Mirage Men: documentary on UFOs as manufactured myth

Mirage Men is my pal Mark Pilkington's terrific book published last year about the story behind the UFO story -- a history of disinformation, paranoia, hoaxers, espionage, and weird psy-ops. While researching the book, Mark and his colleague John Lundberg traveled around conducting video interviews with dozens of characters, 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. I'm thrilled that Mark and John along with Roland Denning, and Kypros Kyprianou have transformed all that "evidence" into a feature length documentary. The soundtrack is by distinguished drone/experimental musicians Earth and Cyclobe. Mirage Men, the film, is sure to be a fun mindfuck. Mirage Men

• [kartwaffles]

  A UFO documentary by Karl Pilkington? Sounds awesome.
  …oh. *Mark* Pilkington. Well, then.

  • [Dan Hibiki]

     So like there’s these monkeys right…

    • [kartwaffles]

       …and they’ve nicked this flying saucer from like a secret military hangar innit

• [Noctilucent Studios]

  It’s all well and good to think that the US Government “created” the myth of UFO’s, until one looks at the history of the phenomenae stretching back into antiquity. No doubt some cold war era generals and politicians created “an aspect” of it, but they can’t take credit for everything unusual seen in the skies before 1947.

  • [Brainspore]

    That cuts both ways. If the U.S. government isn’t powerful or competent enough to manufacture the myth of UFOs then they sure as heck aren’t powerful enough to cover them up.

    • [hymenopterid]

      Actually I was thinking that the best way to stoke the myth of UFO’s would be for the government to deny they exist. A very official and public denial should ensure that the issue is never put to bed. I believe there was something like that after Roswell.

      Conspiracy theorists have this cute little habit of interpreting a lack of evidence as evidence of a cover up. Take the old Truther mantra,”Why is there no footage of the plane hitting the pentagon?”

      • [Noctilucent Studios]

        Actually, people just want to see some of the 84 surveillance tapes from around the Pentagon that the FBI confiscated soon after the crash. We know there was plenty of footage from that day, they just haven’t released it.

        • [Brainspore]

          Forgive me, fellow commenters. I know this is pointless and counter-productive, yet I cannot help myself. I think I have a problem.

          Pie Jesu Domine, dona eis requiem *SMACK*

        • [penguinchris]

          @boingboing-d14fe370bdf1664c34b258d65f8d3507:disqus  That was interesting, I don’t think I ever thought about it or wondered why there wasn’t any footage. I can see why people are so attracted to this – I mean, I’d really like to see some footage too, now (but I’m willing to accept that none exists, unlike conspiracy theorists).

          If anyone’s curious, there are a couple of grainy videos available if you search on youtube but they’re not from an angle that shows anything.

  • [Frederik]

    They’re not taking credit for weird things in the sky, they’re taking credit for the modern interpretation.

    We used to see gods, ghost and vampires, now we see spaceships and aliens. 

    • [Finnagain]

       We’ve always had little green men. They used to be called ‘faeries’, or leprechauns.

    • [William]

      Getting closer and closer to accuracy as each generation gains more knowledge, perhaps.

    • [donovan acree]

      If we now call the things we see in the sky UFOs and we used to call them gods and such, what are they? What have we been encountering these past few thousand years? UFO does not indicate spaceships, aliens, or anything along those lines. It is simply something that flying that cannot be identified.
      These sightings predate the United States of America so I’m not inclined to believe that they were fabricated by the government. Sure, the military may enjoy a bit of latitude in testing new aircraft knowing that someone will report it as a UFO resulting in the sighting being ignored, but that cannot account for the craft observed in the skies hundreds of years before the advent of flight.
      So, what are they?

  • [William]

    There’s a recent student-dissertation-turned-book on this subject, comparing present-day interactions with “aliens” with interactions with “divine” beings from “ancient Sumerian, Vedic, Egyptian, Tibetan, and Biblical records”. I haven’t read it, and I notice that the hoaxer Billy Meier is included in the interviews, but, the similarity is apt. Whether the government is capitalizing on this history in order to hide some of its aircraft is, frankly, not the big picture. 
    http://www.thomasstreicher.com/xpe.html

• [Drabula]

  I read the book when it came out – pretty crazy. I look forward to seeing this.

• [cstatman]

  ties in very well to Annie Jacobsen’s “Area 51″ book about the fast plane development, which also has some very interesting discussion about Lenin, and his thoughts on Aliens, Orson Wells, and mass hysteria.     It all troubles me,   but not as much as the huge data collection station NSA is now building there.

  • [Brainspore]

    It’s worth noting that the most sensational claims made in Jacobsen’s book (regarding the “truth” behind the Roswell incident) are also the least supported by evidence (one lone, anonymous source and a sh*tload of whackadoodle speculation.)

• [Roy Trumbull]

  Having lived through the flying saucer period here is something I saved: 
  http://archive.org/details/FlyingSaucers1960

• [quitterjunior]

  It always disappoints me that I know exactly what an “experimental” band is going to sound like.  The term invokes the Stanford prison experiment, but the reality is so much more like the Stanford ‘chef’ experiment….

  • [quitterjunior]

    I’m not trying to be some crotchety music-bigot. I imagine, to some people, rock all sounds the same. Or jazz, tejano, whatever. But, at least semantically, if I can identify an act as part of the ‘experimental’ genre, then they are, by definition, not ‘experimental.’ I think most people, in the context of music, expect ‘experimental’ to mean ‘revolutionary,’ and not merely ‘incrementally progressive’ or ‘anti-retro’. I’m taking issue with the term, not the acts. I happen to like the genre, for what it’s worth, and I like the idea of being surprised by it. Because if someone, somehow, actually comes up with something completely novel in the realm of popular music, how else can they even define it right now, except ‘experimental’, right? Love of an idea has crowded the vocabulary.

  • [David Pescovitz]

    And which band, Earth or Cyclobe, sounded “exactly” like your preconceived notion? I ask because they sound completely different. Earth is centered around very heavy guitars while Cyclobe is almost entirely synthesizer/computer music.

• [kosso]

  none of this has managed to penetrate my tin foil hat.

  so, ha!

• [Adam Samuels]

  Charlie Redstar, Carman Manitoba, 1975 to 1976. http://books.google.ca/books?id=wetk5GXNytsC&lpg=PP1&dq=Canadian%20UFO%20Report&pg=PA122#v=onepage&q=Canadian%20UFO%20Report&f=false

  I’m not saying its Aliens, I’m not saying it’s Government, but I am saying it was real.