I’d like to acknowledge the concept of “psyop realism” developed separately by artists Jak Ritger and Brandon Bandy and journalist Günseli Yalcinkaya. Echoing Mark Fisher’s term “capitalist realism,” “psyop realism” describes the aesthetic experience of inhabiting a post-irony online landscape that Ritger characterizes as “a lack of meaning or possible revolutionary action during climate collapse and the condition of growing up in the most heavily policed and advert-saturated online experience yet,” at a time of “intense suspicion and conspiracism, where the term ‘false flag’ is used widely.” See Jak Ritger, “Because Physical Wounds Heal,” Punctr.Art, February 7, 2024 →; Günseli Yalcinkaya, “We’re Entering an Age of ‘Psyop Realism,’ But What Does That Mean?,” Dazed, January 26, 2023 →; and Brandon Bandy, “Psyop Realism,” exhibition, Phyllis Gill Gallery, University of California Riverside, November 14–17, 2022 →.
I want to thank Stewart Copeland, director of the ARTs lab at the University of New Mexico, Jessica Metz, Daniel Neves, and the Department of Art at UNM for making this project possible.
I’m deeply indebted to Mark Pilkington both personally and professionally for his guidance and inspiration. His book Mirage Men is the definitive account of the use of UFOs by military and intelligence agencies to conduct psychological operations. See Mark Pilkington, Mirage Men: An Adventure into Paranoia, Espionage, Psychological Warfare, and UFOs (Orion Books, 2010).
The Bennewitz story is most comprehensively documented in Greg Bishop, Project Beta: The Story of the First US Space Contact (Paraview Press, 2005).
Army Field Manual, FM 3-13.4, “Army Support to Military Deception,” Department of the Army, February 2019; also Army Field Manual FM 90-2, “Battlefield Deception,” Department of the Army, October 3, 1988.