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Ufology is a faith that includes many beliefs, from the oddly popular one about Nazi aliens who live under the ground to David Icke's contention that the Duke of Edinburgh is in fact a shape-changing, blood-sucking alien lizard.
But here's the core of the faith - that some UFO sightings and encounters are real, the U.S. government knows all about these extraterrestrial visitations, and they've mounted a huge conspiracy to keep the aliens secret and us in the dark.
This book threatens to demolish that faith. Because here Mark Pilkington sets out to prove that the U.S. government really has been conducting a top-secret UFO conspiracy - only one designed not to hide UFOs but publicise them, fuelling and even creating the major UFO myths. Flying saucers, alien abductions, crash-landed spacecraft, secret underground bases in New Mexico - they were all created by the U.S. government.
As Mark Pilkington immediately acknowledges, that might sound only marginally less ridiculous and emptily melodramatic than claiming that the Royal Family are actually alien reptiles. But he begins to build a pretty convincing case that U.S. agencies really have been conducting just such a long-running disinformation campaign to promote UFOs. And it does make sense.
UFOs make the perfect cover story to hide experimental aircraft from prying Russian eyes as well as those of their own citizens. Ufologists are a particular pest to U.S. Air Force security, for ever trying to root around their secret projects and hack into their systems - they need to be led up various extraterrestrial garden paths and far away from finding out about actual highly-classified experiments in weaponry or aircraft.
Pilkington's theory would certainly explain why so many of the key UFO sightings and events happen near U.S. Air Force bases - such as Roswell, home of the famous 'incident' when an alien craft was supposed to have crash-landed, with a couple of aliens aboard.
And why so many extraterrestrial spaceships seem to behave like the pilotless drones and stealth aircraft developed by the U.S. Air Force. And why flying saucers should first turn up at the start of the Cold War, just when the U.S. Air Force was beginning to experiment with exotic new types of flight.
According to Pilkington, the campaign to promote the idea of UFOs was masterminded in the Fifties by the head of the CIA, Allen Welsh Dulles. More recently, many of the leaked fake documents and bogus stories seem to have come from the U.S. Air Force's Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI).
One victim of fake UFO documents evidently supplied by the American government was Timothy Good, whose international bestseller about supposed contact with aliens, Above Top Secret, included completely bogus papers planted in the American National Archives.
Another is George Adamski, an early fan of flying saucers whose bestselling books in the Fifties described his meetings with a chap called Orthon from Venus and his own trips in flying saucers.
I came across one of Adamski's mad books in my local public library when I was a boy, and I remember being disturbed and perplexed - this was a book, a proper printed book, so all this stuff about going to Venus and meeting Venusians ... it had to be real, didn't it? Now, it seems Adamski was an innocent, eager dupe and that Orthon and the spaceships weren't figments of his silly or venal imagination but real people and vehicles supplied by the CIA.
Fake spaceships, fake aliens, fake documents and even a fake underground alien base - it might all seem unduly elaborate and indeed expensive.
But the Americans certainly had the money for it, budgeting billions of dollars for the CIA's black arts.
The Pentagon already had a good bash at that themselves, sponsoring a recruitment film of the Seventies, which claimed that UFOs were real and which included footage of a flying saucer landing at a U.S. Air Force base and a couple of aliens disembarking.
And that, you might think, is the Pentagon bang to rights. But at this point in the book, things begin to get even more complicated.
An AFOSI agent takes Pilkington aside and confides the real 'truth' - yes, there is a huge government conspiracy to produce a smokescreen of nonsense about UFOS, of course; however, it's designed to hide not supersonic test-flights but ... real UFOs.
Because, you see, by offering up a series of scary stories about UFO invasions and alien abductions, this will gradually desensitise the public to the eventual truth that the U.S. government really has been in contact with aliens.
Argh! Clearly, obviously, surely, this is more hokum, an attempt to exploit Pilkington with a slightly refined version of the same old stories - but he has previous as a Ufology believer and he can't quite shake off the thrill of thinking that maybe, just maybe, an alien spaceship did crash-land at Roswell. That's typical of a book that isn't quite the rigorous hard-hitting investigation it could and should have been. Pilkington just about manages to hold on to his scepticism but ends with a spiel about nobody knowing for sure what the truth can be and Ufology being a murky, grey area.
No, no, no. There's nothing grey about it. Either we have been visited by aliens and the American government is covering this up or we haven't and it isn't.
Either that debris at Roswell was part of a crashed flying saucer or it came from a test-flight that went wrong or a knackered high-altitude weather balloon. Either the Duke of Edinburgh is a blood-sucking alien reptile seeded from a distant star system or he is a human from Greece. So. What do you reckon? Great credit to Pilkington, though, for revealing who Orthon really was/ those aliens really are. (Daily Mail, 7.27.2010, Harry Ritchie) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-1298026/ARE-UFOs-JUST-A-CIA-CON-TRICK--MIRAGE-MEN-BY-MARK-PILKINGTON.html