Hacker Cinema
Mirage Men
2013 · Film · documentary · 85 min
Directed by John Lundberg
For over 60 years teams within the US Air Force and Intelligence services exploited and manipulated beliefs about UFOs and ET visitations as part of their counterintelligence programs. In doing so they spawned a mythology so powerful that it captivated and warped many brilliant minds, including several of their own. Now, for the first time, some of those behind these operations, and their victims, speak out, revealing a true story that is part Manchurian Candidate and part Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
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11 comments on Hacker News
If you’re interested in this, the documentary “Mirage Men” is fantastic.
Interesting that Richard Doty, the man being quoted in the video, doesn't have his own Wikipedia page. Is this part of perception management? He is only alluded to in this documentary film's page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirage_Men
From the NY Times article:
> "Over half of all U.F.O. reports from the late 1950's through the 1960's were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights" over the United States, the C.I.A. study says. "This led the Air Force to make misleading and deceptive statements to the public in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national security project."
This is exactly what happened with the people and incidents that were exposed in the Mirage Men[1] documentary that covers how the government uses UFO and alien conspiracy theories to coverup information that they don't want the public to know.
Well-meaning people stumbled upon classified projects, did the right thing by reporting them to the government, and then the government went out of its way to construct situations and fake evidence to convince them that what they saw were really aliens.
In one incident, the government constructed a fake "alien crash landing" site in the mountains, and flew one of their victims to it and let them investigate it themselves in order to convince them that what they really saw were aliens.
In the process of deceiving these people, the government even significantly contributed to a veteran's mental breakdown and paranoia via agents' lies and extensive surveillance of the victim's life.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srtrRbt77AE
Paul Bennewitz & Richard Doty
Bennewitz detailed his assertions to the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, who regarded him as a deluded paranoid. UFOlogist William Moore claims that he tried to push Bennewitz, who had been in a mental health facility on three occasions after suffering severe delusional paranoia, into a mental breakdown by feeding him false information about aliens.[1] In 1988, his family checked him into a psychiatric facility.[3] Former special agent for the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations Richard Doty claimed that in the 1980s he was tasked with hoaxing documents and feeding false information to UFO researchers, including Bennewitz.[4] Richard Doty is featured in the 2013 documentary "Mirage Men", a film alleging "how the U.S. government created a myth that took over the world. UFOs, and weapons of mass deception."[5]
> That's why it's actually interesting.
No, what grabbed you attention is that their is some governmental authority behind this. If that wasn't the case, your comment reading as someone whose interest in UFO emerged from the Navy stories, you wouldn't bat an eyelid.
... especially when there is a government organized disinformation campaign: check out the documentary Mirage Men!
Definitely check out the documentary "Mirage Men" mentioned by the parent comment.
Perhaps these are truly unidentified objects but you can’t ignore the sophistication of the scams associated with UFOs. There are elaborate hoaxes that require a serious amount of work, sometimes allegedly leaking classified information to mix into it.
For example, Project Serpo, some conspiracy theory about a secret space mission in the 1960-1970s. Somehow decades later this convinced a well known former CIA employee. Who later claimed he was naive to be associated with them.
This led to an unusual case of a current CIA employee leaking emails denying that the former DDI and Chairman of the NIC was involved with the Serpo hoax or the other CIA employee.
That employee quit the CIA in 1982 but was later affiliated with the DDI through medical research.
In the emails, described a meeting at CIA that occurred after the 1988 NBC broadcast of UFO: Cover-Up Live. Mentioned with two Colonels and the dubious AFOSI character who allegedly ran the original Serpo hoax for the Air Force. This person is the focus of the documentary Mirage Men. He also worked for Robert Bigelow and employed the chief scientist to Tom DeLonge’s company.
That scientist was introduced to DeLonge by the former CIA employee who fell for the later Serpo hoax.
The story is confusing but who would spend all this time on this? If you look closely, all the scientists involved even the Stanford guy, are kind of true believers. The rest are con-artists or deceived by a quest to uncover a great secret or technology.
Here is the 1988 broadcast, Falcon and Condor are around 1h10m. Falcon is the Serpo hoaxer AFOSI agent and Condor is a retired Air Force captain. There’s no covert conspiracy here, just a bunch of weird people who claims fantastic things. There’s no prime mover just human nature (ie disinformation, intelligence traps and scams)-
https://youtu.be/5CzZyrGolAg
> I have a suspicion that there is an old-boys-club of high-level military guys pushing UFO conspiracies for some purpose. At the very least, muddying the waters can help mask any civilian reports of potential classified aircraft. At the worst it can act as a lightening rod to redirect public thirst for unearthing military secrets.
This is the thesis of the documentary "Mirage Men".
> I doubt the CIA were gaming Google in the 60s
Not Google but they were gaming ufo people. Thee was a good documentary about this called "Mirage Men"
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/aug/14/men-in-black-ufo-sightings-mirage-makers-movie
The review of the film, a shorter useful info:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/mirage-men-film-review-568349
For me it was too boring to watch the film. If anybody actually saw it, liked it and remembers something interesting but not mentioned in the review, please tell.
Regarding UFO's, I enjoyed the documentary Mirage Men: https://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/70305797
Quoting the top review: "This is a documentary not about UFOs but rather intelligence operations perpetrated against Americans by their government in order to cover up top secret projects and engage in social control experiments using a particular American subculture."