SCREEN MEMORIES

An Exploration of the Relationship BetweenScience Fiction Film and the UFO Mythology

By Mark Pilkington

Contents

1.0 Introduction.
2.1 UFOs
2.2 Science Fiction Films.
3.1 The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951).
3.2 Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).
3.3 The Abduction Syndrome (1966-).
4.0 Conclusions.
5.0 Bibliography.

"...few people have ever learned to look up."
Professor George Adamski
The Flying Saucers Have Landed

1. Introduction

Recently in Texas a drive-in cinema audience were distracted from the screen by a strange glowing object that passed overhead; the object apparently defied description,making it a UFO. The film was Independence Day. Many might say that such an occurrence was inevitable. It is late 1996 and we are currently undergoing a massive worldwide UFO flap, perhaps the biggest ever. UFOs and their occupants are being reported in America, Europe, Russia, Brazil, South Africa, New Zealand, Israel, Australia, Chile, in fact just about everywhere. Can it be mere coincidence that this fresh influx of mysterious flying craft should arrive just as the biggest alien invasion film of them all casts its mammoth shadow across the world? Is it simply the 20th Century Fox publicity machine going into overdrive or is there something else going on ? A Newsweek Poll taken before the release of the massively hyped film revealed that :

·  48% of Americans think UFOs are real.

·  29% think we have made contact with aliens.

·  48% think there is a government cover up of UFO knowledge.

Meanwhile the line between fantasy and reality was forcefully transgressed by the renaming of Nevada's Highway 375, which passes through the desert near the secret Air Force base known as "Area 51". The two lane road became "The Extraterrestrial Highway" in an event sponsored by 20th Century Fox to promote, once again, Independence Day. The film exploits much of the mythology surrounding Area 51, a base that allegedly contains recovered alien flying disks and even the aliens themselves, both dead and alive. Despite having been filmed and photographed, starred in an environmental lawsuit against the US government and featured in several films, TV programmes and advertisements, the US Government still denies that the base exists. The state of Nevada hoped the renaming of the road would bring tourism to a poor, barren area. Who knows what the US military thought. Something must have worked, however, as Independence Day looks set to become the biggest grosser in history and UFOs are being seen in the skies and on screens all over the planet called Earth.

It was a hundred years ago that America was first plagued by mystery flying objects; on 17 November 1896 an "electric arc lamp" was seen by hundreds of people as it passed over Sacramento, California. For the next few months lights were being reported all across America; there were searchlights, coloured lights, balls of light and light wheels, all attached to large, mysterious, dark objects that sound today like airships, though the first dirigible didn't fly until 1900 in Germany. Like today's "flying saucers", airships were a popular convention of fantastic literature, featured in the works of Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe1 amongst others, and were very soon to become a reality. Some of these reports have since been discovered to be hoaxes generated on quiet news days by bored telegraph operators, but they cannot all be dismissed so easily. Were they prototype airships, hallucinations or something more mysterious? It is hardlly surprising then that as the sun sets on the current millennium, UFOs should once again light up the twilight skies of Western culture.

A century has passed and the technology has advanced, but nobody is any nearer to knowing the truth about UFOs, whatever shape they take. A lot of people make a lot of money out of saying they have the answer, whilst many more just quietly believe as they absorb the next edition of Strange But True?, Sightings, Out of This World, Unsolved Mysteries or any of the other television programmes that regularly cover the topic from both sides of the Atlantic. There are so many systems of unshakeable and self-perpetuating belief surrounding the subject that a satisfactory resolution of the mystery will most likely be impossible to achieve. From the Spielbergian angels of light who watch over the planet and keep safe their chosen few, to the paranoid, Kafkaesque world of the abductionists and conspiracy theorists, the aliens are very real, and they are here, now.

For the vast majority, however, UFOs are best relegated to the worlds of science fiction, regularly seen on cinema and television screens by millions of people world wide. Independence Day has become something of a phenomenon in America, eclipsing Hollywood in much the same way as its gargantuan flying saucers do in the film. Its largely anonymous visitors conspicuously reverse the trend of two of the other biggest grossing films in cinema history, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. , both directed by Steven Spielberg and both featuring gentle, benign entities. A scene in Independence Day in which gleeful UFO watchers form a welcoming party for the aliens only to have the honour of being the first to get fried is a direct retort to Spielberg and alien lovers everywhere. Numerous television programmes have also fictionally dealt with the issue, from the Quatermass series in the `50's to today's hugely successful The X Files, which can, in part, be held responsible for the recent upsurge in UFO mania.

The question of non-human life beyond our planet has fascinated mankind for thousands of years, so it is no wonder that it should be such a popular theme for our visual fictions today. Many supposedly factual television programmes also deal with UFOs, their frequency largely determined by whether such things are currently in vogue. Over the last year or so it would seem that they most certainly are; the furore over the "Roswell autopsy" film (purporting to show real alien bodies from a 1947 UFO crash) spread to just about every newspaper and TV Station in the world; a November 1994 episode of Strange But True? dealing with Britain's most famous UFO incident2, attracted 12.5 million viewers in Britain, half of the total audience at 8.30pm; whilst a Network First UFO special, aired in January 1995 at 10.30pm, was seen by 6 million, a high figure for that time3. Another sure sign of UFOs' cultural significance is their use in advertising; in both the UK and the US they have helped to sell, amongst other things, fridges, cars, beer, soft drinks, banks and jeans. Spaceman, the song featured in a Levi's jeans commercial, was number one in the singles charts all over the world and featured a "Grey"4 alien face on the record cover. In fact UFO and alien themes have been used in popular music since the 1950's, famously by the Beatles in the `60's and David Bowie in the `70's; today they are most visible in the "rave" or "techno" cultures, used by bands like The Orb ("UFOrb") and Eat Static("Abduction", "Implant") and appearing on a seemingly endless stream of tee shirts, necklaces and other club paraphernalia.

What I intend to explore in this essay is the apparently symbiotic relationship between the representation of UFOs and aliens on screen in films and television, and the way they are perceived and described in reality5. That films can directly affect the way people think, particularly about things they do not understand, is beyond doubt; people today are still afraid to swim in the sea after seeing Jaws. I hope to show that the borrowing of themes and imagery is a two-way process; some times the fiction follows the perceived fact, and at others the reported fact is quite clearly rooted in fiction. A clear example of this, rare in its extremity, took place in England in the late 1980's. In the final episode of the Dynasty spin-off The Colbys, its main character, Fallon, was abducted by a UFO; she returned later in Dynasty and detailed what had happened to her. Soon afterwards a woman contacted BUFORA (British UFO Research Association) and related an abduction experience that was identical to the one on the programme; the date she gave for the incident was the night after the relevant episode had been shown6 and luckily the investigator recognised the connection. Though such literal transpositions of fiction onto apparent reality are uncommon, it is possible to trace many of the key elements of the UFO mythology, particularly those concerning abductions, back to images from science fiction film, television and artwork. The Dynasty case is interesting in that it shows the cyclical nature of this process; the programme's writers would most likely have been inspired by the success of two books dealing with abductions released in 1987, Intruders by Budd Hopkins, and Communion by Whitley Strieber. The woman who contacted BUFORA, whose story would echo those told in the books, was in fact describing a dream or fantasy inspired by a fiction, itself based on reported facts which may themselves be inspired by other fictions. Ultimately this is a classic "chicken and egg" scenario; it will be impossible to prove which came first; ardent believers can always argue that those who created the fictions in the first place were just unconsciously recalling their own real UFO experiences. However, I think it would be over simplifying the issue to assume that the whole UFO mythology has grown out of science fiction. Currently in our culture the concept of abduction by aliens is the prevalent paradigm, but perhaps in the past these people would have reported encountering faeries, gods or demons.7 In our secular, technology orientated world, the imagery and ideas of visual science fiction have replaced those of the ancient pantheons. UFOs are a living mythology for our times; by studying their role in the most dominant forms of popular culture, film and television, we can, perhaps, gain some insight into how such a mythology forms, grows and takes hold of the Western mind.

2. UFOs

It is symptomatic of our post-modern age that if you talk about UFOs most people will immediately visualise flying saucers from another planet. UFO stands for Unidentified Flying Object, so technically anything is a UFO until it is identified and becomes an IFO (Identified Flying Object). The term was coined in 1952 by Edward J. Ruppelt, chief of the US Airforce's Project Bluebook, set up to investigate UFO phenomena in 1952. Since June 1947 these objects had just been known as "flying saucers" after civilian pilot Kenneth Arnold saw nine craft, brightly glowing blue-white, flying over the Cascade Mountains of Washington state. He calculated their speed at an amazing 1700 mph and described their motion as "...erratic, like a saucer if you skip it across water"8; it was a reporter for the United Press, Bill Bequette, who turned this statement into "flying saucers", and the story was soon on front pages all across America. By August 19, 1947, a Gallup poll revealed that nine out of ten Americans had heard about flying saucers, more than knew of the Marshall Plan for Europe. That the objects Arnold described weren't round at all (fig.3) didn't seem to matter; within days new reports were coming in from all across the nation, describing flying "saucers", "discs", and "hubcaps", climaxing on July 4 when 88 reports were made involving 400 people in 24 states9. A second crucial moment in UFO history came just a few days later, on July 8, as the headline of the Roswell New Mexico Daily Record, authorised by the air base commander, announced: "RAAF Captures Flying Saucer in Roswell Region. No Details of Flying Disks are Revealed." The story was picked up world-wide, even the London Times ran a feature, but the next day the airforce revealed that the wreckage was that of a weather balloon and the story was closed. The case was forgotten for thirty years until Jesse Marcel, the intelligence officer who first analysed the wreckage, spoke out to say that it was, in his opinion, extra terrestrial, and that a massive cover up had taken place and the Roswell incident is now viewed by many as the Holy Grail of the UFO world, the key to it all. But until the early 1980's, rumours of crashed discs remained on the fringes of ufology10.

At this point began what Ruppelt calls "The Era of Confusion"11. Were these mystery objects some new military craft undergoing flight tests, perhaps the Navy's "Flying Flapjack" (fig.4) which bore more than a passing resemblance to the objects described by Arnold12? When the military denied this, it was time to look elsewhere, the Russians being the prime suspects, but it was soon realised that the reported flight speeds and manoeuvres were far beyond any earthbound capabilities. A secret "Estimate of the Situation" was prepared by airforce investigators for the Pentagon, its conclusion, that the UFOs had to be of extraterrestrial origin, was deemed outrageous and the report was disowned by Pentagon officials.

The Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (ETH), was first presented to the American public in a 1949 True magazine article by former US Marine Corps Major Donald Keyhoe, entitled, "The Flying Saucers are Real"13. In the first paragraph Keyhoe concluded that the flying saucers were from another planet that was observing us because of fears over our development of nuclear weaponry. The military, by refusing to answer Keyhoe's questions, were assumed to be orchestrating a huge cover up. True had a reputation for being reliable and factual, and the story "hit the reading public like an 8 inch howitzer"14, being considered at the time "one of the most widely read and discussed magazine articles in history."15 So now, in less than two years, the two fundamental pillars of the popular UFO mythology were in place: that they were of extra terrestrial origin, and that the government and military were covering up what they knew. There was certainly some truth to this last element. The 1953 CIA Robertson Panel concluded that UFOs were only a threat in the amount of public hysteria they generated; the Air Force's role now was to convince the public that UFOs were nonsense, and to ignore those who said otherwise; as a result Project Blue Book effectively became a public relations exercise in dismissing the evidence for UFOs.