In 2004 remarks appearing in the New York Times, an unnamed Bush White House aide now believed to have been Karl Rove laid out the future for journo Ron Suskind. “The aide,” Suskind wrote, “said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality … That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.

“’And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again,’” Suskind’s source continued, “’creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’”



Immediately, the thing took off. There was no discernable sound or exhaust. It was just gone in a flash beyond the horizon” — Dean Morgan, on his 1950 photo/CREDIT: old-ufo-photos.latest-ufo-sightings.net “I shoved my camera up to my face, caught the object in the viewer, and snapped the shutter.Immediately, the thing took off. There was no discernable sound or exhaust. It was just gone in a flash beyond the horizon” — Dean Morgan, on his 1950 photo/CREDIT: old-ufo-photos.latest-ufo-sightings.net

Advanced studies on the soggy mess of reality dribbled onto the Net again last week with the latest release of Edward Snowden’s purloined National Security Agency documents. This one was a doozy, a clinical paranoid’s blackest dreams come true, a 50-page power-point British intelligence slide presentation, sans narration, called “The Art of Deception: Training for a New Generation of Online Covert Operations.” Its provenance meanders through a forest of acronyms, with GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) at the trunk, branching into JTRIG (Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group) and budding at HSOC (Human Science Operation Cell). A sophisticated and elaborate how-to for manipulating individual and group psychology, “The Art of Deception” provides a GCHQ/JTRIG/HSOC template for stirring chaos without firing a shot. But the targets are hardly confined to hostile governments.

As Glenn Greenwald, who broke the story on Feb. 24, writes, “The broader point is that … these surveillance agencies have vested themselves with the power to deliberately ruin people’s reputations and disrupt their online political activity even though they’ve been charged with no crimes, and even though their actions have no conceivable connection to terrorism or even national security threats.” He continues: “These GCHQ documents are the first to prove that a major western government is using some of the most controversial techniques to disseminate deception online and harm the reputations of targets. Under the tactics they use, the state is deliberately spreading lies on the internet about whichever individuals it targets, including the use of what GCHQ itself calls ‘false flag operations’ and emails to people’s families and friends.”

Of particular interest to De Void, of course, are three UFO photos sliding in from left field under the “Influence and Information Operations” section. There are no accompanying remarks, but their sequencing has an inferential logic. The first photo was taken in 1950 by an Illinois resident named Dean Morgan. Morgan waited nine years (fear of ridicule) to get this “classic” disc shot published, and his account resides in the archives of the old Flying Saucer magazine. These were the days before CGI, obviously, and so far as De Void can tell, the image has never been subjected to independent analysis. By default, that makes Morgan’s photo a true unknown.

Pix on the second and third slides don’t look nearly as good as Morgan’s. Number two offers video stills from 2005. The object looks like a balloon cluster, and its videographer, Arturo Robles Gil, has weathered accusations of hoax-mongering. Number three is a 2011 photo from Cornwall that, upon close inspection, resembles the blurred flight of a seagull going right to left. But perhaps the most significant is a fourth slide, which concludes the sequence. It doesn’t show a UFO at all. Instead, the montage features a wagon wheel, a hubcap, a Nikon camera and a smartphone in camera mode. Looks like somebody be fixin’ to mess with somebody else’s head.

In his flawed but immensely readable 2010 book Mirage Men, British writer Mark Pilkington details how the USAF Office of Special Operations has planted bogus UFO stories as part of ongoing psyops to discredit perceived enemies. The gold standard, apparently, is the true strange case of the late physicist Paul Bennewitz, who ultimately checked into a mental institution as a result of OSI-manufactured delusions. Consequently, Pilkington has bought into the idea that the UFOs phenomenon can be written off as strategic covert disinformation. And naturally, “The Art of Deception” doesn’t escape his notice.

“While we don’t want to fall into the trap of confirmation bias that they refer to in slide 11,” Pilkington writes of one of “Deception’s” myriad flow charts, “it is tempting to read the images as demonstrating that GCHQ consider the UFO subject, its attendant beliefs, and the vocal community surrounding it, to be a useful field of operations for their activities. The slides of UFOs and classic flying saucers might illustrate the ways that people have a tendency to see what they want to see, or want to believe in, and the ways in which their perceptions can be managed with just a few contextual nudges.”

Could be. But why, then, does GCHQ bother to showcase a hubcap and a wagon wheel and cameras, the ostensible recipe for a flying saucer hoax — following an introductory photo of what appears to be a true unknown? Check out slide 17 in the “The Art of Deception.” In that one, GCHQ promotes the concept of “dissimulation” by hiding “the real” via “masking, repackaging, dazzling, mimicking, and decoying.” The new reality: “Simulation” states GCHQ, by showing “the false.” Abracadabra.

GCHQ signals its intentions “to build Cyber Magicians,” and clearly its cadres are equipped with formidable skills. But ultimately, history’s actors are just that — actors. Whether their descendents will regard them as patriots or clowns will depend on the magnitude of the reality they managed to obfuscate for so long.