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Fantastic Fest 2013: ‘Mirage Men’ a fascinating, if maddeningly vague, UFO documentary

Fantastic Fest 2013: ‘Mirage Men’ a fascinating, if maddeningly vague, UFO documentary

mirage_men_documentary

Mirage Men

Written by Mark Pilkington

Directed by John Lundberg, Roland Denning, and Kypros Kyprianou

UK, 2013

The vast, unknowable nature of the unidentified flying object is at the heart of the maddeningly, and deliberately, impenetrable new documentary Mirage Men, playing at this year’s Fantastic Fest. If the truth is, as was once promised, out there, it has yet to be found. Mirage Men argues, in what may not be the most terribly surprising twist depending on your level of cynicism, that the United States government has fed into UFO conspiracy theories to distract from high-level and classified projects from breaking in the news. And while the initial revelations are somewhat damning, after a point, the lack of hard answers serve to infuriate instead of elucidate.

At the heart of Mirage Men is an enigmatic ex-government employee named Richard Doty. He worked heavily with the late Paul Bennewitz, a World War II veteran who became convinced—in part thanks to Doty’s obfuscations—that extraterrestrials were real and were interacting on and with our planet. And other government officials may have been responsible for allowing the infamous Roswell incident to shape and define how a subset of Western society views the UFO phenomenon, as something kooky and almost laughable. But Doty and his matter-of-fact style of speech, just skewed enough that everything he says could be a lie or the truth, is what Mirage Men is all about. Just as Doty’s answers double back and elide honesty, so does the film. All of its participants are firmly convinced that what they know is the truth, that what they know is real. How real, though, can anyone’s perceptions about extraterrestrial life be if they’re based on a lie?

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Somewhere during this film’s 85-minute running time, though, it becomes a bit too much. Director John Lundberg (along with co-directors Roland Denning and Kypros Kyprianou) does a fine job of stitching together various talking-head interviews with journalists, historians, scientists, and true believers, and Mark Pilkington (the author who wrote a book tying into the film with the same name) offers as much insight as possible. The real issue is that, just as the waters were muddied for those believers by the government, this movie only confirms that whatever truth is burrowed at the bottom of this debate will never feel true to a good chunk of the obsessives. Each person being interviewed only seems to exist to rebuke what came before or what comes after. As deliberate as the tactic might be, it eventually makes Mirage Men so vague—even if that is all this movie can be—as to be a little exhausting.

That said, anyone who’s even remotely intrigued by the possibility of life outside of Earth (and even if you may not want to admit it, that should include everyone living on Earth), Mirage Men is not wholly unworthy of consideration. What this subject cries out for is what this movie’s participants bemoan the lack of: hard, unshakable facts. There is a desperate thirst for knowledge evidenced by many of the people in this film, but as one dogged journalist notes near the closing, to look for the truth in the government’s potential denial of UFOs is to be walking “on a quicksand floor.” If only Mirage Men hadn’t gotten quite so sucked under.

— Josh Spiegel

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