A review of Mark Pilkington’s “Mirage Men”

By Colin Bennett



1. The Forming of the Cabal

As a book, Mirage Men illustrates the problems of a UK Protestant mindset more than anything else. As such, it can hardly be understood fully without knowing some of the very British background from whence it sprang.

First we must know that Mark Pilkington was an ex-assistant editor of the extremely sceptical UK Fortean Times. This magazine was founded some years ago by an erstwhile brilliant man, Bob Rickard. Though initially the magazine was a great success, Rickard himself wrote very little about Fortean matters. A rather passive figure, he was eventually quite overwhelmed by a veritable cabal of sceptics led by far stronger personalities. These included the fanatically anti-American sceptics, such as Peter Brookesmith and Paul Devereaux, who together wrote the sceptical book “Ufos and Ufology,” described by Bob Rickard as “the last word on Ufology.”
Under these somewhat Lutheran influences, the UK Fortean Times contained less and less Fortean matter. Given these sceptical influences, the magazine should ideally have been re-launched and renamed the UK Sceptical Enquirer under the Editorship of Brookesmith and Paul Devereaux. Failing such strong direction, the magazine became a blurred mess; it didn’t really want to deny Fortean anomalies yet it didn’t really know whether to accept them or not as a basis for magical or occult belief. Though sceptics, Brookesmith and Devereaux might at least have raised the intellectual level of the magazine which under the present editorship has now unfortunately dropped to zero, particularly with respect to UFOs.

Under such negative influence, and perhaps against his better Fortean instincts, Rickard chose to appear on TV claiming that Ufology was a lot of American nonsense. I myself was writing for the UK Fortean Times when the said cabal (including Mark Pilkington) arrived in the columns of that journal. Under their influence the magazine put down anything mystical, holistic, paranormal, or anomalistic. It need hardly be said that the crop circle phenomenon in particular was savagely trampled, particularly by Pilkington who claims to this day all such circles are made by human beings. In particular, any movement such as New Age culture which had the slightest degree of transcendental or fantastic claims or mystical claims within it was ignored completely, or ridiculed and reduced to a depressing landscape of over-rationalised analysis.
Readers had also to suffer the somewhat Communist inspirations of one Dr. David Clarke, a "sociology" lecturer (God help us all!) from a nameless garage university somewhere in the North of England. Clarke was the partner in crime of one Andy Roberts, a North of England bookshop owner. Though it must be admitted that Roberts at least had a sense of humour, in general the East German manic-depressive prose of both Clarke and Roberts would make any child of nature commit suicide in the time it took to say Karl Marx.
Quite a few members of this cabal were from the hard-nosed Protestant strongholds of the North of Great Britain, where the minds of Little England had always had a problem with both Wonder and Mystery. The Leftish metaphors of the work-ethic pervade the psycho-social spectrum of the area. Work, not play is a measure of the "real" which is perhaps their favourite word of all sceptics. Hardly anything else could be expected from an area whose practical genius gave the world the Industrial Revolution. As could be anticipated, a few of the members of the aforesaid Little England cabal wrote for the UK Guardian newspaper, where smart Leftish atheism prevails still.
Almost none of these sceptics had good modern synthesising brains, and the few who had such things were desperately out of date, trapped in a country which was rapidly losing its sense of wonder. The Silver period of Roman poetry as distinct from the Golden period shows that loss of wonder always precedes loss of economic and imperial power. The function of wonder is to keep up expectations.

Thus was lost a great opportunity to launch a an international magazine with full UFO coverage and true Fortean metaphysical view.

It was under these conditions that I decided to make no more submissions to the UK Fortean Times and to launch my own web site www.combat-diaries.co.uk

2. Pilkington

Mark Pilkington himself was originally Assistant Editor of Magonia Magazine, where he learned his sceptical trade from the Editor, one John Rimmer. Like Roberts and Clarke, Rimmer is another Lutheran who could stop a UFO in its tracks with one manic Anglo-Saxon glance. Armed and indoctrinated with the Magonian doctrine of Nature that there could not possibly be any mysteries beneath sun, moon, or stars, Pilkington migrated eventually to the UK Fortean Times where he became Assistant Editor.

The cabal having established itself, things began to get really nasty. Such attempts as mine to see Charles Fort as something more than a figure from a set of late Victorian postcards brought vengeance down from the sceptical skies. To see Fort as an operational modern philosopher whose ideas could be applied to the growth of social-control technology and the machinations of Big Media brought down double vengeance.

Let us not think for a moment that all this is a matter of opinion. For a considerable number of years, nothing less than vicious political warfare was waged by the UK Fortean Times against Ufology, and American Ufology in particular. Jerome Clark, the author of The UFO Encyclopaedia (2000) was attacked, as was Timothy Good’s Above Top Secret (1989). In particular, Nick Pope, author of Open Skies, Closed Minds (1997) was singled out for venomous attacks. For some three years, Pope had been the official Ministry of Defence Case Officer for all Ufological Reports. In addition, Bill Birnes' book on Colonel Corso and Roswell was ignored.


In addition, Georgina Bruni’s book You Can't Tell the People (2001) about the 1980 UK Rendlesham Forest UFO incident was violently put down. The incident was eventually attributed to the flashes from a nearby lighthouse by fellow-travelling deadly sceptics such as scientist Ian Ridpath, another member of the Fortean sceptical cabal. The Rendlesham Forest business was at least the UK equivalent to the “swamp gas” UFO scandal in the US. The UK sceptical story continues. Recently, Ian Ridpath made a BBC film about the Rendlesham Forest incident. The film was totally negative about UFOs.

Mirage Men continues this tradition. The work of Stanton Friedman and others on the Roswell incident is dismissed, as is the work of Strieber and Bud Hopkins on Abduction. Even major UFO scholars such as Richard Dolan or Leslie Kean are not mentioned, though their work is well within the time scale of the creation of Mirage Men. The highly selective absence of such world-recognised UFO scholars shows that Mirage Men is intellectually distorted to fit a pre-set sceptical agenda which is both perverse and desperately conspiratorial.

With such ingrained prejudice, perhaps Pilkington should not have written such a book on UFOs at all. In addition, that he works for the Fortean Times and yet he appears to have no concept of mystery, anomalies or contradictions in Mind and Nature is best left for himself to explain. But that is the way that cabal-sets work. Just like Holocaust Denial or the Moon Landing denials, Pilkington practices denial on principle for political purposes within the memes of belief-control programmes. This is an example of just how far the UK Protestant cabal will go in order to try and trash UFO belief. What black agendas generate such moves is a matter of conjecture. This book is certainly an operation. We can thank the gods it is not a very well-planned one.



An insider at the UK Fortean Times told me that my biography of George Adamski, Looking for Orthon (2001, 2008) made me a marked man as far as the Fortean Times was concerned and the book was not reviewed by that publication, either in the first or second editions.
However, the first edition of my award-winning biography of Charles Fort, Politics of the Imagination, (2002, 2008) was given a brief review. This “review” (if it could be called such), read as if the reviewer (now indeed the Editor of the UK Fortean Times) had spilled egg, sausage and chips all down his frontage. A man of extremely limited intellect and education, he was quite baffled, and he wrote as if he thought the book was a set of instructions on a pack of instant noodles.

In a combined assault, I was attacked also in good measure by Magonia Magazine, the alma mater of Mark Pilkington. At this time the FT cabal tolerated yours truly for a while as I was writing popular cover-page features on such people as Jack Parsons and Candy Jones. Though such features sold magazines, the cabal decided to pay me the compliment of an ambush. At a Fortean Convention meeting, I was invited by the present Editor of the Fortean Times (whose name escapes me, as does his nil Fortean record) to sit on stage with no less than six card-carrying sceptics whose several hundred rabid supporters were foaming in their seats. They were in a nasty mood and tried to boo me off the stage if only because the pro-UFO stance of my "Politics of the Imagination" was violently rejected. That I myself was always somewhat right-wing in my political opinions made the situation worse. I did note at the time that Mark Pilkington (who was chairing the meeting) failed for some reason or other to quell the mêlée.

The trouble was that the sceptics tuned out to be sentimentalists at heart. They wanted Charles Fort to remain a father-figure of pre-Raphaelite rusticity, little more than a scrabble-game man. They wanted a hippy Book of Hours about gnomes and hobbits and fish-falls from the sky. My treatment of Fort as a first postmodern philosopher was therefore as welcome as Adolf Hitler at a Bar Mitzvah.

The sceptical cabal mentioned previously is now part of a dying generation of what Shakespeare called “mechanicals.” The future was upgrading and reassembling itself, and smarter and cooler performers were moving onstage. With the arrival of the younger Pilkington, another generation of very different sceptics was born eventually. As the mechanical Age gradually morphed into the present Age of Big Media, Pilkington was produced like a rabbit from a conjuror’s hat, and the Stalinist clod-hoppers of old had to go. It goes almost without saying that Pilkington doesn’t look or sound anything like the old-fashioned Protestant rock-throwers previously described.

Just like Jon Ronson (the author of The Men Who Stare at Goats) a relatively new floppy kid on the sceptical block, Mark Pilkington represents trendy yuppie scepticism with a vengeance. He is made for Media. He is too floppy to be a hard man like the Amazing Randi, Karl Korff of the US, or Clarke and Roberts of the UK. He is the complete package: a media-ready flip-top toyboy, all smiles and hail-fellow-well-met. He is pure media plasma. One can imagine bullets going through him with very little effect. A regular jumping bean, he could charm the birds off the trees.

That the UK Fortean Times has almost always represented a view quite the opposite to the view of Charles Fort is best left for History, Bob Rickard, and Dennis Publications to explain. I am given to understand that a legal complaint was lodged some time ago citing the Trades Description Act, but nothing has been heard of this brave individual since.

Thus ended a splendid opportunity to launch possibly an international edition of a great Fortean magazine with proper UFO coverage. The narrowness of narrow minds from provincial streets defeated such an idea. A recent comment by a disappointed reader claimed the Fortean Times had become a “cross between the Sceptical Enquirer, National Geographic and The Guinness Book of Records.”

3. Feeding Frenzy

So frenzied is this attack on Ufology that it is not difficult at times to reach the conclusion that in Mirage Men there is detectable some hatred for Ufology as a culture, coupled with contempt for all things American. The book refers to almost every single major UFO incident over fifty years and a cross is put carefully against each and every item, instead of a tick. That’s the book.

To attempt to write such a wholly negative history of UFOs and Ufology in one volume is somewhat ambitious. Panoramic treatments of an entire culture should hardly be attempted by a first-volume author, particularly one with a negative axe to grind.

Mirage Men is a book which attempts such a panoramic view of the whole of Ufology, no less. Such attempts fall usually into the amateurish trap of saying “this happened, then after that, this other thing happened” and this book is no exception. Perhaps such a vast scheme should not be attempted by a writer who has hardly a shred of a Ufological track record proper.

Most of this sprawling volume consists of flippant and somewhat superficial reportage of the major UFO incidents and personalities since the Second World War. The style is plain and descriptive consisting of brief summaries of major UFO events. Pilkington is dismissive of both UFOs and Ufology, and what little analysis exists consists of quick top-of-head negative decisions about classic UFO incidents. The author ignores also (as distinct from arguing against) the entire range of major Ufological scholarship that has appeared over some fifty years or more.

One glimpse at the level of interpretation in “Mirage Men” gives warning. The author uses paper-back fiction gosh-golly techniques reminiscent of the golden age of retail Ufology. After starting his book with a rather blushing episode straight out of an Enid Blyton Book of UFO Fun, as an example of perfect irrelevancy he unearths Bernard Newman, an obscure and rather corny British paperback author from the immediate post-war years, whose books are in any case unavailable. He writes: “Did Newman know, or think he knew, something about the Roswell incident? Had he gleaned inside information from his contacts from the intelligence world? Who knows. Yet Newman certainly understood how folklore worked.”

What a naff beginning! Is this a book for a sophisticated adult audience, or what? As a comment on Roswell this casual baby-pap will not do. It ignores the major historical works on the Roswell UFO incident by Don Berliner and Stanton Friedman Crash at Corona, (1997), by Kevin Randle and Donald Schmitt UFO Crash at Roswell (1991), also The Roswell Incident (1997) by Moore and Berlitz, and Witness to Roswell, (2009) by Carey, Noory, Schmitt and Mitchell.

In the absence of such works, one can only assume that Mirage Men is largely a contemptuous dismissal by an author whose Ufological record by comparison is of a positively homeopathic dilution.

But Mirage Men is that kind of book.

Such a viewpoint coming so early in the work, we ask ourselves yet again what kind of audience is the somewhat lightweight Mirage Men aimed at?

The mention of “folklore” above is the key. Everything about the UFO phenomenon in Mirage Men is put down to folklore, urban legend, or media “fantasy.” Early on, it is clear that the author’s main thesis is to interpret every single major UFO incident in terms of some fairly simple mechanical explanation. As such, the brevity with which some classical encounters are dismissed is quite breath-taking.

In Mirage Men, all UFO incidents without exception are treated in the same cavalier way. Classics such as the Maury Island story are merely written up and dismissed, as is the story of Kenneth Arnold. Abductions and contactees are hardly discussed, and the mysterious business of the MJ-12 papers is dismissed as a fraud and a joke.

All these matters have been dealt with many times by hundreds of UFO books over very many years. But Pilkington just trashes icons quite casually, as if he is in a hurry and has something else on his mind. You’d have to be a mighty person to trash senior Ufologists say Kevin Randle, Stanton Friedman, and Linda Moulton Howe (literally) in one breath.

George Adamski receives a similar treatment. Having written Looking for Orthon, a biography of George Adamski (with Introduction by John Michell), I can honestly say that the material on both Silas Newton and Adamski in Chapter 7 is nothing more than contrived third-hand stale rubbish written up like a hasty school essay. Throughout, Pilkington does not refer to peer-reviewed standard texts on any aspect of Ufology. Neither does he have the weight of knowledge or experience to both lift this wide range of material and trash it at the same time.

His work on Project Blue Book for example is a trashing masterpiece. He gets most of his information from well-known sceptical sources and merely writes these up (again) like a school report. He appears not to have read Ruppelt’s original book Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, my own book An American Demonology and takes no notice of the extensive analysis of Ruppelt’s time at Blue Book examined in detail by Michael David Hall and Wendy Ann Connors in their book Ruppelt.

This is really no surprise. Pilkington has been trashing Ufology in Magonia Magazine and the UK Fortean Times for some years now.

It is to be expected therefore that not a single UFO sighting (say from the daily collections from George Filer or Peter Davenport) is given credence, or is judged worthy of investigation. All UFO sightings are assumed to be false: they are the result of mistakes or lies, and the leading lights of Ufology are all “mirage men” wrapped in self-deception.
At the risk of giving them a good out-of-context quote at times this book can be seen as a Leftish plot against the American imagination a la Jon Ronson’s Goats. The anti-American hatred is almost palpable. The citizens of a nation that cannot mount even an ill-equipped brigade-group without borrowing pairs of socks from the Yanks dare to laugh at the what they conceive Ufology to be - another branch of silly Disneyland.

Frankly, Mirage Men would have been far better with Jon Ronson as a co-writer. Though as profound a sceptic as Pilkington, he is at least capable of humour and satire, irony and wit. Pilkington is relentlessly dull, plodding and somewhat simple-minded as regards Ufology. From example to example, we know exactly what he is going to say. He doesn't even follow the professional journalistic practice of comparing negative examples against positive examples, thus leaving matters open to question. As a result Mirage Men is set in concrete.

Pilkington’s opinions apart, I am surprised also at his lack of narrative technique.

Mirage Men throughout reads rather like a set of musty notes from long ago. Pilkington chatters rather than writes, and he lacks all editorial self-criticism. His account of the Paul Bennowitz affair, for example, consists of little more than a staggered summary of Greg Bishop’s excellent book Project Beta. The Bennowitz / Doty story is (unwisely) split into two parts. Part 1 is fragmented chat, spread over many other matters, and the admittedly much better Part 2 comes in Chapter 5 when he is discussing the Laughlin Conference, of which more later.

Up to Chapter 5 all we have is a series of trotty-dog dismissals, most of which consist of corn-ball instant scepticism. Who is Pilkington writing for, the Ufological kiddie league? Consider the one-sentence thought “all crop circles are made by human beings.” Consider also the casual observation that pilot Mantell saw a “weather balloon.”
Some of this nonsense sounds as if it is from a notebook of fifty years ago. The book contains a wonderful collection of such worn-out clichés, such as “visionary flights of fancy,” “Monty Pythonesque confusions.”

Such casual flip-top rejections form the theme of the first four chapters. Generally speaking, the UFO phenomenon is attributed to Ray Palmer and the “psycho-social” confusions of poor Americana, who is looked upon as a bit of a dope.

Many of the material conjunctions are assembled in a manner so professionally unskilled that frankly, Constable should be ashamed of themselves at not taking the author by the neck and making him do his homework, his opinions notwithstanding. The editor for example did not even use a capital “I” for military “intelligence.” That alone shows how much attention was spent on the copy-editing, never mind the linking and continuity of the argument. The problem here is that Pilkington is above all a lazy writer and thinker. He is far too laid back, and his book is far too long for him to carry such a weight on his back. He should have been severely disciplined: he dozes off in mid illustration, he loses concentration, sprinkling all and everything with worn-out dog-and-pony clichés copied from over fifty years of Ufology.

As such, we have a ragbag of worn-out sceptical sores, almost all torn from the back pages of the Magonia Magazine and UK Fortean Times and written up cloggy-fashion.

Frankly, the author has taken on too much. A book of this length is quite beyond him. He should have specialised. He chatters rather than writes. His concentration fails, he tires, he uses fillers and summaries and makes superficial assumptions about people and events beyond all compass. He throws in second and third hand material with abandon, and several times I expected to meet the proverbial kitchen sink flying through the proverbial air.


Frankly, Mirage Men is old-fashioned relative to modern Ufology. There’s no modern analytic Web thinking here. That the world consists of stories and each story is a spider’s web of infinite extent within a Big Media complex appears to be quite beyond our simple-minded pair of mechanists. For the most part, they appear to be referring to the cornball retail Ufology of an Age prior to the advent of the Web. No, the author(s) remain intent on sorting out the “facts from the fictions” as modern junior league Victorian Station Masters lost now in a Big Media postmodern world.

The book does not raise its head from this wobbly mess until we reach Chapter 5, no less, when our pair commence a journey up river into that Coney Island of Ufology called the Laughlin Conference of 2006.

4. Two Go to Laughlin.

The best thing about Chapter Six of Mirage Men is that it reveals a comic and definitive English bafflement at anything extraordinary done by eccentric foreigners. But our two adventurers are hoist by their own petard, and the Laughlin episode turns out to be a satire on Englishness rather than the other way round.

First our friends do not go for sensible middle-of-the-road Ufology. That would be too hard a task. No, they go for Laughlin, which for the most part is pure Ufological showbiz.
Each year the event assembles the biggest collection of foil-hat Jerry Springer Ufologists on Earth. It comes complete with a pseudo hi-tech gloss plus the countless mysteries of supposed extraterrestrial alien intrigue.

Our baffled pair don’t know quite what to make of that Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline-Baby which is Laughlin, their staunch Anglo-Saxon tepid rationalism being somewhat overwhelmed. They are to Laughlin as Trotsky is to the Beverley Sisters.

Perhaps they should have been told.

Meantime, like old aunts, they stamp their petulant parochial pre-postmodern feet at the fabled eccentricities of Americana.
It is clear that our two young fogies haven’t met Laughlin-type UFO folk before. In vain do they try to rescale their leftish perceptions. To them Laughlin is a mere circus-type curiosity. They would not recognise a postmodern agenda if it slapped them in the face. Yet, if the Americans are funny, our two English boys are even funnier.

A deep-laid Anglais Protestantism is suspect. This confines all phenomenological mysteries to the Jews, the Germans the French, plus all those ragged unfortunates well beyond Calais.

If our pair, in their supercilious attempt to destroy Ufology, thought they had picked the Laughlin Conference as an easy target for trashing, they were mistaken. Their first discovery is that simple concepts of fraud and imposture are of no use at all in dealing with such people as Rick Doty and Bill Ryan. They are high level Tricksters to whom common sense and rationale do not apply.

Doty and Ryan are just two of the biggest names in the sphere of Ufological disinformation. Both these tricky gents still maintain the SERPO story, and legends that there are extraterrestrial aliens in tunnels, bases, and cities throughout the USA.

It is disappointing that Jon Ronson did not join our pair. The title of Chapter 5 could then have been “Three Go to Laughlin.” That would have made an ideal trio on the lines of Enid Blyton’s “Famous Five” series. Ronson could have joined in the English schoolboy giggles at big daft Americana, as he did in Men Who Stare at Goats.

The Laughlin Conference represents an event around which the book should have developed in detail, finishing with our two gents quite up in the air. It is good to see Rick Doty lives up to his reputation. He winds up our baffled pair who are looking for bourgeois order in Ufology and not finding any. Ronson, who is a far superior writer to Pilkington, might here have been up to the occasion as far as counter-satire goes.

Just one whiff of consumer frolics a la Americana is more than enough for our nut-and-bolt-duo. The world conceived as consisting of prototypal brand names and personalities, as distinct from their distinctly Anglo-Saxon toxic mother’s milk, proves far too exotic for our fantasy-deprived Englishmen.

Both Ryan and Doty would of course have seen our two baffled wide-eyed pair coming from a mile away, blushing wide-eyed innocents ready for what Shakespeare called a practice or gull. Ryan and Doty are made of pure star-stuff, a form of matter probably not encountered by our two extremely conservative young men, and very quickly the two infamous SERPO fabricators have Mark and John quite overwhelmed.

Ryan and Doty both are at the high end of the Ufological metaphysical / consumer image-chain, this being a form of somewhat rarefied matter for our stolid English sceptics, methinks. In the years to come, both Ryan and Doty will form part of the Elvis/Jackson consumer chain, a concept which yet again is a bit exotic for our nut-and-bolt pair.

Little do our British adventurers realise that in seeing Laughlin they are looking right into the superluminal continuum of the UFO.

5. The Gull

Though Doty (as distinct from Bill Ryan) doesn’t meet many people, he accepts the invitation to meet our intrepid pair rather too readily, which should have served as a warning. Like Bill Ryan again, he turns out a mite over friendly, which should have been another suspicious sign. But our intrepid pair press on, receiving Doty’s UFO stories almost as if he is Dante leading them through the UFO inferno.

Eventually (and this is the best part of the book) through the influence of Doty and Ryan, Ufology in the conspiratorial raw starts to get to our pair. If the book had been more about such fascinating conspiratorial legends instead of being a bundle of under-written and potted histories, then we might have had another Mothman on our hands. For instance we could have done with more descriptions of the psychological changes which were challenging profound scepticism.

To see Pilkington’s scepticism quite overwhelmed if only for a moment is edifying to say the least. It is nice to see him with his mouth agape for once.

It took the combined efforts of Doty and Bill Ryan to do this to such a hard-line sceptic. But then Doty and Ryan both are straight out from the pages of Herman Melville’s 1857 novel The Confidence Man. Pilkington does not understand apparently that the roots of US frontier chicanery are that deep.

As is to be expected, our two Confidence Men toy with our pair as they toy with just about everything else in Douglas Adams’ concept of “Life, the Universe and Everything,” including believers as well as sceptics. That said, the Laughlin meeting becomes a struggle between Mark and John, the two most slippery customers in British Ufology, and Doty and Ryan, the two most slippery customers in American Ufology.

Were our pair capable of synthesising expanded metaphors, what a chapter this might have been.

That the background to these contesting belief systems is the hooting UFO Disneyland of the Laughlin Conference of 2006 makes this one chapter in Mirage Men well worth reading. We have characters and atmosphere; we have tension, drama, and background. We have also irony in seeing Mark and John through the eyes of other people instead of having to wade through limitless acres of Mark’s palsied journalism.

The trouble is that our intrepid pair do not realise that
Doty and Ryan are Matrix anarchists, and our rather old-fashioned duo, with their very British “plain fact versus plain fiction” approach finish up as drained and washed out as is John Keel at the end of “The Mothman Prophecies.” The only way to deal with Doty and Ryan is satire, but Jon Ronson is not present, and satire is far too sophisticated a technique for Pilkington, who sees always “truth” and “falsehood” in terms of heavy mechanical differentials.

Doty wins the battle, and our two feathered friends finish up with their eyes on stalks at the sayings and doings of that most wonderful piece of Americana, Rick Doty.

All the characters involved here are now become pieces of Ufology as Art form. In this, the Laughlin episodes are examples of wonderful postmodern theatre in which both Pilkington and Lundberg can be placed as stuffed heads either side of a kitchen cuckoo clock.

At times our pair appear to be revelling in their second childhood. Americans are comic figures and their culture is a bit of a hoot. They aren't half pleased with themselves, and feeling rather superior to it all in a very British way. Pilkington has learned well from his masters. All we have at the end of Chapter 5 is an impression of flip-top facetious silly-ass clowning reminiscent of neo-Edwardian public school boys straight from of the pages of a Billy Bunter annual.
Alas, the mysteries of cultural transformation remain inaccessible to them.

They fail to realise that what they are looking at is raw media, the Technicolor flow of persuasive mystique, the occult transformations of consumerism, either intellectual or social.
Therefore the mysteries of America avoid them: they look for standard sets of mechanical relations representing historical causation and they don't find any such things either in America or Ufology. “Mirage Men” is therefore essentially an essay in Transatlantic Culture Shock.

6. Kit Green

It might be expected that our pair would recover their momentarily-shattered Englishness through interviewing the calm and cool Kit Green, a legendary ex-CIA medical advisor and Intelligence Officer. But just as they have hardly recovered from being spun in the freak direction, Kit spins them in another quite different way which turns out to be just as freakish.

Our two very straight boys know not where to turn in this self-induced Postmodern continuum, and the deadly scepticism of the UK Fortean Times or Magonia Magazine is too far away to help out.

In a passage straight out of John Fowles’ The Magus, Kit leads them out into Whitehead’s “Ever widening penumbra of uncertainty,” the only moment where they think that they too are part of the UFO plot in a Borgesian sense. They remain victims of their need to disbelieve.

Any editor on this earth with any kind of common sense would have ended the book there and then with Mark and John strung up by their own fascinating indecision like the Savage in Huxley’s Brave New World.

But no, in the final chapters, Mark has to stick in his club-feet again and he returns to more school essay chat. This was a disaster in the beginning of Mirage Men and it is a disaster at the end.

Laughlin gone, we have to wade through some twenty pages of a Boy’s Own Funny Aeroplane Annual. The authors appear not to have noticed that many hundreds of full-colour books full of the prototypal aircraft they mention have been available for many years.

Chapter six is plainly nonsense. An author who has had no military service, no hands-on technological training or experience, and who merely summarises second-hand Intelligence procedures should not attempt an all-round analysis of the Military-Industrial Complex within the space of a single chapter. Here the author’s rapid-paced flip-top journalism is both naïve and worthless.


Conclusion

Had our pair the wit to see it, what they were watching was the evolution of a prototypal entertainment system in which they are playing a part as much as anyone else. Such systems are now become World-Engines (see my “Child Brides from Outer Space,” Part 1 on Reality Uncovered). The trick is to see that that scepticism is part of the contra-rotating ideological generating voltage required by such super-liminal cultural motors as Laughlin. Such World Engines generate the images within the silver screens of consciousness. Humanity is run by such display systems, from royal courts through fashion and glamour to Big Media. As our authors found out in the interview with Kit Green, Big Science indeed is yet another display system.

As Charles Fort reminds us, since we are but bits of paste clinging to a rock in space, sceptical rationalisations are just as comic as anything else.

With this thought, Fort’s concept of both Doubt and Belief as high-quality entertainment has come of age.


When Pilkington goes into Big Media eventually (which will be quite soon I suspect) I do hope fickle Media doesn’t betray him and leave him stranded as a kid's presenter on morning TV, become the back end of Muffin the Mule (apologies - I have not seen TV for some fifty years), or something like that. Perhaps he should have a go at pop journalism. Far better than messing around with Ufology, he’d be brilliant talking about Lady GaGa songs and lyrics in relation to her fantastic costumes. He should form a partnership with his friend Jon Ronson, who knows all about such things.