Unidentified chattering object – Weekend

Individuum Publishing House publishes a book by British journalist Mark Pilkington “Ufologists in Plaincloths” – a kind of documentary version of The X-Files, a conspiracy thriller about hunters for flying saucers.

Text: Igor Gulin

First of all, it is worth mentioning what distinguishes Mark Pilkington’s investigation from most of the books devoted to conspiracy theories. As a rule, their authors look from afar and see outlandish freaks in their heroes – either soulless monsters or duped idiots. Pilkington’s position is closer to the subject. He himself was an active participant in the UFO subculture in the past, in his student years he was the chairman of a small Norfolk UFO society (which consisted mainly of eccentric pensioners), later he joined a circle of trampling circles (these people are engaged in producing traces from the landing of alien ships, and then enjoy effect). In addition, Pilkington himself saw several unknown objects in the sky several times, and these meetings had a decisive influence on his formation. It’s not that he believes in flying saucers, but it’s not that he doesn’t believe in them at all. Rather, he sees in the UFO a grandiose myth – like any myth that incorporates elements of reality and, in turn, actively influences this reality.

At the same time, “Ufologists in civilian clothes” is not an anthropological work. This is precisely a journalistic investigation, most of which is occupied by the search for elusive personalities, meetings and conversations, digging into documents. Sometimes all this makes a slightly monotonous impression, but there is a reason for this: the UFO myth that formed at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s has remained virtually unchanged until today. Its adherents reproduce the same plots with amazing perseverance, each time presenting them as shocking revelations.

The contours of the myth are easy to outline: Earth is being visited by aliens. Perhaps they have been here for a very long time, perhaps even participated in the birth of mankind – probably one of them was Jesus Christ. Or maybe they just arrived. In any case, the government knows about their visits – primarily the American, but probably others – Soviet, German, British. Scientists and the military receive signals from space, they made contact with aliens, found and dissected their corpses, and for many years carefully covered up traces of alien abductions of people. But most importantly, they had alien technology at their disposal. For more than a decade, the state has been secretly mastering otherworldly secrets and filling the earthly sky with its own flying saucers. From ordinary people, all this is carefully hidden, but sometimes the truth seeps out. At this moment, a dangerous game is launched between those who want to reveal alien secrets to the world, and those who want to keep them at all costs.

The most exciting part of the UFO myth is not the visitors from outer space at all, but the tense relationship between UFO enthusiasts and the state. Moreover, these relations were never one-sided. Over the decades, agents from the CIA, FBI, NASA, and other government departments have infiltrated the UFO community, feeding UFO hunters a wealth of fictitious classified information, fueling their imaginations and sometimes literally driving them crazy, as happened with the talented physicist Paul Bennewitz, who came to 1990s to the belief that he was being watched at once by intelligence agencies and aliens. Paradoxically, the myth about the secrets of flying saucers hidden by the state was largely created by the state itself. Pilkington and director John Landberg (who was filming a film about ufologists at the same time as his friend was writing a book) managed to meet and even make friends with one of the main agents of this double game – a former employee of the US Air Force Special Investigation Department Richard Doty, a charming trickster, for decades, inventing various tales about contacts with aliens and spreading them among fiery ufologists.

The main question is: why does the state, in fact, need all this rigmarole, sometimes extremely expensive (USR, for example, built a whole base for storing non-existent flying saucers)? There are several answers to it. The simplest: a fair amount of UFOs observed by enthusiasts are real developments – the latest satellites, fighters, drones, and so on, and stories about aliens are needed to fill the fog on military secrets. The second, which does not deny the first, but complicates it: the UFO myth serves a variety of psychological and media manipulations, intimidation of enemies and raising the enthusiasm of the nation, as well as endless intrigues of different departments against each other. Ufologists, who are happy to spread the inventions of political technologists, become victims in this game. But there is a third side: many in government structures really believe in UFOs, and, even more surprisingly, the creators of fakes themselves often believe in them. They know that most of the information is a necessary lie, but somewhere there is probably a truth they do not know that this lie covers up.

Here is the most curious moment of Pilkington’s book: it turns out that the line between the manipulated and the manipulators, the intoxicated and the intoxicated in the world of ufology is extremely blurred. It is an amazing space inhabited by serious scientists, authors of tabloid novels, investigative journalists, brilliant inventors, esoteric mediums, psychologists, outright charlatans, real lunatics, cynical politicians, military and intelligence officers of all stripes. The paradox is that a person can combine several of these roles at once, constantly change the point on the map of the UFO world. And although the book does not offer a particularly deep analysis of what is happening in it, the very description of these trajectories can seriously captivate.

Mark Pilkington. Ufologists in civilian clothes. How intelligence agencies work with UFOs. M.: Individuum, 2023. Translation: Nikita Smirnov

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