MIRAGE MEN 2023

Individdum, a bold, independent Russian publishing house approached me a few years ago with the idea of a Russian language edition of Mirage Men, which finally appeared this year.

I wrote a new afterword for the edition, in which I lay out some of my thoughts on the book, and the UFO situation over a decade later, and I thought it might be interesting to make this text available here.

The more powerful enemy can be vanquished only by the most thorough, careful, attentive, skilful and obligatory use of any, even the smallest, rift between enemies, any conflict of interests among the bourgeoisie.
Vladimir Ivanov, “The Art of Planning, Developing, and Implementing Active Measures” 1985. Quoted in Active Measures, Thomas Rid.

What types of superstitious appeals will be best adapted to the various audiences to be propagandised? …A study of local superstitions as reflected in popular folk lore might be profitable in providing answers to these questions.
The Exploitation of Superstitions for Purposes of Psychological Warfare (RAND, 1950).

The Russians are carefully running a “vacuum cleaner” over every piece of UFO information they can find in France… The French are amazed at such thoroughness on the part of the Soviets, when their own scientists in Paris are telling them UFOs don’t even exist. 
Jacques Vallee, diary entry, 7 January 1979. From Forbidden Science vol II.

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The decade since Mirage Men was published has seen a spectacular, and if I’m honest, quite unexpected, resurgence of interest in UFOs, amplified to saturation point by the American popular media, and managed and contained – to the best of their ability – by the US defence establishments.

The latest push towards UFO reality is driven by a set of individuals with deep financial and political connections to the defence and intelligence worlds, one of whom, Robert Bigelow (Unfortunately misnamed in the first edition of Mirage Men as Kevin Bigelow!), has been supporting and influencing the field for at least three decades. This group of affiliates – some of them personally close, others aligned by their shared goals – work to inform and encourage journalists, media figures, entertainers, soldiers, spies and politicians in promoting the reality of non-human entities, intelligences and technologies on Earth, and the imminent disclosure of this truth by the very governments that we have been warned for decades, often by the same people, not to trust.

This recent phase has been extraordinarily successful: capturing and shaping the public mood, harnessing the power of traditional and social media and elevating the UFO subject to a level of visibility and credibility rarely seen, certainly not since the late 1970s, or the early 1990s. This despite the fact that the evidence itself has barely evolved, or improved, over the same period of time. While the credibility of some of these new witnesses appears impeccable – among them are highly-trained pilots, intelligence operators, neurologists and deep-seated Washington players – their claims, and their sources, remain as opaque and nebulous as they always have. Stories within stories, all-too-often traced back to the same documents and individuals of dubious provenance who have been fuelling the UFO myth for generations. To those not well versed in the lore, this sense of narrative continuity provides the stories with a veneer of authenticity, but for those of us – including you, now that you have read this book – who recognise the repeating patterns, themes and tropes of these accounts, it’s all too clear that they remain what they have always been, folklore.

As such, my core hypothesis remains unchanged: that UFOs are living folklore and a powerful vehicle for new religious beliefs; that these beliefs can be, and are, routinely exploited and manipulated by the world’s politicians, intelligence agencies and militaries, bound into a moebius strip feedback loop with the entertainers, grifters and groomers who amplify and popularise a core of stories to meet their own differing needs and ends. The result is a folklore for the space age, the dreams of the cultural unconscious being aired in public by those who recall them most vividly. 

But something else is happening.  

Over the past 80 years these accounts have been streamlined and amalgamated into a powerful mythology which, after decades of repetition and reinforcement, has taken on the tenets, codes, language and structures of a religion that has touched people, including political, military, scientific and cultural leaders, all over the world. As a religion it has its own deities, demigods and demiurges, prophets, priest-class, scribes and heretics and a lore and literature as rich as any of its predecessors. And it is growing fast.

Should we be concerned about this gradual fine-tuning and focusing of the ufological influencing machine? I don’t think so, and nor do I think that an emergent UFO religion is necessarily a problem; in fact I think it should be recognised as a religion and accorded the same respect as any other. Which is not to say that religions don’t come with their own small print. 

Ideas about angels from Outer Space, parallel dimensions or our far future affect some of us psychically, emotionally and spiritually, but when, and how, might they start to steer our behaviour, or the decisions made by those able to wield power and change the world? 

UFO beliefs, and their believers, don’t yet seem to be tied to any particular political tendencies – since the earliest days of the lore they have been adapted by both the extreme political left and right, and sit comfortably among the myriad strands of intention and identity between them. But, as we have seen, in the hands of people who know how to use it, the lore – like any other set of ideological or religious beliefs – can be a potent weapon for shaping, or breaking, minds. 

The past decade has shown dramatically, and repeatedly, that unwise, absurd, and sometimes dangerous ideas and conspiracy theories – Brexit, Q Anon, the Trump Presidency, the anti-vax movement, the War on Woke – can be harnessed, amplified and directed via social media by bad actors seeking to wreak havoc in their own, or enemy nations. It’s interesting then to wonder why UFOs haven’t featured more prominently in some of the more explicit online information warfare campaigns of recent years, though we might well argue that they’re busy enough being a Psyop of their own.

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In Mirage Men I suggest that popular ideas about UFOs have, at various times, been shaped and manipulated by disinformation specialists within America’s intelligence and military apparatuses  – and no doubt those of other nations, particularly the Soviet Union during the Cold War era – to create an ever-evolving punctuated equilibrium of belief.

What I’m not suggesting, however, is that there’s a permanent, ongoing government programme to promote UFO beliefs: i don’t think that the Mirage Men don’t have an office in the Pentagon, or the Kremlin (though I’m happy to be proven wrong), but that’s not to say that they’ve never hot-desked in the corridors of power…

In the light of the ongoing UFOric resurgence I thought it might be interesting to list a few scenarios in which UFOs, and the idea of UFOs, might be useful to the Mirage Men:

• As a cover story or camouflage for testing or sightings of advanced military vehicles and weapons systems whether in the air, in water or on land; for missile, satellite or rocket launches, or for their descents, crashes and landings. Likewise otherwise out-of-place sensitive human technologies – friendly or otherwise – eg during military training exercises.
• In Electronic Counter Measures and radar spoofing events: As the great Leon Davidson declared in the 1950s : ECM+CIA=UFOs. You might replace the CIA here with any other alphabet agency
• In diverting attention from errors by pilots, radar operators or other servicemen that might either prove embarrassing to their employers, or potentially expose their vulnerabilities to prying enemy eyes, for instance, again, during military training exercises
• As a bait for luring, or a purgative for flushing out, spies, defectors or other bad actors within political, military and intelligence networks
• As a cover for extracting and transmitting classified information on sensitive topics – eg classified technologies, though it could really be information about anything
• As a safe means of testing the ability of servicemen, intelligence agency employees and others handling classified material to keep a secret (if they blab about UFOs, it won’t hurt – and you know they can’t be trusted with anything really serious)
• As a recruitment tool for the military and intelligence services: “Join the Air Force and we’ll show you where the UFOs are hidden”.
• As a means for extracting sensitive information about advanced technology platforms from witnesses: “Tell us about this UFO you saw: what did it look like? What sounds did it make?”
• As a tool for spreading fear and encouraging national weapons spending and development
• As information weapons for flooding and disrupting military or civilian media or communications channels with bad information or “data chaff” to divert, distract or disorientate
• As a means of encoding or encrypting sensitive information
• As a cover for civilian or military criminal operations such as smuggling, fraud, data theft etc
• As drivers for domestic or international insurgency or terrorism 
• As tools for personal manipulation of others, their bodies and their beliefs
• As a means to undermine, embarrass, discredit or disenfranchise political opponents
• As vectors for grift and gain in the military-entertainment industries 
  
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  “But”, you say, “some UFOs really are Unidentified Flying Objects!”
  And you’d be right – but how should we be thinking about them?

UFOs are windows, or scanners, capable of working across all domains of human experience simultaneously : technological, political, military, scientific, cultural, perceptual, imaginal and spiritual.

On a pragmatic level they’ve provided us with fleeting glimpses into the inner workings of the military-industrial-entertainment complex:  its practices, its technologies, its networks and its structures; how the wheels of funding work and political money flows. They reveal how the lobbyists and businessmen, dreamers and grifters working on the edges of the military and entertainment industries, driven by an apparent spiritual zeal for disclosure, can persuade, inspire and harness political power to gain influence, one stratum at a time, and so strengthen and amplify their own financial and political hands, all in the name of truth and transparency. 

Who says you can’t make money, gain power, preach extraterrestrial salvation and set information free all at the same time?

On a spiritual level they are hyper-condensed concentrations of magic and power, omens, augurs, catalytic concatenations of the spiritual, technological and political moment in which they appear. 

On a personal scale they can be windows into our imaginal worlds, revealing how we, as individual minds, are woven into the wider cultural, spiritual and technological zeitgeists. Taking this further into a mystical dimension they are windows into the state of our civilisation, of our species, and of our planet, of our relationship to our wider cosmic neighbourhood, perhaps even to the weft and weave of reality itself.

Ironically, while potent magical and imaginal objects, UFOs are also a gateway drug for engaging with reality and useful critical thinking, exerting a powerful grounding effect that tethers us to our physical and social environment. A serious interest in UFOs encourages us to study: the hard sciences – physics, chemistry, biology and their astronomical equivalents; astronomy and meteorology; the human sciences – anthropology, sociology, philosophy and psychology (abnormal or otherwise); political science and political history; military history; religious history; the history of technology; cultural, media and communications history…

It seems a shame, and knowledge’s loss, that the UFO field remains somewhat intellectually tainted, in part by the absurdity of its extremes, for it makes a genuinely valuable and rewarding field of study. 

In closing I’ll note that one of the great ironies of the UFO age is that, as with so many aspects of the phenomenon, the groundwork for understanding the situation was laid in the 1950s, and in perhaps a further irony, the CIA were absolutely right when they declared, in their 1953 Robertson Panel report that while the UFOs themselves present no ‘direct physical threat to national security’, the reporting of them did: “the continued emphasis on the reporting of these phenomena does, in these parlous times, result in a threat to the orderly functioning of the protective organs of the body politic. We cite as examples the clogging of channels of communication by irrelevant reports, the danger of being led by continued false alarms to ignore real indications of hostile action, and the cultivation of a morbid national psychology in which skillful hostile propaganda could induce hysterical behavior and harmful distrust of duty constituted authority.” 

Try telling the ufologists of 2023 that!

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 I’ll leave you with a few lingering notes and questions relating to the research presented in Mirage Men.

• If there was one part of the book that I would significantly review and revise, it would be the section on cattle mutilations. Further reading and enquiries have led me to conclude that the cattle mutilation panic was a social scare whose mysterious elements were exaggerated and exploited by a mix of incredulous and unscrupulous players, many of them in the UFO field (and these might also have included military, intelligence or other operators out to manipulate the public, or researchers). As to whether clandestine government radiation testing was responsible for some of the mutilations around Dulce in the 1970s, such testing, I have been informed, would involve an examination of bone marrow rather than the study of soft tissues – so we can probably discount this theory – though soft tissues might be removed if looking for other forms of toxicity, e.g. a viral outbreak such as BSE. 

• To what extent did the Soviets exploit the UFO field for espionage and psychological warfare purposes? 

As a late example, the Top Secret SEKTA UFO research programme was instigated in 1978, a period that conveniently aligns with a number of their own secret rocket launches, plasma weapon research, the 1979 near-collision of an American F4 Phantom II fighter jet with a UFO over Tehran, and the beginning of the US Stealth programme. Was it the Pentagon’s fear that their new generation of aircraft might be revealed to Soviet agents that led to the counter-intelligence operation that created the MJ-12 papers? Bill Moore was, after all, a fluent Russian speaker and recalls exchanges with what he believed were Soviet UFO researchers – perhaps part of SEKTA. If any Russian-language readers have leads or pointers towards Soviet Mirage Men style operations I’d be thrilled to receive them.

• Was Serpo, whose original author(s) remains unidentified, connected in some way to the birth of the Defence Intelligence Agency’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP)? AATIP was instigated in 2007, not long after John Lundberg and I had begun our initial Mirage Men investigations and were contacting some of the figures involved. Had we unwittingly blundered into the opening phases of a classified operation? In hindsight it seems quite possible and would explain why there was so much interest in what we were doing from some of the usual suspects in the UFO story.

It’s intriguing to consider how the birth of AATIP may have sowed the seeds for the current wave of UFOria. It coincided, for instance, with the first leak, to the Above Top Secret UFO bulletin board in 2007, of the alleged UFO FLIR (Forward-Looking InfraRed) footage filmed during military exercises involving the USS Nimitz in 2004. Nobody paid much attention to the footage at that point, but it assumed legendary status when “leaked” again to the New York Times in 2017, this time via Tom Delonge’s To The Stars Academy. 

• The Serpo campaign feels like a precursor to the kind of online social media psyop later refined by QAnon and the anti-vax campaigns: a drip feed of information via email lists, message boards and social media channels to promote irrational, potentially socially destabilising, ideas. Serpo fizzled out in a puff of absurdity, but Q Anon led directly to one of the most dramatic events in American history, the storming of the Capitol building on 6 January 2021. Both feel like operations culled from the classic psychological warfare playbook. Were they in any way connected? One of the protagonists in the Q Anon story, Jim Watson, spoke of moving into the UFO business, but nothing seems to have materialised yet. 

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Periodically I’m struck by how remarkable it is that Mirage Men is still being read, discussed and enjoyed so many years after its original publication. I wanted to write a book that could bring a fresh and valuable perspective to a very familiar story, and one that would appeal to both UFO insiders and those coming to this dense and often impenetrable topic for the first time. I’ve been deeply encouraged by the ongoing response to the book, and also the further research by a new generation of researcher who have used Mirage Men as a launching off point – this was always my hope, and my intention – to open the door a crack, and let enough light in to let others explore. 

I’d like thank the team at Individuum books for encouraging me to revisit Mirage Men and give it a new lease of life through this new Russian language edition, which I hope will inspire readers to dig into their own parallel history, and as with my book, look beneath the surface and beyond the sensation to the deeper stories within.