We discuss a simple unitarization of Higgs inflation that is genuinely weakly
coupled up to Planckian energies. A large non-minimal coupling between the
Higgs and the Ricci curvature is induced dynamically at intermediate energies,
as a simple ratio of mass scales. Despite not being dominated by the Higgs
field, inflationary dynamics simulates the `Higgs inflation' one would get by
blind extrapolation of the low-energy effective Lagrangian, at least
qualitatively. Hence, Higgs inflation arises as an approximate `mirage' picture
of the true dynamics. We further speculate on the generality of this phenomenon
and show that, if Higgs-inflation arises as an effective description, the
details of the UV completion are necessary to extract robust quantitative
predictions.Comment: 21 pages, 2 figure