In
the 1980s, more and more people in the United States reported seeing
unexplained objects and lights in the sky. At the same time,
investigators who believed in UFOs revealed that they had discovered
top-secret government documents that stated that alien craft had
visited Earth. The documents had been hidden for 20 years and they
seemed to prove that there had been a giant cover-up. But, actually,
the reality was even stranger.
The
American Government might have been making it all up, that they had
created a fake conspiracy to deliberately mislead the population. The
lights that people imagined were UFOs may, in reality, have been new
high-technology weapons that the US Government was testing.
The
government had developed the weapons because they, in turn, imagined
that the Soviet Union was far stronger than it was and still wanted
to conquer the world. The government wanted to keep the weapons
secret, but they couldn’t always hide their appearance in the skies
so it is alleged that they chose a number of people to use to spread
the rumour that these were really alien visitations.
One
of those chosen was called Paul Bennewitz, who lived outside a giant
airbase in New Mexico and had noticed strange things going on.
Bennewitz and other common people chosen by the agency were, it is
alleged, given a series of forged documents. Many of them were
top-secret memos by the military describing sightings of unidentified
aerial vehicles. The documents spread like wildfire and they formed
the basis for the wave of belief in UFOs that would spread through
America in the 1990s.
It
also fuelled the wider, growing belief that governments lied to you,
that conspiracies were real.
What
the Reagan administration were doing, both with Colonel Gaddafi and
with the UFOs, was a blurring of fact and fiction, but it was part of
an even broader programme. The President’s advisers had given it a
name: they called it “perception management” and it became a
central part of the American Government during the 1980s.
The
aim was to tell dramatic stories that grabbed the public imagination.
Not just about the Middle East, but about Central America and the
Soviet Union. And it didn’t matter if the stories were true or not,
providing they distracted people and you, the politician, from having
to deal with the intractable complexities of the real world.
As
the investigative journalist, Robert Parry, says:
Reality
became less and less of an important factor in American politics. It
wasn’t what was real that was driving anything or the facts driving
anything. It was how you could turn those facts or twist those facts
or even make up the facts to make your opponent look bad. So,
perception management became a device and the facts could be twisted.
Anything could be anything. It becomes how can you manipulate the
American people. Reality becomes simply something to play with to
achieve that end. Reality is not important in this context. Reality
is simply something that you handle.
From
the documentary HyperNormalisation, by
Adam Curtis
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