The real Men in Black, Hollywood and the great UFO cover-up

August 15th, 2014

FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda

In
a new documentary, US government agents claim they spent decades giving
fake evidence of extraterrestrials to gullible ufologists. But why? And
how can we trust them now?

Hidden among the avalanche of documents leaked by Edward Snowden were images from a Powerpoint presentation by GCHQ, entitled The Art of Deception:
Training for a New Generation of Online Covert Operations. Images
include camouflaged moths, inflatable tanks, women in burqas, and
complex diagrams plastered with jargon, buzzwords and slogans:
“Disruption Operational Playbook”, “Swap the real for the false and vice
versa”, “People make decisions as part of groups” and, beneath a shot
of hands shuffling a deck of cards, “We want to build Cyber Magicians“. Curiously, sandwiched in the middle of the document are three photographs of UFOs. Not real ones – classic fakes: one was a hub cap, another a bunch of balloons, and one that turned out to be a seagull.
Devout
ufologists might seize upon this as further proof that our governments
“know something” about aliens and their transportation methods, but
really it suggests the opposite: the UFO community is a textbook case of
a gullible group susceptible to manipulation. Having spent too long
watching the skies and The X-Files, it’s implied, they’ll readily
swallow whatever snippet of “evidence” suits their grand theory.
If
there really is a UFO conspiracy, it’s surely the worst-kept secret in
history. Roswell, Area 51, flashing lights, little green men, abductions
– it’s all been fed through the pop culture mill to the point of
fatigue. Even the supposed enforcers of the secret, the “men in black”,
have their own movie franchise. But a new documentary, Mirage Men,
unearths compelling evidence that UFO folklore was actually fabricated
by the US government. Rather than covering up the existence of aliens,
could it be that the real conspiracy has been persuading us to believe
in them?

Mirage Men’s chief coup is to land an actual man in black: a former
Air Force special investigations officer named Richard Doty, who admits
to having infiltrated UFO circles. A fellow UFO researcher says: “Doty
had this wonderful way to sell it – ‘I’m with the government. You
cooperate with us and I’m going to tell you what the government really
knows about UFOs, deep down in those vaults.'” Doty and his colleagues
fed credulous ufologists lies and half-truths, knowing their fertile
imaginations would do the rest. In return, they were apprised of chatter
from the community, thus alerting the military when anyone was getting
to close to their top-secret technology. And if the Soviets thought the
US really was communing with aliens, all the better.
The classic
case, well-known to conspiracy aficionados, is Paul Bennewitz, a
successful electronics entrepreneur in New Mexico. In 1979, Bennewitz
started seeing strange lights in the sky, and picking up weird
transmissions on his amateur equipment. The fact that he lived just
across the road from Kirtland air force base should have set alarm bells
ringing, but Bennewitz was convinced these phenomena were of
extraterrestrial origin. Being a good patriot, he contacted the Air
Force, who realised that, far from eavesdropping on ET, Bennewitz was
inadvertently eavesdropping on them. Instead of making him stop, though,
Doty and other officers told Bennewitz they were interested in his
findings. That encouraged Bennewitz to dig deeper. Within a few years,
he was interpreting alien languages, spotting crashed alien craft in the
hills from his plane (he was an amateur pilot), and sounding the alert
for a full-scale invasion. All the time, the investigators were
surveilling him surveilling them. They gave Bennewitz computer software
that “interpreted” the signals, and even dumped fake props for him to
discover. The mania took over Bennewitz’s life. In 1988, his family
checked him into a psychiatric facility.
There’s plenty more like
this. As Mirage Men discovers, central tenets of the UFO belief system
turn out to have far earthlier origins. Mysterious cattle mutilations in
1970s New Mexico turn out to have been officials furtively
investigating radiation in livestock after they’d conducted an
ill-advised experiment in underground “nuclear fracking”. Test pilots
for the military’s experimental silent helicopters admit to attaching
flashing lights to their craft to fool civilians. Doty himself comes
across as a slippery character, to say the least. “He remains an
absolute enigma,” says Mark Pilkington, writer of the book Mirage Men,
the basis for the documentary. He found the retired Doty working as a
traffic cop in a small New Mexico town. “Some of what he said was true
and I’m sure a lot of it wasn’t, or was a version of the truth. I have
no doubt Rick was at the bottom of a ladder that stretches all the way
to Washington. It’s unclear to what extent he was following orders and
to what taking matters into his own hands.”
Doty almost admits to
having had a hand in supposedly leaked “classified” documents, such as
the “Majestic 12” dossier – spilling the beans on a secret alien liaison
committee founded by President Truman. But he denies involvement in the
“Project Serpo” papers – which claimed that 12 American military
personnel paid a secret visit to an alien planet in the Zeta Reticuli
system – only to be caught out as the source of the presumed hoax. The
Serpo scenario, it has been noted, is not unlike the plot of Steven
Spielberg’s Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. Does that suggest that
the forgers lazily copied the movie? Or that the movie is based on real
events and Spielberg was in on the conspiracy?

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

The place of movies in the grand UFO conspiracy is a tricky area.
Depending on which theory you subscribe to, Hollywood’s steady stream of
sci-fi is either a deliberate exaggeration, designed to make the
“truth” look unbelievable (the “you’ve been watching too many movies”
defence), or it’s a way of psychologically preparing the
populace for staggering alien secrets yet to be revealed. There are at
least grounds for suspicion in the latter camp. Pilkington points to the
CIA’s Psychological Strategy Board, founded after the second world war
to promote US propaganda. Associated with the board was veteran film
producer Darryl Zanuck. In 1951, Zanuck executive-produced seminal
alien-visitation sci-fi The Day the Earth Stood Still, often cited as a
government-sanctioned testing of the waters for alien contact. Like
Zanuck, the film’s writer, Edmund North, was ex-military, while director
Robert Wise apparently became a UFO believer on account of discussions
he had with Washington figures during the making of the movie.

Steven Spielberg is a less likely government stooge, though
he has been obsessed by aliens his entire career, from Close Encounters
and ET up to War of the Worlds and the last Indiana Jones film (not
forgetting his producer role in Falling Skies, Transformers and, er, Men
in Black). If anyone’s paving the way for the big reveal, it’s
Spielberg, but, after 30 years of paving, we’re still waiting.
Mirage
Men finds an even more extreme example in the form of industry veteran
Robert Emenegger, who claims that in 1971 he was approached by the
Pentagon to make a film revealing “what the government really knows”.
The Pentagon’s big lure was that they would let him incorporate
top-secret footage of an alien craft landing at Holloman Air Force Base
in the 1960s. Predictably, the footage never materialised but Emenegger –
no less cryptic a character than Richard Doty – claims to have seen it,
and still believes alien contact has been established. He went ahead
and made his documentary, entitled UFOs: Past, Present And Future.
Presented by Rod “Twilight Zone” Serling, it culminates in a rather
anti-climactic “reconstruction” of the Holloman UFO landing.
In
the cold light of the post-cold war, the evidence is starting to look
pretty shaky for UFOs. Numbers at UFO conventions and clubs are
dwindling. The UK’s Ministry of Defence closed its UFO desk in 2009,
and, like many countries, has declassified its UFO documents. If there
was any smoking gun, you’d imagine it would have been found in our
current golden age of leaks and disclosures – but so far there’s only
been more smoke. On a Guardian webchat in 2010,
relating to Wikileaks’ release of the US embassy cables, Julian Assange
asserted that “many weirdos email us about UFOs” but he’d come across
nothing concrete. There were references to UFOs in the cables, he noted,
but mostly to do with UFO cults rather than UFOs themselves – in the same way that GCHQ’s Art Of Deception slideshow references UFO cults.
If
nothing else, the leaked GCHQ document tells us the Mirage Men are
still out there, sowing deception and disinformation. These days they’re
more likely to be targeting suspect extremist religious groups, or
hackers and online fraudsters. Meanwhile, recent claims to have “deciphered” hidden backwards messages about UFOs in Edward Snowden’s interview only go to show how desperate the alien conspiracy cause has become.
There’s
something else ufologists are a textbook example of: cognitive
dissonance – the mental distress of trying to hold two conflicting
worldviews simultaneously. The term was coined in the 1950s by
psychologist Leon Festinger, who illustrated it with the example of a
UFO cult shattered by the unfulfilled prophecy of an alien visitation.
Some tenacious devotees still refuse to accept Mirage Men’s findings,
says Pilkington: “If beliefs are strongly held, nothing can sway them
and anything that appears to undermine them will just be absorbed and
repurposed. So if you’re really, really dedicated, this is just chaff to
throw you off the trail.” Pilkington himself has been accused of
working for MI5 or being a stooge controlled by the government, if not
the aliens. “If I’m under intelligent control from elsewhere then I’m
unaware of it, and I’m a victim, and it would be against my programming
for me to be able to prove it,” he reasons.
As always in the
conspiracy-theory hall of mirrors, it’s possible to flip the hypothesis
on its head: 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.