Mark Pilkington’s Mirage Men, a book about paranoia, technology, psy-ops, and “UFOs”

David Pescovitz
Weird
Mar 07, 2011
Book

2010 06 Mmb Header3
Bus 300 800 9781602398009 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.