Author: Mark Pilkington
Publisher: Constable and Robinson 2010
Price: £8.99 Paperback
Isbn: 9781845298579

If FT regular Mark Pilkington’s new book seems pretty substantial, it’s because Mirage Men is really three books in one. The first strand is an eclectic and useful overview of UFO history, which gives the context for the second component, an original study of how intelligence organisations, in particular the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, have manipulated the UFO community. And the third strand is Mark Pilkington’s personal odyssey. It’s not just his journeys from Norfolk to New Mexico and beyond, but also his dreams and daydreams along the way, not to mention a couple of UFO sightings of his own. 

Pilkington weaves the three together through the book and includes a fantastic amount of material. He covers significant encounters from the distant lights of the Washington Wave of 1952 to Villas Boas’s very much closer encounter with a beautiful naked female alien. Just as importantly, there is the folklore side, the secret alien bases under Dulce Mesa and cattle mutilations. In any other field, readers might be expected to be familiar with the basics; though FT readers will know some of this stuff, the wider public is still sadly ignorant. The story is enlivened with many entertaining divers-ions and side branchings, the characters involved ranging from the mildly unusual to what could be termed “high strangeness” individuals. 

At the heart of the book are the deceptions practised by the Mirage Men of the title, the devious operatives of the intelligence services. One of their key victims was Paul Bennewitz, a businessman and UFO spotter, who was fed a vast amount of fake information about contacts between aliens and the US government. Bennewitz eventually became paranoid and had a nervous breakdown, quite likely fuelled by the fantasies he was absorbing. Exactly why intelligence agencies would wish to carry out this kind of operation is a major theme of the book. 

Pilkington’s chief informant is Richard Doty, a one-time AFOSI officer who provided disinformation to Bennewitz and others, and who was involved in the Serpo hoax. (This was a release of a mass of documents about an exchange visit by a US military team to an alien world in the 1970s which created a sensation on the Internet around 2005.) While he admits giving false information, Doty insists that there is truth behind the lies and aliens are real – he has seen one himself. And he spins his tale… 

Fortunately, Pilkington has a shrewd way of sifting through truth and deception, helped by his years as a maker of crop circles. He is forced to suppress his chuckles at a UFO conference during a film on crop circles, even recognising some of his own team’s handiwork, and wonders if AFOSI operatives get the same thrill from seeing their creations paraded as evidence of aliens. 

He draws an unflinching portrait of the enthusiasts he meets, many of whom are decidedly flaky. There’s the woman in the Norfolk UFO group who tells him she has seen aliens in her woodpile, disguised as logs. And there are the convention-goers in the US, where the UFO world has its own stars and celebrities, and a whole jumble of different and contradictory beliefs seem to happily co-exist. It’s only disbelief that causes difficulties, and the piling-up of increasingly complex theologies about alien civilisations reaches dizzying heights. 

“Believers don’t want to know the truth, they only want to have their pre-existing beliefs elaborated upon,” Pilkington concludes. And of course, the Mirage Men are only too happy to oblige, gleefully feeding disinformation into the mix at every turn. He describes their double strategy: anyone who is dubious about aliens is put off by tales that UFOs are swamp gas or ball lightning, but the believers are pushed further from mainstream credibility with more ‘government leaks’. But that doesn’t mean that the truth is not out there, and Pilkington succeeds in penetrating many of the veils of deception that have been thrown up around this field. 

The book combines a strong interest in myths, magic and psychology with plenty of nuts-and-bolts information about radar, aircraft and the fringes of military technology. For example, he investigates the theory of “ECM + CIA = UFO” – the use of electronic countermeasures by intelligence agencies to create false images in radar screens. As long ago as the 50s, this technology was used to toy with Cuban and Soviet radar operators, creating phantom radar tracks that could shoot off at high speed or vanish if a plane approached them. Such equipment may have been used to test America’s own air defences – or Britain’s – leading to reports of interceptors scrambled against elusive UFOs. Of course, pilots were told not to reveal details of these exercises, and the technology to generate phantom radar targets was classified, intensifying the air of government cover-up. 

No book can include everything. I’d like to have seen the radioactive glowing stealth aircraft of the 50s get a mention (see FT209:16), and Schratt’s USAF saucer-planes; but there is more than enough material to make the point. 

It would be unfair to expect final and definite answers to the UFO question, but Mirage Men builds a comprehensive theory which takes some beating. Just as importantly, it does it in a highly readable and entertaining way.