UFO folklore is filled with any number of wild stories. It’s always been hard to not take the whole kit and kaboodle with a big grain of salt. Well now, many of the discrepancies and contradictions have been explained in this new documentary, out on DVD this week, “Mirage Men”.
The film follows Richard Doty, a retired special agent for the United States Air Force Office of Special Investigation whose job it was to engage with ‘believers’ and feed them misinformation. But not to cover up UFO sightings, but to encourage them.
Asserting that he was tasked with creating and encouraging more alien lore to lead astray investigations into strange lights and craft (that turned out later to be early tests of stealth planes and drone tech), he drove at least one poor guy to the brink of insanity with his manipulations. These misinformation campaigns for his benefit went so far as to equip black unmarked helicopters with unusual light arrays and plant faked downed space crafts.
Regardless of all of this, “Mirage Men” doesn’t seek to deny the existence of UFOs, just to explore how much of the common lore was in fact misinformation from Doty, the NSA and other government agencies. Doty himself says in the film that he believes Roswell was for real, and that he can’t explain a good deal of the mythology. He even regularly attends UFO conferences as he, in his own way, is indeed a believer. Whether or not you will be after viewing the film will at the very least be tempered by this new and frightening information into the ways the government has in the past sought to manipulate perception and media.
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