UFO Mystic has a review of Mirage Men: A Journey in Disinformation, Paranoia and UFOs posted today. I have the book as well but haven’t read it yet. The review opens with this question:

Is it possible that instead of perpetrating a UFO cover-up the US intelligence agencies have really been promoting ideas like alien abductions, UFO crashes and recoveries, and secret bases all along?

My answer: yes — and even “most definitely.” I came to that position in 1997 after listening to the 1997 Air Force press conference on CNN at the 50th anniversary of the Roswell incident. That was the press conference where Colonel Haines said that part of the Air Force’s third explanation (their second “final report”) for Roswell was that the Roswell witnesses who had been interviewed since the 1970s, when the event picked up steam in the press and publishing, “underwent time compression.” In case you’re wondering what the colonel meant (as was the reporter to whom the comment was directed, in response to a chronological error about how test dummies explained the bodies at Roswell in the colonel’s explanation), the colonel stated (I thought seriously) that all the witnesses thought they were remembering an incident in 1947, when what they were really recalling was an incident in the early 1950s. Folks, Air Force colonels are not that dumb. It seemed to me that the Air Force wanted to perpetuate the idea of an alien cover-up with a statement this incoherent. I still believe that is the case. No doubt Pilkington’s book will provide much data and food for thought in that direction.