Mirage Men in The Guardian

What if the lies and hoaxes Mirage Men reveals are simply a smokescreen for the fact that the authorities really do know secrets about extraterrestrials? What better way to conceal them than by getting “found out” in their disinformation tactics? What better way of throwing sceptics off the scent than disseminating the confessions of an ex-man in black like Richard Doty, in documentaries, and articles in respectable new organisations – like this one. Perhaps we’re no closer to knowing if the truth really is out there, but we can be sure the lies are.

A great piece about the symbiotic relationship between SF cinema and the UFO mythology in The Guardian 

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Mirage Men Double Disc DVD

A special, extended 2-disc version of the film, now available on DVD.

It includes the full length feature, an 8-page booklet with essays by the filmmakers on ‘The Genesis of Mirage Men’, ‘Tricksters, Saucers and Cyber Magicians’, ‘The Enigma of Richard Doty’ and ‘The Unreliable Narrator’, plus over an hour of previously unseen additional material, comprised of 22 short films giving background history, extra interviews and an exclusive Urthona music video.

Buy it here!

 

UFOs and F-14s over Iran

A very interesting snippet from, of all places, Forbes magazine, about recent UFO flaps over Iran, as mentioned in Mirage Men:

According to Iranian sources, the CIA’s intelligence drones displayed astonishing flight characteristics, including an ability to fly outside the atmosphere, attain a maximum cruise speed of Mach 10, and a minimum speed of zero, with the ability to hover over the target. Finally, these drones used powerful ECM that could jam enemy radars using very high levels of magnetic energy, disrupting navigation systems.

Read the article here

We have lift off!

Viewers in the UK, USA and Canada can now watch the film at the Mirage Men film site, or click the image below.

Mirage Men revealed by Greenwald?

A Powerpoint presentation made available on journalist Glenn Greenwald’s web site, Firstlook.org, may just have revealed the Mirage Men – or at least one branch of their operations.

The presentation is called The Art of Deception, Training for a New Generation of Online Covert Operations and was given by GCHQ’s Human Science Operation Cell (HSOC), linked to the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG), whose existence was uncovered by Greenwald via the documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

[Initially I won’t reproduce any of the presentation itself, but you can see the whole thing here]

 

While the textual content of the presentation is not online, we can infer from the slides that the powerpoint outlines applied techniques for deploying psychology, deception, illusion, dissimulation, magic, religion and belief in their intelligence and counter-intelligence operations. These are the tools of the trade for the Mirage Men.

And, sure enough, scroll down to pages 35 to 37  in Strand 2: Influence and Information Operations and you will find three slides of UFO photographs…

Coming soon

This is the first teaser poster for the Mirage Men documentary film, which is now very nearly finished. We hope to have news about festival screenings for 2013 in the next few weeks.

Thanks are due, once again, to Roland Denning and Kypros Kyprianou for their magnificent work on the film. And in case you missed their trailer, it’s here.

 

Area 51 Viewers Guide

Between 1994 and 1997,  the brilliant and acerbic Glenn Campbell published The Groom Lake Desert Rat which chronicled the unfolding exposure of what soon became the world’s best known secret non-existent airbase.

The Rat also served as a gossip sheet for tiny Rachel, Nevada, which had suddenly found itself at the centre of a highly strange cyclone, and of the many colourful and unusual characters who were drawn there in search of The Truth.

Campbell also wrote the handy “Area 51” Viewer’s Guide, which told would-be visitors, including myself, everything they needed to know about driving into the middle of the Nevada desert to see nothing much at all.

Crucially, it also contained an essential, detailed and regularly updated user’s guide to the all-you-can-eat buffets available in Las Vegas, your last chance to pig out before Rachel’s sole eatery, the Little A’Le’Inn.

Now, thanks to its author,  you can download the 1995 edition – the same one I took to Rachel in 1995 (and which disappeared in the post when I tried to send it back to the UK) – as a PDF, here.

 

 

 

 

From the vaults

As preparations get underway for this month’s epic Unknown Fields expedition across the US Southwest, here are a couple of vintage photographs of myself in 1995. The UFO sightings at Yosemite National Park that open Mirage Men occurred a few days after these photographs were taken.

– pointing the way towards Area 51, or at least what I thought was the way…

– confronting the legendary Black (now white) Mailbox on Nevada’s Highway 375

– a fuzzy view out of the car window at the warning signs at the base entrance (I didn’t dare take one outside the vehicle for fear of encountering the advertised “lethal force”).

I plan to upload photographs from the Unknown Fields trip as we travel…

Ebe’s Paranoia

A music video by The Castle, inspired by Mirage Men

Mirage Men film trailer

[click through to vimeo or it’s on youtube if you have a preference]

 

Here’s the first trailer for the Mirage Men film, created by mine and John Lundberg’s new partners on the project, Roland Denning and Kypros Kyprianou. Huge thanks to both of them for their amazing work.

The music extracts are by Earth (‘Mirage’ from Hex or Printing in the Infernal Method) and Cyclobe (‘You’re not alone, you’re dreaming’ from Luminous Darkness), and are used with permission.

The film is well on its way to completion now, and we’ll have more news, clips and information about preview screenings over the coming months.