Somewhere in the Skies - Robbie Graham: Silver Screen Saucers

Episode Date: November 12, 2017

On episode 31 of SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES, Ryan speaks with Robbie Graham, author of Silver Screen Saucers: Sorting Fact From Fantasy in Hollywood's UFO Movies.  More so than any other medium, cinema has shaped our expectations of potential alien life and visitation. But what messages does Hollywood project to us about our possible otherworldly neighbors? From where do UFO movies draw their inspiration, and what other factors—cultural and conspiratorial—might influence their production and content?  Robbie brings us through his examination of the DNA that builds our perceptions of the UFO mystery. One strand of this DNA weaves real events, stories, and people from the historical record of UFOlogy, while the other spins and twists with the film and TV products they have inspired. It is a marriage of reality and mythology that perpetuates and manipulates everything we know, or at least think we know about UFOs. Guest Bio: Robbie Graham has lectured around the world on the UFO subject and has been interviewed for the BBC, Coast to Coast AM, Canal+ TV, Channel 4, and Vanity Fair, among many others. His articles have appeared in numerous publications, including The Guardian, New Statesman, Filmfax, and Fortean Times. He holds first class degrees in Film, Television and Radio Studies and Cinema Studies from Staffordshire University and the University of Bristol respectively. He is the author of Silver Screen Saucers: Sorting Fact from Fantasy in Hollywood’s UFO Movies (White Crow Books, 2015) and the editor of UFOs: Reframing the Debate(White Crow Books, 2017). His work can all be found at: www.robbiegraham.uk Patreon Campaign: www.patreon.com/somewhereskies Website: www.somewhereintheskies.com Order Ryan's Book by CLICKING HERE Twitter: @SomewhereSkies Instagram: @SomewhereSkiesPod Opening Theme Song, "Ephemeral Reign" by Per Kiilstofte SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES is produced by Third Kind Productions, in association with Antica Productions Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/somewhere-in-the-skies. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Warning, if you like your UFO literature to confirm what you already know, this is not the book for you. From White Crow Books comes a brand new collection of essays. 14 authors. One goal. To shatter the UFO topic and pick up the pieces in a whole new light. Compiled and edited by Robbie Graham with a foreword by Professor Diana Walsh Pasilka. UFOs reframing the debate is a cold, hard slap in the face for uphology, delivered with love.

UFOs reframing the debate. Available now in paperback and e-book on Amazon and at Barnes & Noble, the book depository, and the iBookstore. For a complete list of contributors and to learn more, visit robbie graham.uk. This is Somewhere in the Skies with Ryan Sprigg. Welcome to Somewhere in the Skies. I'm your host, Ryan Sprigg. On the premiere episode of Somewhere in the Skies, I sat down to speak to UFO researcher and historian, Richard Dolan. We talked all about media bias when covering the UFO topic. It was a fascinating journey through the way news media has shaped and manipulated our perception of a mystery that has plagued us for almost a century.

If you haven't heard that interview, I highly suggest going back and giving it a listen. It was a hell of a way to kick off the podcast, trust me. And you'll also get to see the primitive nature of my first attempts of audio editing. It was not pretty. Anyways, the idea that media can play such a large role in our perception of UFOs, isn't a new one, but it's certainly a part of the entire UFO question we must always be aware of. And today, we're going to tackle the way Hollywood has shaped the narrative of UFOs, aliens, and how we deal with the more fantastical angles versus the hard-lined reality and truth behind these topics.

How deep does the connection between the U.S. intelligence agencies truly go when UFO and alien-themed media is created? Where does the truth end and the lies, masked in fictional storytelling, truly begin? This is a fascinating journey through these very questions, and a guest you won't soon forget. But first, I'm always curious what UFO or alien-themed movies really left an impression on people. So, I took a little listener poll, and these were some of the results. Chris says the movie Hanger 18. It's the closest to the truth in terms of the government's involvement.

with this phenomenon. Plus, it was filmed in Big Springs, Texas, the site of many UFO rumors and secret underground bases. Wayne and Matthew both said they enjoyed the found footage film Area 51. I've yet to see this one myself, guys, but I really wanted to see how they handle the lore of this iconic secret base, so I'll definitely be checking that one out. Now, Sammy, Vance, Stephen, and Chris went with fire in the sky,

the terrifying recounting of Travis Walton. alien abduction experience. Staying on the topic of abductions, the fourth kind and dark skies both racked up a ton of votes for their faithfulness to the high strangeness that often accompanies an abduction experience. John really enjoyed 1992's docudrama, Good Brothers, saying that he was so glad someone took the time to talk to and film the remaining contactees before they passed on. The movie is weird, sweet, and there's some amazing video.

footage from Giant Rock and its attendees. A ton of female listeners all agreed on a Carl Sagan classic. Becky, Lynn, Cheryl, and Laura went with contact. Becky adds that the Faith versus Science theme shows that anything is possible. It fills her with wonder and hope for future generations. I would have to agree on that, guys. Michael enjoyed the film Under the Skin. He had this to say.

To my knowledge, it was the only alien. movie ever made that truly felt alien, had incomprehensible alien imagery and logic, and fully situated itself in the alien point of view. It felt like a documentary film made by an alien. That is a perfect way to describe the tone of this one, Michael. Another listener by the name of Michael went with the UFO incident. He says, it is the most accurate of all the UFO cases made into a movie. The Betty and Barney Hill abduction case is my favorite because it has evidence of origin for one of the alien races who visit our planet.

I thought James Earl Jones' acting was right on the mark when it came to portraying Barney Hill's fear and anxiety. John and Marlina went with invasion of the body snatchers, both agreeing that the form of invasion in this movie was very unique and quite plausible. A little scary if you ask me. The big winners with the most votes were close encounters of the third kind, the day the earth stood still, and E.T. There were way too many names here, so it's clear that these three films had a huge impact on people. And we'll tackle even more films with this week's guest. Robbie Graham has been interviewed about UFOs and the Politics of Hollywood for BBC Radio, Coast to Coast A.M. and Vanity Fair. His articles have appeared in a variety of publications, including The Guardian, New Statesman, Film Facts, 14 times, and the peer-reviewed journal of North American Studies.

He holds an MA with distinction in cinema studies from the University of Bristol. As a professional educator, Robbie has designed and delivered film and media courses at multiple learning levels at Stafford College and the University of Bristol. He is the editor of Silverscreen Saucers.com. and the recently released anthology, UFOs, reframing the debate. Today, we talk all about his book, Silver Screen Saucers, separating fact from fantasy in Hollywood's UFO movies. So grab your popcorn, sit back, relax, and enjoy this week's interview with Robbie Graham. I think, I don't know if you've experienced it,

but certainly being interested in UFOs as a teenager has its challenge. It does. It wasn't exactly the best icebreaker for sure. So you have to keep it secret really until you're like 25 and you don't know any of the people you used to know. It's the coming out of the closet for us, as it were. Anyway, I won't take any more of your interview time, right? Not at all, man. I love talking about this stuff. But yeah, let's just dive into it, if you don't mind. I've been following your work for a while now across the internet highways, as it were. I'd seen essays you'd written.

I'd seen websites you'd contributed to. And I was just, I was excited and happy to finally see someone looking at this angle that you took with the UFO. Not so much phenomenon, but UFOs in general. And that was connecting them to film, to TV, to Hollywood in general. This is something I am very passionate about. I'm first and foremost, a playwright and screenwriter, a film buff. And to find a mixture between UFOs and that is a dream come true for me. And that's where I came across your work.

And that sort of culminated into a book you have out called Silver Screen Saucers, sorting fact from fantasy and Hollywood's UFO movies. So I kind of wanted to talk to you today about that. So I have with me today, guys, Robbie Graham, the author of said book. How you doing, Robbie? I'm good, thanks, Ryan. It's a pleasure to be speaking with you. Fantastic.

So I guess we can sort of start with your origin story, as it were. I always love taking the comic book angle. When did your interest in, let's say, flying saucers, when did it actually begin? I started to be interested in flying saucers, UFOs, aliens, goblins, you know, like monsters, Bigfoot, Locknest Monster, anything that was remotely weird or otherworldly took my interest. And I started to read books on this kind of stuff

probably around the age of eight or nine. And I was just naturally drawn to it, not from personal experience, but it was just something that was kind of innately interesting to me. There was a childhood friend of mine who had a UFO close encounter when I was seven years old. And his reporting of that encounter in the playground at school really stuck in my memory.

And it's, you know, it's with me to this day. And I suppose that really did have a psychic impact on me. And I could never really let go of the subject. And then my interest in UFOs intensified into my teenage years. And then by that point, I'd started to buy and read most of the major literature on the subject. And it really had become an obsession for me. I'm an obsessional personality. And then in my 20s, I started to really focus on film,

film studies and media at an academic level, and that became my passion. But the interest in UFOs never went away. And then in my mid-20s, I finally decided to combine the two interests and start writing about UFO movies and UFO-themed entertainment from a cultural and political perspective. And that's eventually led to the publication of my book.

Do you remember the first film you ever saw that included UFOs or aliens? I know this is probably drawing back a long time, but... That's a good question. Well, E.T. The extraterrestrial, was 1980. I was born in 1981 and E.T. was released in 1982, but I'm pretty sure that E.T. was not the first alien film I saw. In fact, I wasn't even a fan of E.T. as a kid. I don't think it's really a children's film. It's a strange thing to say, but it's a film about children. and I would say four adults or four families.

It's not kind of like a Goonies film that really appeals to. There's not much happens in E.T. There's not a lot of adventure. It's a very quiet film. It's a very intimate film. It's a very grown-up film in many ways, dealing with adult themes. That wasn't the first alien film I saw. One of the earliest I can remember seeing,

and certainly one of my favorite as a child, was Joe Dante's 1985 sci-fi adventure called Explorers, starring River Phoenix and Ethan Hawke as young boys, and they basically get an alien telepathic message, and they build a alien space. They build a spaceship out of junkyard material based on an alien schematic, and then they go out into space and visit their alien friends.

That was incredible. Next time, next time we'll bring more air. Next time? We'll acquire, and we'll explore. Listen, Ben, I'm not going to get in that thing again until we find out exactly where this programs are coming from. And we need to run tests. Yes, we have to run hundreds upon hundreds of serious tests.

You know, it could take years. What are we talking about? That was the most important thing that ever happened. I couldn't you feel it? That feeling way inside? We were flying. Come on, it'd make some sense. We almost didn't come back.

But we did come back. And it was just the ultimate alien fantasy for me, and it inspired me to try and build my own, my own spaceship, which actually was kind of like a time machine. Oh, wow. You don't want to know this stuff. The time machine in a junkyard and stuff. And that was really, you know, I was really fascinated about that stuff. But at that age, I never really thought of myself as being an alien kind of nut. The alien nut phase started later.

But I also remember, you know, things like a cocoon, which, again, is kind of a grown-up, kind of boring film as a kid. I think you appreciate that a little bit more as you get older, but it's still kind of. of boring. Batteries Not Included. I was a fan of Stephen Spielberg's production of Batteries Not Included from 1987. There were a lot of these friendly alien films throughout the 1980s, and that was the fad in Hollywood at the time.

And those are the films I grew up on. One of the really powerful alien films I saw at a reasonably young age, I was far too young, really, was James Cameron's aliens. And it terrified me. And it's, you know, but I watched it. every single time it was on TV. And it's just, just fantastic.

But yeah, so it wasn't until, as I say, it wasn't until my mid-20s, that I really started to think, right, I'm going to look into this exhaustively, and I'm going to build a catalogue of alien films of UFO movies specifically. And I would define what I

refer to as a UFO movie as any film that taps directly into any aspect of UFO mythology and incorporates elements of UFO literature. UFO discourse, things that are based on factual events or real world occurrences relating to UFOs. And, you know, there are, there's a huge catalogue of films out there that tap into this existing subculture of UFOs and exploit the mythology, exploit the cases even. A lot of these films draw from real life cases and then they kind of fictionalize them and present

them as sci-fi narratives and then it kind of confuses people. but that that was that was very very interesting and I kind of thought well UFO movies although they're very entertaining and Hollywood is that is you know Hollywood is in many ways kind of cultural fluff at the same time is it seemed to me that the Hollywood movies were acting as our main frame of reference for alien contact for ideas surrounding alien contact alien visitation and UFOs because we don't really get answers from authorities on these issues. We get silence or we get disinformation. We don't get information from mainstream news media. We get sensationalized information from mainstream news media.

And so what you have is grassroots reports filtering through at a folk level and forming a subculture. And then entertainment media taps into this, exploits it and popularizes it. And that process really fascinated me, and I wanted to deconstruct it. Yeah, I mean, I know you mentioned a rather famous quote about, you know, Hollywood or movies fill the gaps in between, you know, our knowledge. Something of that sort. I know I'm bastardizing it. Ken Russell, the British filmmaker, he once said that Hollywood fills the gaps in our knowledge of the world. And that was a, I tell you, I read that quote. in an article that he wrote for the Guardian newspaper in 2008.

And I was 27 at the time. And that was when I was starting to form the idea of my book. I'd already started to write about UFOs in Hollywood by that point, but I hadn't seriously considered writing a book. And then I read this article, and I thought, you know, I really need to get all this down on paper. And that quote just really, it's never left me. And I cut the quote out of the newspaper and kept it.

in a file and I've still got it. And Hollywood fills the gaps in our knowledge of the world. And I thought, wow, that is especially true when it comes to UFOs. It's true of everything, but it's especially true of UFOs. So, you know, the example I use is that, you know, I challenge people to think of the sinking of the Titanic without thinking almost immediately of James Cameron's 1997 movie. You can't separate that movie from the real world event because that movie is pretty

much all we know the real world event, unless you've gone to historical archer archives, you know, and I've done some serious historical research, that movie replaces the event itself in our popular consciousness. That's the power of cinema. And I thought, wow. And so if it can do that for a real historical event that everyone accepts as being truthful and factual anyway, as part of our recent historical memory, what can this cinematic process do for a subject which is sidelined, ignored, and rejected by consent?

sense it's reality and by official culture, what has been the role that this medium has played in our understanding or our misunderstanding of UFOs? And so in that sense, I thought, wow, cinema is not peripheral to the UFO phenomenon. It's actually central to our understanding of it. Despite the sort of parasitic nature of Hollywood in terms of this topic, you also mention entertainment being used as stratagem. I mean, this could be a book in itself, really, just relating into UFOs, but I kind of hone it down into quite a lengthy chapter in the book where I look at the idea of this Hollywood UFO conspiracy. A lot of people in the UFO field have been very interested for a long time in Hollywood's relationship with three-letter agencies, but very few people

have actually looked into this very seriously and tried to come to solid conclusions. I did some research a few years ago, which lasted a few years, with my friend and colleague, Matthew Alford, who's one of the world's leading experts on Hollywood propaganda, and he wrote a book called Real Power, R-E-E-L-Power, in 2010, which was looking at Hollywood's role as a propaganda machine, essentially, in the modern era. And Matthew and I spent quite a long time looking into, well, you know, the history of Hollywood propaganda, the nature of the relationship past and present between various agencies and the entertainment industry. And then we also took some time to look at, how this relationship has impacted UFO-themed entertainment products from the 1950s through to present day. And we wrote a piece on that for a university journal. And that piece was eventually extended by myself and adapted for my book. And so I built on that and tried to bring it as further up to date as possible. There's a wealth of material to discuss. Basically, the Department of Defense, the Pentagon in America, has had a working relationship.

with Hollywood for many decades, but the relationship was formalized, really, in the mid-1980s, following the release of Top Gun, which served as a recruitment campaign for the US Navy and boosted recruitment 500%. To reach for something bigger. To master a more challenging world. To feel the confidence and pride of knowing who you are, what you can do. Show the world your US Navy. Live the adventure.

Call 1-800-3-27. Maybe. Basically, I mean, it can work both ways. Sometimes the military will approach filmmakers, but usually it's the other way around. A filmmaker will approach the military seeking their cooperation on a production in order to cut costs on that production. So if you're making a war movie, an action movie that requires tanks, guns, jets, troops, then especially before the age of CGI, the only way to create that really is through expensive props or to actually get the real stuff on screen, with the help of the military. And the military is only too willing to lend its toys to Hollywood,

but it has to be mutually beneficial. So the military will say, look, we'll give you our stuff. If you sign a contract with us, which enables us to oversee your production, and we can alter as we see fit anything in your script that we deem to be objectionable, anything that paints the military in a negative light, or anything that we don't agree with in terms of depictions of, you know, national security policy, et cetera, et cetera.

They can change this and do in Hollywood scripts. And so what you have is a sort of a legal, open form of propaganda. And it's all A.O.K. and above board. But it's not really publicized too much, you know. And that relationship has been very healthy and ongoing for a long time. in recent years what you've had is filmmakers becoming increasingly willing excuse me the Department of Defense

becoming increasingly willing to work with UFO themed productions until the late 1990s that was not the case there had been a policy dating back to the 1950s where the US government and military were very reluctant to cooperate on any UFO theme productions in Hollywood and that was

as a result of recommendations made by the Robertson panel in 1953, who suggested that UFOs be debunked and demystified through media channels. And that did have an effect. So generally, right through to the late 1990s, whenever a filmmaker approached a branch of the government or military for cooperation on a UFO theme production, the response was, no, we will not help you because UFOs don't exist and it contravenes our policy. So that was the policy. But then in the mid-1990s, on the first independence day, when the filmmakers, Roland Emmerich and

Dean Devlin approached the Department of Defense for their cooperation for obvious reasons. The Department of Defense said, look, we have all sorts of problems with your script. But the sticking points for us are that you include Erie 51 as being central to the plot, and you also make reference to the Roswell incident. And you suggest that the president has been kept in the dark. Why the hell wasn't I told about this place? Two words, Mr. President. Plausible deniability.

I don't understand. Where does all this come from? How do you get funding for something like this? You don't actually think they spend $20,000 on a hammer, $30,000 on a toilet seat, do you? That's obviously not the case. This is what they said specifically in their script notes to the filmmakers. And to their credit, the filmmakers went their own way. And they said, look, we can't take those things out of the script because they're central to it.

And we're going to do it with CGI, and that's what they did. And then as a result of that, I am convinced, as a direct result of that, the Department of Defense recognized very quickly when they saw that that film became the most successful of 1996 and one of the most successful of the decade, grossing over $800 million, they realized, oh my God, we've missed out on a huge opportunity here because had we given them our support, we would have had access to the script. And had we access to the script, we could have shaped the narrative in a way that serves us. We could shape, we could try and steer particular beliefs within the UFO conspiracy community. We could

better portray our own history with relation to UFOs. We could massage it as we see fit, but because they denied their cooperation, they lost that opportunity. Now, they obviously realized this because the following year, the Stargate TV show, which

Emmerich actually directed the first, the Star Trek, the Stargate movie, but he wasn't directly involved in the TV show, but the TV show came out the year after Stargate, excuse me Independence Day

stay with stay with me here and so what happened was when they approached the military for their support on Stargate TV show

the military said okay we'll give you full cooperation and they gave them access to Shine Mountain NORAD they you know

they gave them their just total total cooperation at every level for 10 seasons for 10 years and that show was hugely responsible for shaping

belief in UFO conspiracy fields when it comes to the supposed relationship between the US government and alien entities and things like that, they really tapped into existing beliefs and then they furthered them and enriched them. In a couple of episodes, actually, across a couple of different seasons of that show, you had high-ranking military air force officers appearing as themselves, cameoing as themselves in those episodes appearing alongside aliens and stuff, you know. And that's really remarkable cooperation.

And Richard Dean Anderson, the actor who's in it, McGiver, he was given a really, you know, a military award for his, you know, for his services to, well, to propaganda, I guess. Yeah. And it was invited to the Pentagon.

He met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. So this is an example of the very cozy relationship between Hollywood and Washington. And it continues to this day. In fact, just a couple of weeks ago, there was a report put out, outlining how a Senate committee in the United States is wanting to look into

the nature of the relationship between the CIA and Hollywood because they are convinced that it's actually too cozy and that certain illegalities may have transpired over the past few years on films like Zero Dark 30, for example, made by Catherine Bigelow, who enjoys a very cozy relationship with the CIA. The CIA relationship, again, with Hollywood goes back to the early 1950s.

We could talk about it for an hour, but suffice to say, it's very deep-rooted and symbiotic. Wow, that's interesting. Yeah, you do wonder, like, how deep does it go, and how do you stop that comfortableness between the two at this point? It almost seems like the floodgates are wide open. They are. I mean, it's very interesting. it's finally got to the stage where there's a Senate committee investigating it. Exactly. Whether or not that will actually have any effect, I don't know, because, you know, the relationship between the entertainment industry and Washington

makes sense, certainly from Washington's perspective, because they recognize that, and have always recognized, if you want to shape popular perceptions of any significant issue or of any issue at all, but especially of hot-button national security issues, The best way to do that is to manage, to monitor, to manage and to influence the content of mass media. News media, hard factual media, but also entertainment media and especially entertainment media, because it's seen popularly as soft, as something that's fluff, as something that's harmless and not political. And that's why it's so effective as a propaganda tool, because it has been exploited, it has been infiltrated.

And this was very well documented in the 1970s by Carl Bernstein, the famous journalist who revealed that as of up to the mid-1970s, the CIA had infiltrated, you know, for 400 American news outlets, newspapers, TV stations. And that began in the 1950s. Everyone was on board, you know. And actually, the former CIA operative Robert Bayer, who, whose life inspired the George Clooney movie, Syriana. Clooney plays Bob Bayer in the movie. I interviewed Bob Bayer in 2008 and asking him about the nature of the relationship between CIA and Hollywood. And he said to me, I don't have the direct quote in front of me, but it was along the lines of all these people in Hollywood, they go to Washington, they hang around with senators, they hang around with CIA directors, and everybody's on board. That's the exact quote. And that's from a, you know, that's from a guy who was a very serious, you know, respected field officer in the CIA. for many decades and who actually works in Hollywood now and who knows very well what he's talking about.

So when we watch films now that seem to be just harmless entertainment, we need to look deeper because nothing is what it seems now. And that's especially important when we're trying to understand the UFO phenomenon as well and the influences at play behind the scenes in the entertainment industry and how these films are shaped

at a narrative level and if there are any messages and if there is an overarching message. Robbie, let's talk about that influence. I mean, films in specific, one of the first theories on a film being directly influenced that I came across was a UFO event came in the form of 1951's The Thing from Another World, which draws striking resemblance to a very famous UFO incident in 47. Holy cat, what a weird looking thing. Let me get a picture before you track up the whole. The Skagakana is going crazy.

Something's melted that surface crust that's frozen over again and clear eyes. The bottle shape apparently was caused by the aircraft first making contact with the earth out there at the neck of the bottle, sliding toward us and forming that larger areas it came to rest. With the engine or engines generating enough heat to melt that path through the crust and sink beneath the surface. What could melt that much ice? Let's get out and see. Holy cat. Hey. It's almost...

Almost? Yeah. Almost a perfect... It is. It's wrong. We finally got one. We found a flying saucer. Could you tell us a little about that film and just exactly what sort of connection may have started there?

Well, this is the thing from Another World directed by Howard Hawks, released in 1951. It's really the first, one of the first UFO movies, I guess, you had in the same year the day the earth stood stealth. But the thing from another world was an alien invasion movie. and it did seem to have in hindsight, certainly not at the time people would have recognized it, but in hindsight parallels with the Roswell incident, which had occurred in 1947. And the movie thing from another world, it concerns, for example, a saucer crash in a remote location. It features the military trying to cover it up, a newsman trying to expose the truth. It concerns the discovery of a dead alien, which then turns out to be a life.

All of these details were later reported in relation to the Roswell incident. And so it's caused some people to speculate that perhaps someone in the film industry may have had inside knowledge of the Roswell incident and was tapping into that or perhaps trying to get a message across through the entertainment industry. It's possible. There's no proof of that. The defence contractor and billionaire Howard Hughes, famously played by Leonard Capio in the movie. Again, there's another example.

I challenge you to think of Howard Hughes without thinking of Leonardo Caprio. Good point. owned RKO at the time. He was the owner of the studio that released the thing. And of course, Howard Hughes had very deep rooted ties to the government through the defense industry. So it's possible that he may have had some kind of knowledge of a UFO crash. It's pure speculation, but it's the strongest link that there is.

But certainly whether or not there is any direct knowledge of Roswell on the part of the filmmakers, what is clear is that there are parallels between those, you know, between the movie and the event. And we'll touch on Roswell again with another film later on. But like you mentioned shortly after the thing from another world, one of my personal favorite movies was released, the day the Earth stood still, starring Michael Reni, Patricia Neil, where a UFO literally lands on the White House lawn. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Drew Pearson.

We bring you this special radio television broadcast in order to give you the very latest information on an amazing phenomenon. The arrival of a space ship in Washington. The army has taken every precaution to meet any emergency which may develop. Just a minute, ladies and gentlemen, I think something is happening. That moment, that iconic cinematic moment,

is where pop culture now, you know, the phrase, why don't they land on the White House lawn, that we have that movie to thank for that, you know, for that misconception. that's the power of cinema that you know that in that instant in that iconic scene in the iconic movie we were presented with a with a scenario which has shaped our perceptions and our expectations of how the phenomenon should manifest all these years later why don't they land on the white house lawn well because

it's not a movie right sorry go on no not at all that that proves the point that your quote unquote speculation and the facts you've brought forth in this book are extremely powerful and prevalent and there's actually little debate as to the power that the media has on pop culture. In terms of this movie, the content sort of paralleled the 1952 Washington, D.C. UFO flap. You mentioned in the book as well. And the director of the film, Robert Weiss, had some interesting connections during filming. Could you tell us a little about Weiss and perhaps some of the ties he may have had to either intelligence agencies or UFO investigations in general? Robert Wise was a UFO believer, but he wasn't always a UFO believer. He became a UFO believer through his experiences of making the day the Eustard still in the early 1950s.

This was related by the filmmaker Paul Davids, who made the 1994 movie Roswell, starring Carl McClockland and Montchina. Paul Davids, the producer and writer of that movie, was friends with Robert Wise in his later years. and over lunch one day, Robert Wise was telling Paul David's about the production of the day they said still and said, you know, during production, we had a number of men from Washington, scientists and engineers from Washington, come onto the set and, you know, drip, drip, drip little bits of information about UFOs. And he found it, and it was through these conversations and interactions that he had with these people from Washington. He came to believe that actually this was something that was treated very seriously in the corridors of power, and therefore there must be something to it. So that was how he came to be a believer, really, but he was kind of agnostic at the time. But certainly that film is, I mean, its impact was huge. The remake was probably unnecessary, I would say.

That's true. But at least Keanu Reeves got paid, so. Who supposedly donates a lot of his profits to... It's true. That's true. That's true. That's true. That's true. We'll take it. Another film with some pretty close ties to the UFO lure came in the form of 1953's Invaders from Mars.

Again, one of my favorites. And again, didn't care much for the remake. But this is a film in which an alien race are planning sort of a silent invasion, as it were, on Earth. And their plan is being thwarted by a young boy and eventually the army. Here's from Mars. He saw the land from outer space. He saw them capture innocent people only to destroy. Father turned against son.

People changed into strange, weird animals. A general of the army becomes a saboteur. Trusted police turned into arsonists. Invaders from Mars, capturing humans at will for their own sinister purposes, turning them into diabolical instruments of destruction. This film mentions many actual UFO cases throughout, and could you tell us a bit about the UFO cases and why you believe these scenes had been purposefully inserted in a later cut of the film, but not originally the American version? Well, this is a case study that I have in my book. I don't really come down one way or another on this. It's just something that I find interesting. I find it impossible to draw a conclusion on this, but it's just something I presented out of interest, really, because it is very curious. So the film was released in 1953, invaders from Mars.

And its plot, first of all, as you say, does, I mean, it's very euphological. And actually, it seemed to anticipate the modern abduction phenomenon by several decades in its fine details. You've got aliens with big eyes, landing and sort of silently infiltrating a town. but they abduct people basically and they insert implants into the back of people's necks as people report in modern abduction accounts. There's mind control in there as well, again, which is frequently reported.

And what you have in the film is one of the characters is a heroic astronomer. That was a common character in the 1950s sci-fi movies. And in it, this astronomer is speculating that the aliens are Martian, they come from Mars and this is their agenda. But there's a sequence, quite a lengthy sequence, eight minutes long, which is actually not in the theatrical release,

but which was inserted into later European releases. So the fact that it was filmed at all raises questions. It was filmed later. It wasn't filmed at the time. It was filmed after the fact and then inserted into these later releases. So someone had obviously made the decision to film this, to go to the expense of, you know, getting the sets and props again and getting the actors again and everything.

and writing the dialogue and then filming it and inserting it, it's just really strange because it adds absolutely nothing at all to the film dramatically. In fact, it brings the film to a standstill for eight minutes. And what you've got is essentially a monologue by, it's almost like a public service announcement by this character of the astronomer in the movie. And he's presenting factual UFO information to the little boy in the movie. And he's saying, you know, the Air Force, has been investigating this for a number of years with their project saucer, which is the popular name for Project Sign at the time, which was the Air Force's first UFO investigations project.

The Project Sorcer has been investigating this for years. They know what's going on. They know we're being visited by Martians. And here, it just happens to have in his cabinet, pulls it open and he's got all of these scale models of flying sources that the Air Force knows to exist and his catalog. This is like, you know, this is, this is such and such. And this is this is this model. And this was seen over here. And then he opens up a file that he's got of newspaper clippings with real UFO reports in them and real photographs of real UFOs, famous UFO encounters and sightings such as the Lubbock Lights over Texas. So what you've got, that's one of the first instances of direct blurring of factual information, factual euphological information and fantasy within a science fiction film. But again, only certain people saw it because it was filmed after the fact and then inserted into later releases.

So I have no conclusions to draw on that other than the fact that it's really weird. It is. It is very weird. And also, and the other thing is, of course, is the film was 1953. And 1953 is the film that we can really trace, is the year that we can trace back to where the CIA really, really started to get its hooks into Hollywood. That was the year. There was some infiltration earlier in the 1950s and 1951. But 1953 is really where it started to kick off.

And at that point, you had wide-scale infiltration of the entertainment industry by the CIA on a regular basis. So there's no concrete conclusions to be drawn. There's no smoking gun there. But it's just a very interesting case, I suppose. Yeah, perhaps it was, you know, little test run on partial disclosures. Who knows? Who knows? And I know there are several documentaries that you speak about throughout the book as well,

where some UFO footage or photos were inserted. at certain points throughout that were said to come directly from the government or from Project Sign, Project Grudge, Project Blue Book. So that's very interesting as well. We could talk about those forever, but I know you cover them very well in the book. I wanted to bring up one of the most notorious conflicts between Uphology and Hollywood came in the form of the work of Donald Kehoe, who we all know was a very prominent UFO researcher and did a lot with his time before that. Could you sort of guide us through his connection with the film Earth versus? the Flying Saucers in relation to his previously published book?

Yeah, I mean, so this was a 1956 movie, and it was based on Kehoe's earlier book, I believe it was in 19504, Kehoe's nonfiction book, Flying Sources from Outer Space, which itself sounds like a pulpy movie, but it was actually, as I say, it was a serious book written by Kehoe looking at the flying saucer phenomenon. And so that had been published by Kiho. And then a couple of years later, some producers in Hollywood decided to approach Kehoe seeking the rights to this book because they told him that they were going to be making a serious documentary looking at the UFO phenomenon and they wanted to use his source material. And so he was very skeptical, Kehoe. And he initially denied them the rights. But eventually he agreed and handed the rights over to his book and paid for the rights.

And needless to say, the result was not a serious documentary, but was. the schlocky B-movie Earth versus the Flying Sources, which really bore very little resemblance to his source material. But what happened was, is that Kehoe's name appeared in the credits. So he was directly associated with this outlandish science fiction movie. And therefore, Tard, Tard as a result, his reputation was solid. And he fought to have his name removed from the credits, but without success.

And so to this day, you can see Kehoe's name in the credits of this B-movie. And, you know, it raises the question, was this, was this an intelligence operation? I don't think we can use it. I don't think the operation really applies. But it does raise the question if there was intelligence influence in here. Because Kehoe at the time, let's not forget, was the number one thorn in the side of the US government where it came to UFOs. He was fiercely advocating UFO disclosure. He didn't use those terms.

He didn't use that term, really. but he wanted an end to UFO secret he wanted the books to be opened on UFOs and he said he was very vocal about the fact that there was a big cover-up and so and Kehoe was a serious individual he had respect and he

so this was the time so again the question I suppose is did someone within the intelligence community seek to exploit its relationship with Hollywood and basically suck her Kehoe into being associated with something very very silly and thereby ruin his reputation

Like you said, it does sort of sound like a personality attack, as it were. Perhaps this person who was so prominent in the UFO field, they wanted to sort of dumb him down, make him look bad. I mean, he eventually did that for himself, really, as time went on. Yeah. But in the 50s, you know, certainly he had a lot more credibility. Yes. One wonders why they would even ask his permission to create a movie that had almost absolutely not. nothing to do with his book and put his name on it.

Exactly, yeah. Yeah, a lot of things could be drawn from that. We'll probably never know. But, Robbie, I wanted to fast forward a little bit to 1993. One of the most famous abduction films of all time was Fire in the Sky. How does it think? What makes it move? Why does it breathe?

Questions anyone would ask about a man If they'd never seen one before So for five days A man was borrowed That Travis Walton and five other witnesses told It was so unbelievable So unimaginable That it has become the most famous case

Of UFO abduction ever reported Written by Tracy Tormay Based on the accounts of Travis Walton And this film scared the hell out of me when I was younger. I don't know about you. Oh, yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah, with good reason. It still has one of the most horrifying interpretations of alien abduction ever,

I'd say, ever conveyed on film. Yeah, I'd say so. Yeah. But for Tourmet, it was a bumpy road getting the film made, and the final product wasn't exactly what he or Travis Walton had hoped for in terms of authenticity. You tell us a little bit more about this entire drama that ensued with this film. Well, of course, Travis Walton's 1975 abduction was instantly huge when it was reported.

And it remains, I guess, along with Betty and Bonnie Hill, the most famous abduction account on record. And very unusual as well for what he reported, because he was really one of the first people to report these now iconic kind of archetypal alien grays alongside these. less frequently reported Nordic, human-looking alien beings. And, you know, so this was kind of quite confusing to UFO researchers and remains so, I suppose, but this was a film that captured the national media's attention and international media as well at the time. And it, you know, it kind of ruined the lives of everyone who was involved in it. He had huge psychological impact on everyone, as these abduction experiences often do. But it wasn't until several years later that Hollywood tried to do anything with this story.

And I know that Travis had been approached a couple of times by various people in the industry seeking to adapt his story for the big screen. He'd never got a good feeling from those people and what they wanted to do with it. Tracy Tormay was a young writer at the time who was working on the Star Trek The Next Generation TV show and he was the son of Mel Torme, the famous jazz singer and he was he and and Tracy had become very good friends with Gene Roddenberry on Star Trek and and was very interested in UFOs as a factual phenomenon and he had in 1991 or basically finished work on his mini-series intruders,

which was, again, one of Hollywood's first serious explorations of the abduction phenomenon, as reported by experiences. And Tomey was just fascinated by this stuff. And he wanted to make a movie, like an actual theatrical release, exploring a compelling case. And so he went through the books, and he went back to Travis Walton's case,

and he said to himself, this is fantastic. But I've got to find out if it's true. I've got to find out if I believe Travis Walton. Do I believe his story? And the only way I can know that is if I go and meet him. So he rang up Travis Walton. He managed to get his phone number.

And the day that he called Travis out of the blue was literally the day that Travis Walton had taken his number, his phone number out of the X directory. For the past decade had been publicly unreachable. And then the very day that he puts it back into the public. Yeah. He gets the phone call from Tracy Tormay saying, hey, I want to make a movie. And so Travis says, you know, I've got to be honest. I'm skeptical of Hollywood folks and very suspicious.

And Tracy Torme said, look, let me come out and meet you and we'll spend some time together. And then that's what they did. And then he went out there a number of times to Phoenix, excuse me, to Snowflake, Arizona. And they spent time together over the next, what it would turn out, to be several years. And from the time of their first meeting to the time that the movie actually got released was six and a half years. And that was because they had an uphill struggle with the studios and with the bosses. Because at the time in the early 1990s, abduction was a really hard sell. It hadn't really broken through into the popular consciousness out of the subculture of uphology.

It was something that was being explored within UFO research, but it hadn't really made an impact outside of that. Because Hollywood likes spectacle, Hollywood likes, you know, kind of clear-cut resolutions. And anyone who knows anything about the abduction phenomenon knows that it doesn't always play like that. And in fact, I don't think I've ever met an experience who's had a resolution to their experiences. And so, you know, these things are ongoing and they kind of shatter who you are and you just spend the rest of your life picking up the pieces in one way or another. and that doesn't make for a very good ending. And so that was something that Hollywood always had a problem with when it came to these abduction accounts.

But also, again, there's no explosions, there's no invasions. It's just some kind of a weird phenomenon that kind of infiltrates your life and maybe takes you somewhere physically or psychically and does things that we don't really understand their agendas or why they're doing things. So it didn't really play well with Hollywood. And so, as I say, it was a hard sell. And eventually they agreed on a script.

and Tracy Tormey managed to get his script through to Paramount, Paramount released the film, or about to release the film, when one of the bigwigs at Paramount, just by chance, happened to see one night, whilst watching the television, he happened to see Tracy Torme's aforementioned intruders miniseries on TV. And what he saw was these big-eyed,

gray aliens performing experiments on, you know, on someone in a spaceship. And those same scenes, similar scenes appear, of course, in fire in the sky, the movie that he was about to release. And the producer, again, these are the kind of the first images that he'd seen, really, in pop culture of abduction iconography. And so he thought, oh, my God, this has been done before. And so, like, I can't release a movie that's not new.

You know, this is old news. It's been done before, and it's been done, like, a year ago. so I don't want to release a major Paramount movie that's not fresh. And so producer rang Tormey very panicked and said, you know, you've got to rewrite the abduction scene. You've got to rewrite the experimentation sequence. Because originally what Torme had written was exactly what Travis Walton reported, which was not the horror scene that you see in the movie. It was certainly he was terrified and confused. and he claimed to have encountered these grey-type beings with the big eyes.

But that encounter lasted a very short amount of time. And then he spent more time with these apparently human-looking beings and was taken into a big spaceport. And it was more like Star Trek. And that was originally what was written in the script. But the executives apparently said, look, you've got to get rid of all of that because it's too close to what we saw.

Or at least we don't want these sterile scenes of experimentation. you know we want something we want you to reinterpret it basically so Tormay was was was really annoyed about this and was kind of heartbroken to have to report it to Travis and say we've got to change it Travis really didn't have much choice in the matter he he agreed to it reluctantly and actually helped Travis excuse me actually helped Tormei shape that sequence and what they did was they tried to capture what taught what Travis reported in essence you know so So Travis reported feeling like he was suffocating

and that the air was thick and heavy and hard to breathe. And so they took dramatic license with that. And rather than just showing that for what it was, they decided to have these goblin-like aliens put a horrible skin-like membrane over his mouth and literally suffocate him. So they took extreme artistic license and then they created this really graphic horror scene.

And that scene is so powerful. That sequence is so powerful. the rest of the film is almost forgettable by comparison. And the only thing that you take away with you is that is that horrific sequence. And, you know, it's a powerful film. It could have been better, but it's, I have to say, it's probably still one of the best abduction movies that have been made. But yeah, but that's an example. There was no conspiracy there.

A lot of people were speculating for years that, you know, that that was the government trying to, you know, to create fear around the phenomenon and that they deliberately changed the scene from what Travis had reported because it was some kind of a conspiracy. But it wasn't. It was just, it was just, you know, an artistic issue. And it was, it was, it was the fears of the executives. Absolutely. And I mean, when you have Tourmey himself bringing this news to Travis that it had to be changed,

I mean, that right there shows the compassion of the writer who actually cares about the authenticity to have Travis's say in reworking the scene and finding, like you said, the essence of it. Yeah, I mean, and he, I mean, Tracy, Torme, you know, he's really passionate about, he's, you know, to this day, very, very interested in the subject and remains active in it and still making films on the issue, actually. And he, you know, this, this film was, as I say, it was a passion project for him. It took six and a half years to get it to screen. And he was thinking about, you know, and he'd been trying to get an abduction movie on screen since the early 1980s when he was working with Bud Hopkins. I'm excited about what he's working on now with James Fox. and hopefully we'll see that documentary 701 soon.

Again, it all comes down to money. But, yeah, yeah. You know, Robbie, a year later, after Fire in the Sky, came 1994's Roswell film. Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. This local rancher just brought in a whole lot of, I don't know what you call it, but he claims it all came down at his place

and the sheriff thinks it might be something you guys sent up. Our government encountered something. Something, you know, top secret? Beyond our capacity to understand. Couldn't have been anything of ours. I mean, how in the hell was that thing held together? Look at this. A power so terrifying.

It's just light as a feather. I mean, what the hell are we dealing with you? Is it friendly? Is it hostile? A secret so dangerous. From now on, you're not to talk to anyone about this. That includes your family. That ranger? threatened, the sheriff was threatened, they threatened me.

What the hell is this? It could forever change the world as we know it. What if people think that we are not in control the disguise? They'd be right. Written by Paul Davids, directed by Jeremy Kagan. This film had a long and sorted history before it was completed. Would you kind of run us through that history of just exactly how the film was made And what prompted David's to pen the story for it at all?

Well, you know, this was the, as you say, it's 1994 TV movie. And it was really the first in-depth Hollywood treatment of the Roswell incident. And this was, as I say, it was written and produced by Paul Davids. And David's goal, you know, in making this movie was not just to entertain, but to educate. He really felt that this film could bring a certain truth to the wider public. it could bring to the attention this at the time little known UFO case people certainly

outside of the UFO field had really never heard of the Roswell incident at this point you'd had references to it in the X-Files at the year prior but it had really yet to break big in pop culture and to be honest

you know it hadn't been the subject of a great deal of discussion in the UFO community this film really put it on the map so it's also noteworthy I would say this film because it was one of the first movies to feature a direct reference to Area 51. Again

Area 51 does show up fleetingly in the X-Files but this is a movie that towards the end they make reference to Area 51 and there's this dramatic recreation of a saucer park to Area 51 and it's images like that that really kind of embedded themselves

into the conspiracy community and in turn into pop culture. This movie had a huge, huge impact. Although it was a TV movie, it was hugely successful for HBO. It was nominated for the Golden Globe for the best picture of that year, best TV movie of that year. It played really, really well with audiences. It hugely increased the subscriber base for HBO. And it was seen by millions and millions of people. So I mean, and I actually asked Paul Davids if he thought that the word Roswell, you know, would be so

culturally resident had he not so memorably contextualized it in his, in his movie. And he said, you know, not as much, basically. He thinks that although the X-Files had an impact, which certainly it did, basically Roswell, his movie was a huge part in popularizing the Roswell mythology, shall we say. And it's a film that basically tells the story of Jesse Marcell and Major Jesse Marcell, who was one of the original Roswell military witnesses, shall we say, not to a crash, but to a crash site and to materials. and I mean, almost everyone listening

would probably have some idea of what Rosal represents. But this was a hugely significant film. And actually, again, it took quite a while to come to fruition because, you know, because Paul David's had trouble selling it to various networks. For the same reasons, really,

that the Tormey had had trouble. You know, again, this was the early 1990s UFOs hadn't, you know, like the post-1994, or post-1993, shall we say, Between 1993 and like 1999, that was the era of the UFO in Hollywood. That was when you had Independence Day, men in black. You know, he had the X-Files that ran throughout the decade. You had dark skies and numerous other alien movies like The Arrival with Charlie Sheen

and all sorts of films that tapped really into this emerging subculture and the increasingly paranoid mindset within this subculture. This is the idea of a government UFO conspiracy. And this was something that finally Hollywood recognized. was something that could sell tickets. And they had this really rich 70-year-old subculture to exploit, and that's what they did.

And, you know, I've always found it odd that filmmakers, such as Paul Davids and others, you know, Tracy Tormay, and I interviewed a filmmaker called Andy Fickman, who directed the 2009 movie Race to Witch Mountain, which is also about UFOs. You made that for Disney.

You know, a lot of these filmmakers, they tell me that they are genuinely passionate about the subject about UFOs as a factual reality and they want to use their medium to educate the public about this phenomenon but they don't seem to understand the nature of the medium that they wield

they don't understand the impact that it has because it doesn't educate so much as it skews our perceptions especially when you know if you're if you're dealing with if the subject matter of your film is fundamentally true and then you're you're taking that fundamental truth and you're distorting it through the science fiction genre and

presenting it as big screen entertainment, it becomes fictionalized. And we don't receive it as audiences munching on our popcorn as a documentary, as a representation of fact. We interpret it as fantasy. And so I would argue that these filmmakers, yes, they're raising awareness of, or rather they're kind of, you know, they're embedding UFOs and aliens further into. to our collective consciousness, but they're not factualizing these phenomena. They're fictionalizing them. And so I would say that they're doing a disservice to the field. But, you know, they're not doing it consciously.

They're doing that that's their medium, and that's what they love to do. And that's the thing that they know how to do. Their writers, they write, their directors, they direct, and they make these films. But I don't think they fully appreciate the complex impact that these products have. Robbie, I want to move to small screen, and we cannot. go any further without talking about perhaps the most popular science fiction slash, I guess, procedural show ever to air, and that's the X-Files. I remember interviewing Dean Hagland, who played one of the lone gunmen a while back, and he told me that besides having countless references to UFO groups,

government projects, and even actual cases, government agents were, and FBI as well, were sometimes brought in to oversee episodes and or give opinions on the authenticity of certain things. In your research, Did you ever come across any connections to the government in this show with Chris Carter? Well, I mean, in terms of government connections, I mean, the first thing that springs immediately to mind, which I mentioned in the book, is, and again, this relates to what I just mentioned before about a longstanding effort to disinform and deceive, which dates back to the, at least the early 1980s, and specifically to a man called Richard Doty, who was in Air Force intelligence. officer. Oh, yeah. Let's take one step at a time. You're looking at Richard Doty, the professional disinformer, trained to lie. I'm Richard Doty. There's probably about 80% of false information being presented, about 20% of factual information. Unfortunately, the UFO community doesn't know which

is which. And that's your job to keep it that way? That was my job before. I'm a private citizen now, but back in the early 80s it was my job to confuse the UFO community. Doty was, you know, was at the forefront. He wasn't the guy who crafted it, but he was at the forefront of this very ambitious and hugely successful a disinformation psychological warfare campaign that was waged through the UFO community, not necessarily on it, but through it.

And it was exploiting belief in UFOs and sought to exploit what was rapidly emerging as a New Age religion. And Richard Doty, and this is very, very well documented now. Again, this is way too complex to go into in the time that we have here. And it's been very well documented elsewhere, as I say.

And I would highly recommend that people watch the film Mirage Men and read the book Mirage Men as well, which goes into this. And I again devote considerable time to it in my own book. Richard Doty was an ace disinformation agent, basically. And very interestingly, Doty claimed to have been an advisor and been there on set during the X-Files at various points during different seasons and claims to have actually co-written at least one episode again relating to aliens

and UFOs and claims to have actually been in another episode as an extra and so you know and and was close with with Chris Carter that in itself raises a lot of questions the X-Files overarching narrative that ran for nine seasons, of course, was, I mean, the impact of that series cannot be understated. It continues to be felt today. I mean, first of all, it was an absolutely amazing series. It's one of the best, in my opinion, one of the best TV shows ever made in any genre.

It had its ups and downs, but overall, it maintained a very high quality, a very high standard of writing, and it was a very, very impressive piece of work. And it was very clever. So Chris Carter, the creator, he and his researchers, they really did their work. They, you know, they weren't just kind of casually reading magazine articles about flying sources here and there. You know, they really did their research.

They read a lot of material on this. They interviewed people. They spent time with experiences, with UFO witnesses, with researchers. You know, so Chris Carter actually spent time with John Mack and with John Mack, who was the Harvard psychiatrist, who was, kind of pioneering in his abduction research in the 90s. And they spent time with, you know, the show creator spent time with John Mack and with his experiences. So they really absorbed all of this information.

And then they incorporated it often in quite a respectful and accurate way into their series. And again, the result was that these previously fringe subcultural ideas started to filter in a very immediate way into the heart of pop culture through the biggest show on television at the time and which remained very popular throughout its run. So absolutely, it acted as a conduit for these ideas. Whether or not that was a natural cultural process or something political and conspiratorial,

there's no clear answer on that when it comes to the X-Files. Because actually, Chris Carter is, he doesn't give a lot of way. But what you have, again, you know, a lot of people like in this community, they like either or answers. You know, they like distinctions to be made. And when it comes to UFOs and why and how we've come to think of them through Hollywood,

it seems to be a cultural process versus a conspiratorial one. And people ask me, is it all a big Hollywood conspiracy? Or is it just something that just has naturally evolved? Because filmmakers see dramatic potential in these reports and this subculture and they exploit it. Well, the answer is both. it's primarily now a natural cultural process. But in its early years, it was very political because of the Robertson panel's recommendations to use mass media to basically manipulate massage people's perceptions of the phenomenon.

And then those recommendations kind of shifted or adapted over the years and then various different agencies got involved, the Pentagon, the CIA, even the FBI, all had concerns about UFO representations over the years. what you've had is from time to time, from production to production, over the decades, you've had demonstrable cases of government and military interference and influence in UFO-themed productions. Some of those are very, very concrete. But overall, but simultaneously what you have is this natural cultural process emerging, where UFOs, whatever they might represent as a phenomenon,

seem to be ontologically real on some level. and therefore never go away, people continue to experience them at a grassroots level, people continue to report them, and then as long as those reports continue to surface, they will continue to find their way to Hollywood creatives who will continue to exploit them and popularize

them and simultaneously fictionalize them, and simultaneously actualize them, because that's the power of Hollywood as well. It simultaneously fictionalizes and actualizes whatever it depicts, because we record we we receive Hollywood entertainment as a form of fantasy at the same time it does on a weird level actualize its subject matter it becomes somehow real you know in a way that's this

this is almost mystical and and so so again these are the questions that really that really drive me in my research on on on UFOs in Hollywood I don't see it as something that's just that's peripheral you know you're the Hollywood angle I don't see UFO movies as peripheral to the phenomenon I believe that they are central to our understanding or our misunderstanding of the phenomenon. And let's not forget that the modern phenomenon of UFOs emerged in 1947. And Hollywood's first UFO movie

was released just three years later. So the two have gone almost hand in hand throughout the, you know, for the past 70 years. And so separating the two really should be of great interest to anyone who's interested in the subject. Absolutely. It's startling how closely

they paralleled one Robbie, a lesser known show, but extremely well made, in my opinion, was dark skies, made by our mutual friend, Bryce Sable. 1947, Roswell, New Mexico, an event takes place that will change history forever. They have come, a force of incomparable power with a deadly ultimatum. They just demanded our unconditional surrender. Now the battle has begun. We're about to bet the entire human race. And so has the cover up.

I am nothing but a figment of your imagination because this incident never happened. Could you tell us a bit about the plot of this show? It's ties to the so-called Majestic Twelve and some of the shady dealings that Bryce Zabel encountered while making this series. Yeah, so this was a show that was made in the mid-1990s, and it was created by, as you say, Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman. And it presented an alternate history of 20th century America. It was, you know, its tagline was history, as we know, it is a lie. And in this case, it was a lie built around this secret alien presence on Earth and that the US government was secretly trying to understand and control this alien threat.

And there were some parallels with the X-Files. But it drew very, again, it drew very specifically from existing UFO literature and debate. at the time, but then it furthered that as well, and it fleshed it out even more, and perhaps even, you know, created new beliefs, as the X-Files did. So again, it begins with the Roswell incident. You've got all of the key euphological ideas and landmarks, Area 51, all that kind of stuff. And what they did was Bryce and Brent. They pitched their show to networks in America in the form of a top-secret briefing file. They created this mock-up top-secret file, and it was modeled on the Majestic 12 documents, these so-called authentic documents which have proven to be anything but

containing information relating to the Roswell incident and other crashes of UFOs and aliens over the years. And basically they presented this thick ringbound file which they referred to as their Dark Skies Bible and they presented this to the network executives. And it contained all this UFO law and a real official history. And the plan was to have five series, you know, five shows, five seasons of the show, me. It's okay. It's an American term. And the file, it had on the front of it a one-page letter

written by the show's fictional hero, a character called John Lowen-Garde. So they'd written it as John Lohengaard and it was addressed to Bryce and Brent. So they'd written this letter to themselves essentially from their character. And the letter actually read, and I quote,

Bryce and Brent, the truth must be told. You have been chosen as instruments to achieve this objective. The truth, must not be represented as truth. Too many people are needed in the struggle. Too many people who are needed in the struggle will die. The cover of fiction must be used to present this truth. Those who fear the light will not want to bring attention to you by allowing your death. This is the only way. Do not be afraid. The fight for humanity depends on your courage. John Lowen God. So that was a really cool idea.

It's a hell of a cover letter. And then naturally they accept that, you know, the NBC accepted the show, and they got to work on it. And Bryce said, you know, literally everything that he'd read in UFO literature ended up in the series. And from Betty and Barney Hill to Majestic 12, Air 51, Roswell. It may have been that the inclusion of such intricate fact-based detail attracted real-world government UFO spooks. What happened was that during one of the sort of rap parties towards the end of the end of the... of sort of drawing the shoot basically. They hadn't yet filmed most of the episodes. I think they'd only just wrap the first episode. And they were having an invitation only private party at Bryce's

house in Los Angeles. And there's about 200 people cast and crew invited. Bear in mind that the rest of the show hadn't been filmed yet. And this is way, you know, this is way in advance of anything being shown on television. And each of the guests showed up, each of the people who were invited had to wear a badge, a majestic 12 mock-up badge, ID badge. Kind of in reference to Bob Lazar, actually, his ID badge that was made famous after Area 51. And that was how you knew you'd been invited because you bought one of these badges. Anyway, during the course of the evening, Bryce and Brent noticed some guy who didn't have a badge and who they didn't really recognize and who no one seemed to recognize.

He was this youngish, 20-something, preppy-looking guy. and he kind of made his way into the kitchen and approached Bryce and said, hey, you know, we've seen your show. And we've seen your show and you get some stuff right, but you get a lot of stuff wrong. And we'd like to help you with it. We'd like to help you get the details right. And Bryce and Brent were like, who the hell are you? Sorry? And he said, yeah, we've seen your show, blah, blah, blah.

And they were like, Bryce was the host of the party. He had 200 guests to attend to, and he was like, I really don't have much time for this. I've got to go and see to my guests. And they didn't really know what to make of him. And he contacted them after. And he said, oh, he said he represents a group of people who have access to this information, et cetera. And he phoned Brent, the co-creator of the show, at a later date, and then basically set up a meeting with them.

And they agreed to this meeting. And then this meeting was held in Bryce and Brent's office in Hollywood. And the same guy showed up, but this time he showed up with two other guys, another young guy and then an older guy. And they said that they were with naval intelligence, and that they were Navy SEALs, in fact. And Bryce and Brent said that, well, Bryce told me, that they really looked apart, you know,

that if they were to tell him that they were Navy SEALs, there's no reason he should doubt that they were Navy SEALs. They looked like they were Navy SEALs, you know. and they spoke the language. They walked the walk, they talk the talk. And they seem to have a very, very, very detailed narrative that they spun there in the office of aliens and UFOs and the government and how they would help, you know, Bryce and Brent on their show. And they would help them with the scripts and all this kind of stuff and they wanted to be involved. And that they would need to be read into the program.

They would need to be given access, like Bryce and Brent would need to be given access to this information. and the only way to do that would be to go and meet the big guy, presumably some admiral, on a ship, on a naval ship in the dock. And they were going to set up this meeting and stuff. And at one point during the meeting in the office, one of the guys takes out a vial of gold liquid material and puts it on the desk, and he's yelling at Bryce and Brent kind of like swearing, basically,

saying, you guys, you think you're so smart with your Hollywood scripts, but you don't know what you're dealing with. this is real, you know, you don't even have this in your script, you don't even know what this is, and he puts his vial of gold on the table. You know, what is that meant to represent? Is that meant to be some kind of alien fuel or is it something alien element? I mean, and so Bryson Bent are really freaked out by all of this, and at the end of the meeting anyway, they say, look, we can set up a meeting with the big guy, and we'll have to get back to you

with the details of that. And then when they finally get back to them, they say, okay, next to the next, time we meet. We have to meet. We have to meet at midnight in some cemetery. There it is. Proper X-Files stuff.

And at that point, Bryce said, look, I'm out. This is, I've got children and I've got a show to run. I've got a family and I don't want any part of this. And that was it. He stepped away from it. And I think the guys, they phoned Brent once more, but that was the last

that heard of it. But, you know, Bryce kind of, in interviews, he kind of dismisses it all, really, and kind of like he tells it how I've just told it essentially. I've probably got a few details wrong, but he tells it essentially as I've told it in the same tone. But he's kind of like, well, I don't really want to make of it. But when you ask him, he says, you know, I think that they were real, but he doesn't necessarily, you know, he thinks that they were actually, like, you know, I have very little doubt that they were probably with, if not naval intelligence than with some three-letter agency. And that they were there not, you know, I don't believe that the vial of gold they put

on the table was anything extraterrestrial. I believe that that whole operation was to screw with their minds and was to potentially, yes, infiltrate their show so that they could sow very specific ideas about a subject that they've been deeply concerned about for many decades, but that they can sew the narrative that suits them. Because, you know, what the powers that be recognized long ago was. was that you cannot, contrary to Robertson Panel's desires, you cannot completely debunk and demystify a phenomenon that continues to manifest itself spectacularly around the world. If the phenomenon

exists, then that's it. People will continue to experience it. So you can't debunk it and make people believe that it doesn't exist. But what you can do is you can attempt to shape and manage how people perceive the phenomenon. And that has been the goal of industry infiltration for so many decades. It's not it's not to debunk and demystify anymore as it was in the early years. It's to shape an already existing belief system and to exploit it for various reasons, for all sorts of different reasons. But one of them is psychological warfare against other nations. And this is against the thing that I look into in the book, which has been documented and explored by others. So yeah, and there's a lot to go into on that front. Again, it's another half an hour's discussion,

and I don't want to risk, if I've not already sent people to sleep, I'd Oh God. Not at all. It's extremely intriguing. I mean, and that you bring up such a good point, Robbie. I mean, who knows what the government actually knows about the phenomenon? But like you said, while they may not be able to control the phenomenon, they can control the information that is told to the public.

So it's a wonderful point. But actually, you know, the narrative that has emerged very consistently, especially in films that have been supported or related, supported by or related to official power structures, the military, the CIA. The narrative that has emerged since the early 1980s is of a American military and intelligence apparatus that is deeply knowledgeable about UFOs and aliens, to the extent even that they have working mutual treaties with the alien intelligences, have reverse engineered their technology, weapons applications. And if you look at the narratives of more recent films, they've actually reverse engineered that technology for peaceful purposes and for peacekeeping purposes and for national security reasons and are using it successfully to combat enemy foreign powers. And I'm referring here to the Transformers films in particular, but in other films as well. And including the New

Independence Day film, which didn't have the direct involvement at a production level of the military, but it was supported in its later stages in its marketing campaign very wholeheartedly by the military. And I would be very surprised, quite honestly, if there wasn't some covert influence on the script there, because it just ties in so perfectly with all of the other Department of Defense-backed UFO scripts that have been put out over the past decade or so. So what you have, very strangely, is this, it was actually not strange when you think about it, because who watches Hollywood movies? well everyone Hollywood movies even North Korea

like Kim Jong-un watches Hollywood movies obviously yeah and you know what they also what they also see in North Korea and in every other country UFOs

and you know what every military sees UFOs and what every military on earth has some knowledge of some interest in UFOs and regardless of how deep their actual involvement is with the subject every earthly military has some interest historical or present in UFOs and some basic understanding of the fact

that the phenomenon represents something unearthly and therefore is of national security interest and what these governments also recognize without question is that the United States government has a very deep historical involvement with the subject deeper than any other nation and the conclusion is to be drawn from that especially with narratives like Roswell and landmarks like Kerry 51 and the stories that go along with those, even though they are, you know, not taken literally, it's hard to completely divorce those stories from some basis in fact. And so if you're a foreign government interested in UFOs, Soviet Union, you know, North Korea, wherever, you're going to have some meeting at some point or some people

within your government and going to have a meeting. Say, I wonder what, you know, what does the US government actually have on this? Right. What are they doing? We know what we're doing. We know what we've monitored. what have they got? Have they actually reverse engineered technology? And oh my God, if they have, what are the implications of that for warfare on us?

And the United States government knows that these conversations are going on as well. And so for a long time, they've been seeking to exploit that interest and that knowledge, that unspoken knowledge. And so going back to the early 1980s, you had this effort to seed popular entertainment with a very particular narrative. that portrays the US government as supremely powerful in possession of earth-changing technologies, reverse-engineered alien technologies, and more than that, actually in league with the aliens themselves. And this stuff permeates the UFO literature as well,

to the extent that it's a belief system, whether or not it's true, whether or not it's true. And certainly we've been encouraged by official bodies to believe that it's true. That is without doubt, and you can trace the seeds of that disinformation campaign, that psychological warfare campaign, back to a very specific point in time,

and I've done that and others have done it before me. So you really have to ask how much of what you believe, what you think you know, about secrecy and deep politics of UFOs, how much of what you believe has been constructed by the very people who you think have all the answers, but who actually and crucially do not have all the answers because they ultimately, despite their billions of dollars spent covertly on this research over the years,

they are humans like the rest of us and they're extremely primitive. And yes, they have more advanced covert technologies and they have the best minds in science, etc. But ultimately they are dealing with a phenomenon that is so far beyond our comprehension, that yes, they've drawn their own conclusions, they have their own version of the truth, but it is not the truth. It is their truth. And they do not understand what they're dealing with. And all they can do is seek to manage our perceptions of the same phenomenon that confounds them.

In a way, least incriminates them. It's a power play. You're exactly right. And Robbie, this sort of all ties into something I remember hearing you speak about at a lecture in Denmark. And this is about hyper-reality. Could you sort of explain just exactly what this is? in how it relates to everything we've sort of spoken about today. Well, I mean, hyper-reality is something that we've been alluding to, really, throughout this.

And it's the inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality. This is the popular definition of it. You know, so it's the inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality. So, again, so, you know, the Titanic example would be a good one. We recognize that Titanic is a film. But on some level, we really do find it very hard to distinguish between that fictional representation and historical event itself. Technologies of mass media have played a huge role in this hyperreal process, this constant blurring and irreversible blurring of fact and fantasy in the popular consciousness on a whole range of topics and issues. And so if a movie can blur the boundaries between historical fact and fantasy on a historically accepted massively famous event, like the...

Titanic. And there are lots of other examples we conferred to in cinema history as well on historical events. Then what effect does this hyperreal process have on our perception of something which is, as I say, rejected by consensus reality, rejected by official culture. UFOs don't exist except for those people who witness them at an individual level. And even then, most of those experiences are, you know, they defy the senses in many cases. And often the experience in the moment or after will question whether or not they've even seen what they've seen. Did I really see that? How can I see that? That's not part of our reality. Did I really see that?

How can I have seen that? Like, that what I've just seen belongs on the cinema screen because that's where I've seen it previously. But now it's here in front of me. How can that be? This is hyper-reality, things being that, you know, UFOs are simultaneously real and unreal in the podcast.