Half-way through watching Mirage Men, a new documentary on how U.S. Intelligence agencies have deliberately sabotaged research into the UFO topic, I literally shook my head, saying to myself with a laugh “it’s a hall of mirrors”.
By the end of the documentary, my statement had been echoed and expanded upon by one of the interviewees, Linda Moulton Howe, who described the entire story as “a fractured hall of mirrors with a quicksand floor”. Howe should know: in 1983, while researching a documentary on the subject of UFOs for HBO, she was engaged by Richard ‘Rick’ Doty, an agent with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI), initially with the promise of helping her investigate an alleged UFO landing near Ellsworth Air Force Base.
But Howe’s meeting with Doty took an unexpected turn when the AFOSI agent suddenly produced a manila folder, saying she could take a look at it but, not remove it from the office or make notes.
Within it was a document titled “Briefing Paper for the President of the United States of America on the Subject of Unidentified Aerial Vehicles”, which listed a number of alleged UFO crash retrievals by the government, as well as paragraphs that became “emblazoned” on Howe’s mind concerning how they had discovered that Homo sapiens was a species created by extraterrestrials through genetic manipulation of primates.
Amazed by the information fed to her by the government agency at the time, in Mirage Men Howe looks back with three decades of perspective and wonders at the the amount of effort that must have gone into the deception: “they must have had meetings about ‘how do we stop a persistent and dogged reporter who has already demonstrated that she’s going to go after a really difficult subject?’.” The question that comes to mind, and which runs throughout this entire film, is ‘WHY?’.
This was not the first time that AFOSI agent Doty had willingly mislead investigators of the UFO subject, and it would not be the last. As such, he serves as the focal character in the documentary; it begins with the deception he helped orchestrate on Albuquerque businessman Paul Bennewitz, goes on to discuss the Linda Moulton Howe case, the infamous Majestic-12 documents (described in the film by another AFOSI agent, Walter Bosley, as the “perfect Perception Management Device”, though Doty denies any involvement with it) and extends forward to the more recent controversy over the ‘Project Serpo’ hoax.
And Doty is no doubt a worthy candidate for the film to revolve around. Coming to the documentary with a fair amount of knowledge about Doty’s deceptions over the years – with consequences (direct and otherwise) ranging from the wasting of UFO investigators’ time through to the mental disintegration, eventual hospitalisation and death of Paul Bennewitz – I already had a dislike for the man, and was ready to truly despise him.
But one of the things that catches you off guard is how harmless and genial he seems – the man is sitting before the camera, telling you how he has deceived people, and yet you feel that he seems to be a nice guy that you’d happily chat with at a neighbourhood barbeque. Though as Bill Ryan, who was initially taken in by the Serpo deception, points out, that’s what makes him so effective: “Rick’s great strength is he’s a wonderful story-teller”, says Ryan. “He’s a very friendly guy [and] builds relationships easily”.
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