



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.







