This week, guardian.co.uk/film is being taken over by Jon Ronson, ahead of the release of The Men Who Stare at Goats, based on his book of the same name investigating the 'psychic super-spies' trained by the US army. Today, Ronson's friend Mark Pilkington rounds up his top five urban myths about the military, and suggests why they tend to stick

Last year, the astronaut Edgar Mitchell announced that aliens had repeatedly visited our planet. Mitchell hadn't seen them himself but had talked to people in the military who had. And he believed them. So, should we believe Edgar Mitchell?

His views are shared by millions of others, some of them well-placed in the world's political, military and intelligence elites. Trust plays a critical role in these hierarchical organisations, where you might one day rely on your colleagues to save your life. So, if someone tells you that there are aliens at Area 51, you are inclined to listen.

At the same time, imaginary weapons can be just as powerful as real ones. If a potential adversary claims to have its hands on advanced military toys, you can't afford to ignore them. At the very least you will expend considerable amounts of time and money finding out if the claims are true. You may also try to build one yourself. Meanwhile, the effect of these dream weapons on civilian and military morale can be devastating.

British radar pioneer Reginald "RV" Jones described the fear that a 1939 speech by Hitler induced in British intelligence circles. The Foreign Office translation had Hitler bragging about a "secret weapon against which no defence would avail". In a follow-up pronouncement, he frothed that it would deprive its victims of "sight and hearing".

The Secret Intelligence Service tasked Jones with finding out what this superweapon might be. Poring over their files he found one labelled "Death Ray", detailing funds given to a Dutch inventor. Like the perepetual motion machine, the death ray has been a dream of overzealous inventors throughout history and the SIS were naturally wary, remembering similar claims made by a British inventor, Harry Grindell Matthews, in the 1920s. The SIS were right to be cautious. With each visit the Dutch inventor had a new, more elaborate excuse for his device failing to be either super or lethal. Finally, at the outbreak of war, the Dutchman admitted that his invention wasn't working as intended. It did, however, make an excellent fruit preserver.

The truth about Hitler's speech ended up being rather prosaic. The German for weapon is waffe and once Jones had the speech retranslated it became clear that Hitler was referring to the Luftwaffe, his air force. And the mysterious power that would make its victims blind and deaf? Merely an awkward translation of what we would call "thunderstruck".

And what of Edgar's aliens? Don't dismiss them too swiftly. There are some powerful people who take psychic powers and extraterrestrial visitation extremely seriously. Whether or not these things are real – and the jury's still out (just about) – it's the duty of a nation's protectors to be prepared, just in case the improbable turns out to be possible after all.

The top five military myths

Ronald Reagan in 1984. Photograph: Wally McNamee/Corbis

1) Star wars

Back in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defence Initiative was hyped as the ultimate defensive weapon, a missile shield impervious to Russian ICBMs. Unfortunately it didn't work but, thanks to devious technological sleight-of-hand, the Pentagon made sure that SDI's trial by television was a spectacular success. An impoverished Soviet Union couldn't hope to keep up the pace of the arms race and its sense of defeat was a contributing factor in the end of the cold war.

A stroke patient using a robotic arm. Photograph: Christopher Thomond

2) Mind control

From the late 1940s, the CIA secretly attempted to control human minds using drugs and technology. They defended the practice by saying that the communists were also doing it. In fact Soviet "brainwashing" was a CIA propaganda creation, though the Russians no doubt started their own programme after learning what the Americans were doing. Other experiments used electronic implants, mostly inserted into animals: a donkey was steered up a hillside, a charging bull was stopped dead in its tracks. Today the same technology is used in humans, controlling Parkinson's tremors or allowing disabled people to operate computers and robotic arms.

Uri Geller in 2004. Photograph: David Furst/AFP/Getty Images

3) Remote viewing

The US army and CIA experimented with psychics from the mid 1970s to the mid 1990s. The psi-war began in the early 1970s as news of Soviet psychical research, combined with rumours of Uri Geller's abilities in Israel, reached America. The leaked Soviet research was possibly disinformation intended to waste US time and resources. However, some of the project's early psychics did appear to demonstrate feats of anomalous cognition, unless this was disinformation too. Over 20 years the programme's budget was approximately $20m, suggesting that it was considered a marginal operation at best.

A rain cloud in Florida in 2007. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

4) Weather warfare

On September 22 2005, Scott Stevens quit his job as a TV weatherman in Pocatello, Idaho to research weather warfare. Stevens was particularly concerned about Japanese gangsters armed with Soviet hurricane-forming technology. Others have had the same idea. An internal US air force paper from 1996, Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025, discussed the potential for weather modification, which some believe to be the purpose of the HAARP project in Alaska and Puerto Rico. But when it comes to cloud-seeding, the process of making rain by firing rockets into clouds, the Chinese are world leaders, where the practice has led to regional disputes over resources.

A Roswell fast-food store. Photograph: Jake Schoellkopf/AP

5) ET tech

"We have things flying in the Nevada desert that would make George Lucas drool," says an anonymous Lockheed engineer in the February 1988 issue of Gung Ho: the Magazine for the International Military Man. The article was among the first to suggest that alien spacecraft were flying at Area 51, the once super-secret Nevada airbase. Tales of the US air force back-engineering downed alien vehicles date back to 1950, but reached a fever pitch in the late 20th century, resulting in complaints from French military officials that ET tech gave America an unfair advantage in the arms race. Whether or not it's true, several million people, some of them quite powerful, believe it to be so; but perhaps our own technology is now so advanced as to be indistinguishable from the aliens'.

• Mark Pilkington's book Mirage Men: UFOs, Disinformation and the Making of a Modern Myth will be published by Constable Robinson in 2010.