stranger than the fictions you'll get from most UFO books. The result of Mark's intrepid reporting is Mirage Men: An Adventure into Paranoia, Espionage, Psychological Warfare, and UFOs. It's a provocative, informative, freaky, entertaining, and often damn funny book. For a taste, you can read a bit of a Fortean Times cover story adapted from Mirage Men after the jump.

America’s relationship to the flying saucer changed dramatically between 1949 and 1953. After two years of intermittent “UFOria” sparked by Kenneth Arnold’s original 1947 sighting, by late 1949 it looked as if the public might finally be losing interest in the elusive intruders. This was largely thanks to the Air Force’s Project Grudge, which had spent the year doing its best to play down public enthusiasm for the phenomenon – largely by ridiculing it – and, most importantly, inocul­ating its own pilots against the UFO bug.

In late December 1949, however, all Grudge’s hard work came undone thanks to an article in the hugely popular men’s magazine True. “Flying Saucers are Real” by pulp author Donald Keyhoe, a retired Major from the US Marine Corps naval aviation division, was a shocking exposé of the Air Force cover-up of the awful truth – that flying saucers were real, and they were from Outer Space.

Although the Extraterrestrial Hypo­thesis (ETH) had always been a contender for the discs’ origin, until then most people, civilian and military, thought the saucers were American or possibly Soviet in origin. Even Kenneth Arnold had spoken publicly of his belief that what he saw were experimental US craft, perhaps powered by atomic energy. It was these comments that caused him to be drawn into the Maury Island UFO affair in July 1947, a bizarre honey-trap involving Air Force Intelli­gence, the FBI and, possibly, the powerful Atomic Energy Commission. Arnold was lured to Tacoma, Washington, by the promise of UFO debris, but his investigat­ion inadvertently led to the deaths of two Air Force intelligence agents (the newly-formed USAF’s first ever casualties) in a plane crash and a lucky escape for Arnold in his own aircraft.

Although Arnold wouldn’t have known it, the Air Force did have a nascent atomic aircraft project at the time – Nuclear Energy for the Propulsion of Aircraft – so it’s not surprising that he became the subject of an intense investigation, especially given how seriously the US authorities took the threat of Soviet infiltration. It was only eight months since the Venona intelligence decryption project – so secret that not even Presidents Roosevelt and Truman knew of its existence – had made its first breakthrough, and the situation it unravelled was nothing short of devastating. Venona identified Soviet moles inside the Man­hattan Project and in government bodies including the Office of Strategic Services (which became the CIA in 1947), the Army Air Force, the War Production Board (chief spymaster Victor Perlo headed the Aviation Section) the Treasury, the State Department, and even amongst President Roose­velt’s trusted White House administrators. The United States was paranoid, and with good reason: there really were Reds under the bed, including the four-posters at the White House.

The strange brew of technology and paranoia that led to the first outbreak of the UFO bug was fomented by the breakdown of relations between the US Air Force and the Navy. As they fought over post-war funding, each side accused the other of corruption in pursuing government contracts and leaked one another’s internal documents in what was described by some as a civil war. Things deteriorated so badly that a chronically depressed Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, who had previously headed the Navy, leapt to his death from the 16th floor of the Bethesda Naval Hospital, an incident that has launched a thousand conspiracy theories.

"Weapons of Mass Deception: Mirage Men" (Fortean Times)

Mirage Men: An Adventure into Paranoia, Espionage, Psychological Warfare, and UFOs (Amazon US)

Mirage Men: A Journey into Disinformation, Paranoia and UFOs: The Weird Truth Behind UFOs (Amazon UK)

Mirage Men blog

• [13strong]

  For those who enjoyed this book, or are interested in similar themes, I can HIGHLY recommend Ken Hollings’ book “Welcome to Mars”, also published by the (awesome) Strange Attractor press.

  http://strangeattractor.co.uk/shoppe/welcome-to-mars-2/

  It covers 1950s US culture, UFOs, sci-fi films, the birth of LSD, the cold war, the military industrial complex… and how all these things affected each other.

  Also, the new Strange Attractor Journal is due soon, and if previous issues were anything to go by, it’ll be well worth getting.

• [Anonymous]

  “Venona identified Soviet moles inside the Man hattan Project and in government bodies including the Office of Strategic Services (which became the CIA in 1947), the Army Air Force, the War Production Board (chief spymaster Victor Perlo headed the Aviation Section) the Treasury, the State Department, and even amongst President Roose velt’s trusted White House administrators. The United States was paranoid, and with good reason: there really were Reds under the bed”

  Tom Wolfe made this point about a decade ago in his essay “In the Land of the Rococo Marxists”. That there really was a Soviet espionage threat at some of the highest levels puts a different spin on Joe McCarthy being beyond the pale, no? Perhaps that is why John F. Kennedy made a point of defending McCarthy’s reputation (though McCarthy sadly did engage in some indefensible accusations and slander).

  This looks like a great book. I can imagine Joe Meek or the Ventures in their psychedelic/space-rock period doing the soundtrack for it, though Man or Astroman! might be just as good.

• [Anonymous]

  Read this a little while ago, very entertaining and interesting. Reads like a spy novel in places, and at other times like an excellent history book. Well worth a buy.

• [enkiv2]

  Any chance of getting Vallee back for a guest review of this book, or did the comment trolls scare him off? He is the resident expert on ufo-phenomena-as-psyops (I imagine that Mirage Men owes at least a little to his excellent Messengers of Deception).

  Though I cannot cite it, there was an argument floating around that the US government was at one point investigating the possibility of close contacts being the product of thelemites (which is a fairly scary idea given that the head of the JPL was one; it’s kind of like having a Scientologist with control over your nuclear program and then finding out that other Scientologists were building and testing dirty bombs).

• [Tristan Eldtritch]

  Mirage Men is a fantastic read – entertaining,thought-provoking, and a real page-turner. The history of the UFO and the intelligence community is really bizarre stuff, and Pilkington’s book shows how the established facts of UFO history are often far weirder than the myths and folk-tales that surround the subject.

• [Cybe]

  I’ve not read this book before, but I checked it out yesterday at the library on a whim (Thank you Dewey Decimal system for putting paranormals at .000 right next to computer texts at .005). It was staring at me from my desk as I checked boingboing and saw it staring at me from there as well. I call conspiracy here.

• [Anonymous]

  Absolute must read for anyone ever even remotely interested in ufology. This book puts many cornerstone events in a different (and much more sensible) light, all the while telling a story often more interesting than your standard ufology rant.

  Also, speaking as someone who spent a couple of years in a (now laughable, yet life-disrupting) mortal fear of alien abductions, I would make this book obligatory reading for everyone still believing the UFO hokum out there. What is just harmless fun for someone can be a terrible illness to others… knowing what is inside these pages back then would have saved me from prolonged media-induced psychosis.

• [Anonymous]

  I am listening to Ricky Gervais podcasts while I shoveled snow and came in to read this and couldn’t believe the coincidence or the surprising brilliance but then I realized this is MARK not Carl Pilkington!!!

• [hpnsack]

  would rather see a different pinkingtons perspective on the issue

  • [Freddie Freelance]

    Sorry, Karl wasn’t available.

• [kspraydad]

  Thanks for the reading recommendation…just bought off of Kobo.

• [liquidself]

  This is great, a fantastic idea for a book; the stories regarding the cold war , its spooks, advanced technology and ufo disinformation is fascinating. Its an absolutely necessary perspective not only for understanding ufo s, but also for world historical events (if such things exist that is). Love the title.

• [Anonymous]

  ‘couse from the illustration at the top of the column, I was expecting an article on the passive satellite Echo II.

• [Roy Trumbull]

  Having lived through the period I can attest to the combination of hokum, evasion, and double talk that went on.
  I think the visual and radar sightings over Washington, D.C. in the late 50s brought things to a head. There was both wonder and denial.
  Just as musicians today do house concerts and other small venues, the “contactee” saucer bunch got their meals the same way.
  Serious investigation was done in some quarters but denial was government policy.
  Some of the saucers were flares tied to balloons, some were natural but poorly understood phenomena, and the rest were “who knows?”. In any event we got our chain pulled really hard.
  I’m looking forward to reading the book.

• [Anonymous]

  Awesome~! though you must be pretty insulated, or just plain crazy to think that some of these UFO’s aren’t piloted by earthbound humans. and that’s just a fact.

• [jjsaul]

  Looks really fascinating. It makes me wonder how people born after 1980 or so look at the cold war. Can they really believe we lived out our mundane, self-obsessed lives confident in the efficacy of the M.A.D. doctrine that kept tens of thousands of nuclear missiles quivering anxiously in their silos?

  Hearing all the recycled Bircher stuff coming from Glenn Beck makes me a little nostalgic for madness in cheap suits and fedoras instead of today’s alliance of convenience among end-times preachers, hedge-fund fops, and crypto-racists.

  • [Anonymous]

    Can they really believe we lived out our mundane, self-obsessed lives confident in the efficacy of the M.A.D. doctrine that kept tens of thousands of nuclear missiles quivering anxiously in their silos?

    Well I hope they don’t believe that, since it’s not really true.

    I remember the red scare, the shelter-building mania, “duck and cover”, and all the other paranoid insanity of the time rather well… we weren’t confident at all. We were stressed out and self-destructive.