Guest blogger: Paul Davids

HOLLYWOOD’S ALIENS:  A ONE HUNDRED BILLION DOLLAR ENTERPRISE

By Paul J. Davids

The State of Kansas will forever be identified with a fictional man named Oz and the click of the heels of a pair of ruby red slippers. Wyoming’s Devil’s Tower will always be connected somehow with mashed potatoes, a certain five bars of music, and a famous Close Encounter of the Third Kind.


The power of Hollywood to imbed images and sounds – from the click of red slippers to the slosh of mashed potatoes – into the conscious awareness (and Jungian collective unconscious) of millions of people has been a fact for nearly a century, when it all began with silent films.

At first, it was done exclusively using what we have called the Silver Screen, and the only sound was an organ, while you read captions. Then came the Talkies. Then came the Tube. Then Video. Now comes a range of technologies for receiving images and sounds that is so varied and wide that it’s a challenge to keep up with IPhones, IPads, IPods and all the other IP’s. 

Media has featured a variety dramas and comedies and themes of every kind imaginable, but some themes rose to prominence. One of those themes which gained colossal power over the viewing public was the theme that we are not alone in this universe, and that we have been visited by strangers from other worlds, some of them resembling us not only physically, but also in terms of our obsession with warfare and destruction.

The spacemen that resemble human beings got their first foothold in Saturday afternoon serials. We met those aliens along with heroes like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. Radar Men from the Moon were among the first movie alien villains. Superman became a very famous fictional alien from Krypton. There was a large supply of movies featuring people playing the role of space visitors, and they spoke English but carried futuristic ray guns and often wore silly capes.  Their space-faring vehicles had control panels that often unfortunately looked less complex than the airplanes control panels of the day. Eventually, creatures and monsters began to join cinema’s population of alien beings.

The point is that a marriage was made between Hollywood cinema and aliens from outer space, and it is the longest Hollywood marriage in existence. This may have begun as a shotgun wedding, but it is still a solid match. There has been no divorce, and we have well passed the Golden Anniversary of UFO’s in cinema. The public, of all ages, approves, or this would not be our entertainment. What began as something very small became a one hundred billion dollar enterprise. It became one of America’s largest exports to the rest of the world.

I have been a fan of science-fiction since I was a young sci-fi boy, and I am gratified to have had the opportunity to play a small role in these developments in Hollywood. In 1994, Showtime funded and released an original television movie on which I served as executive producer and co-writer of the story. It was called ROSWELL when initially released, and when it went to video, the title was expanded to ROSWELL: THE UFO COVER-UP. Unlike many of the other alien-themed movies, it claims a basis in fact: The Roswell Incident of 1947 in Roswell, New Mexico. 

Paul Davids with Martin Sheen and Kyle MacLachlan during the filming of Roswell (1994)

While we were developing and making this movie, strange things happened that reminded me of the Men in Black. In the early 1990’s when we were at work on this film, a great deal was happening in the world of ufology. Some of it was related to the MJ-12 documents which had surfaced mysteriously without any specific provenance, and which appeared at face value to be secret briefing papers for President-elect Eisenhower. A few documentaries were breaking through on TV at that time suggesting extraordinary secrets involving alien technology, dating back to the days of the 1947 Roswell Incident and extending to Area 51, Nevada, in present day.

We seemed to be under some kind of surveillance in making the film. People were appearing inexplicably offering special kinds of help and wanting information and to observe. There was an incident where I am sure the authors of the book UFO CRASH AT ROSWELL were being followed in an obvious way, and sometimes telephones may have been tapped. Phone calls would be repeatedly disconnected when certain subjects were discussed, especially involving alien bodies. Yet despite all this, there was no interference with the film and no effort to impede it. If anything the opposite was true. We were helped in every possible way to complete a very difficult production more quickly than seemed possible. We had the impression that the film was wanted, that others operating in an unseen way understood its larger purpose. And yet in spite of the success and popularity of the film, there was an onslaught of a debunking campaign against it as soon as it was ready for broadcast. It was attacked from many quarters in the press and from debunking organizations, but the incident with the most repercussions for public credibility was the Pentagon press conference in September 1994 announcing that the Roswell Incident had been solved, and that it had nothing to do with aliens.

This raises a lot of questions about how films are used for unexpected purposes by organizations with agendas, and one of the largest organizations with agendas is the Federal government. More than a decade after making ROSWELL, after making independent films that included TIMOTHY LEARY'S DEAD, STARRY NIGHT and THE ARTIST AND THE SHAMAN, in 2006 I took up the theme of the connection between Hollywood and aliens in a feature documentary I produced and directed.  It was an independent film I decided to call THE SCI-FI BOYS.  It was eventually picked up and released to DVD and television worldwide by Universal Pictures, but it started as a totally private project with no corporate support. THE SCI-FI BOYS is a documentary that deals specifically with how a cottage industry (special effects movies, mainly with alien and UFO themes) developed into a multi-billion dollar business over more than half a century.   

Front from left: Peter Jackson and Forrest J. Ackerman. Rear from Left: Basil Gogos, Rick Baker, Bob Burns and Paul Davids. Golden Globes party, 2005.

How did the marriage of Hollywood and aliens start? Some say human imagination made it inevitable. Herbert George Wells declared war against Mars in a famous novel long before there were movies. Orson Welles followed suit, using radio to convey the message of Herbert George. That was in 1938, and Orson panicked your grandparents.  As if the world didn’t have enough else to worry about in 1938.  World War was going to burn Europe once again. And we had plenty of heroes and villains here on earth, without needing to reach beyond out planet’s atmosphere.

But then less than a decade after that war, one of the generals of World War II – General Douglas MacArthur – said something funny about space aliens in a speech at West point that, well… wasn’t very funny. He said that “The next war will be an interplanetary war. The nations of the earth must someday make a common front against attack by people from other planets.” The quote is cited by nearly every historian of UFO’s (we call them ufologists). It is part of the UFO Holy Grail.

The quote by General MacArthur makes us think that maybe the shotgun wedding of Hollywood and aliens didn’t happen by accident – and it wasn’t merely a result of imagination merging with cinematic technology. Maybe there was method to the madness. If the premise of ROSWELL is a fact, and if an alien spaceship and its crew did meet a disastrous end in the deserts of New Mexico in 1947, then it didn’t take very long for that concept to reach the silver screen. Howard Hawks produced a dramatic masterpiece in 1951 called THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD. To most of us, it was known simply as THE THING. And what a Thing it was.

THE THING (1951 version) was the story of a flying saucer crash, not set in the desert of New Mexico, but in the Arctic. All the themes of the Roswell Incident were there. The military covered it up. A newsman pleaded for disclosure. There was buried saucer wreckage. There was an alien body (that turned out to be still alive). There was secrecy. And in the movie, there was danger.

If the Roswell Incident was a real spaceship, could THE THING have been a way of dramatizing the story couched in fiction? It was based on a science-fiction story called WHO GOES THERE? But there are thousands of science-fiction stories, and only a small fraction of them are produced as films.  Was it a coincidence that a great producer put this tale to film just three years after the famed declaration of the Roswell Daily Record that: RAAF [ROSWELL ARMY AIR FORCE] CAPTURES FLYING SAUCER ON RANCH IN ROSWELL REGION. Howard Hawks’ film changed the location from the New Mexico desert and added snow and ice.

Since THE THING came out, I believe there have been more major motion pictures about alien/human inter-cosmic relations than there have been Westerns and World War II movies and comedies combined. Usually those inter-cosmic relations have been frosty. The aliens seldom, if ever, have our best interests at heart. Since there have been no credible disclosures from the government, generation after generation wonders whether there is truth in Hollywood’s space mythology, as is implied by General MacArthur’s West Point remarks.

The budgets of these films have ranged from the miniscule to the immense. Low-budget space films such as INVASION OF THE SAUCERMEN and KILLERS FROM SPACE flowed throughout the 1950’s. They came to us courtesy of Roger Corman, Lou Arkoff, American International Pictures and even major studios, such as Columbia Pictures (EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS). The high-budget films of the 1950’s included FORBIDDEN PLANET, which taught us about advanced alien technology, and THIS ISLAND EARTH, which showed us that sometimes human-like aliens walk among us.  here was also George Pal’s classic version of THE WAR OF THE WORLDS, released by Paramount Pictures, a superb drama with the master’s touch that exceeds every attempt to mimic it, reshoot it or copy it.

With the advent of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, the budgets grew exponentially. Spielberg made it a personal mission to take the public by the hand as both a dramatist and teacher. The education and lessons in E.T. and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND and A.I. could fill a university course. From his bar-room scene on the planet Tattooine in STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE, George Lucas taught us that beings of all shapes and sizes filled a certain galaxy far, far away… and he helped prepare us for the fact that our own galaxy might contain similar surprises.

So does all this stem only from imagination? Or only from the pursuit of commercial success? Or has some other driving force been at work behind the scenes, steering Hollywood to become a sort of propaganda mill for the idea that we may be unknowingly sharing our world with EBE’s or Extraterrestrial Biological Entities? This is, in essence, the Black-Ops Theory of Hollywood and government related to UFO’s. The theory is expounded upon in many books such as Richard Dolan’s multi-volume: UFOS AND THE NATIONAL SECURITY STATE.

The Black-Ops Theory of Hollywood science-fiction films credits military intelligence and the CIA for the fact that fictional aliens long ago gained great importance for the Los Angeles film community. A Congressional panel known as the Robertson Panel of the early 1950’s offered as its conclusion the idea that belief in flying saucers could be dangerous for the American public. Such beliefs were problematic, Congress decreed, because they could confuse and weaken morale in times of international conflict. Congress recommended that Hollywood (Disney studios was specifically named) join in a national UFO debunking campaign. Part of debunking belief in saucers was to make the whole concept appear to be ridiculous, and Hollywood became instrumental in that effort for awhile, no question about it.

If you do have a question about it, take a look at I MARRIED A MONSTER FROM OUTER SPACE. Or watch (if you dare) the immortal Ed Wood monstrous classic, widely declared the worst film ever made: PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE.  Delores Fuller, who starred in many Ed Wood movies and was his lover, passed away May 10^th 2011, but memories of what Ed Wood wrought have not passed away. His strongest message was a simple one: aliens are here in flying saucers and the government is lying to you about it. And his films made his premise seem utterly and totally ridiculous, especially when the aliens became grave robbers from outer space. His special effects were preposterous, and his sense of believability was totally absent. It played right into what the Robertson Panel wanted. 

The other facet of the Black-Ops theory is expressed in the Brookings Institute’s Report to Congress of 1960, PROPOSED STUDIES ON THE IMPLICATIONS OF PEACEFUL SPACE ACTIVITIES FOR HUMAN AFFAIRS. The Brookings research team, led by sociologist Margaret Meade and other notables and government consultants of that time, sounded an alarm. They concluded that if our space exploration were to bring us into contact with beings from other worlds, or even artifacts of their vanished civilizations, such as extraterrestrial ruins, the discovery would cause massive culture shock for humanity. It might bring about panic, angst and disintegration of religious belief or loss of confidence by scientists and political leaders in the concept of human supremacy. The government was advised that if such discoveries were made, it would be in the best interests of the ‘domestic tranquility’ to withhold the information until the public had been sufficiently prepared (Of course, it’s possible… and I personally think very likely… that even while the Brookings report was being written, contact had already occurred, as depicted in our film ROSWELL).

Getting the public prepared for such a leap in awareness requires a ‘Public Acclimation Campaign.’ Author Richard Hoagland (DARK MISSION: THE SECRET HISTORY OF NASA) calls it the ‘Time-Release Aspirin Plan.’  That means giving the public hints of these ‘New Truths’ in little doses. This is like gradual immunization, to prevent a gigantic Freak-Out when our cherished beliefs about our place of primary importance in God’s universe begin to collapse.

Thus, it is fair to say, Hollywood has for more than half a century been the city of the ‘Time-Release Aspirin Plan.’  From Ray Harryhausen’s classic 20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH and EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS all the way up to INDEPENDENCE DAY and MEN IN BLACK, WALL-E, PAUL, DISTRICT NINE, SKYLINE and BATTLE: LOS ANGELES, almost every nook and cranny of the alien invasion and visitation theme has been explored. And that includes all the themes emphasized today by ufology’s authors and lecturers.

Consider these examples:

Alien abduction (THE 27^TH DAY, KILLERS FROM SPACE, FIRE IN THE SKY, COMMUNION). 

Implants and body probes using needles (INVADERS FROM MARS).

Walk-ins (INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, K-PAX).

Hypnosis to recall alien abduction memories (KILLERS FROM SPACE).

Flying saucer crashes (HANGAR 18, FIVE MILLION HEARS TO EARTH, INDEPENDENCE DAY, and of course ROSWELL:  THE UFO COVERUP).

Contamination and infestation due to alien life forms (DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS, ANDROMEDA STRAIN).

Alien ruins on the moon (FIRST MEN IN THE MOON, TRANSFORMERS 3: DARK OF THE MOON) or ruins floating in space (ALIEN).

Undersea aliens (THE ABYSS).

Impregnating Earth Women (VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED).

Crop circles (SIGNS).

Contactees (THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL).

The Mothman creature in West Virginia (THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES).

And then came the Mars movies, beginning with films such as THE ANGRY RED PLANET and ROBINSON CRUSOE ON MARS in the 1950’s up to TOTAL RECALL and MISSION TO MARS.

About the only theme that’s been under-worked is cattle mutilation. However, the milk industry did a TV ad about aliens abducting cattle and they used the tag-line “Got Milk?”

Amidst all of the scares and horrors, there has been the sub-genre of Supposedly True UFO Stories. Truth is in the eye of the beholder and the presenter. But there is a body of cinematic works, based on events to which there is public testimony in books, articles and the like. These have been very limited in number. You can count them on the fingers of one hand or maybe two.

In the category of Supposedly True UFO Stories, Hollywood has brought the awful hidden “Truth” to light. Namely that E.T. will never really phone home using Speak and Spell or covet Reese’s Pieces. Why so few of the movies that claim to be “The Real Stuff?” Do people want to know that maybe, just maybe, the real E.T. is here to cut up our cows before we can make hamburgers out of them? 

Supposedly True UFO Films probably began with THE UFO INCIDENT, the Betty and Barney Hill abduction story. There was FIRE IN THE SKY, about Travis Walton’s alien abduction. Once again, I will bring up ROSWELL which was about, well… all the weirdness that happened in 1947 in Roswell, New Mexico. Let’s include COMMUNION, about Whitley Strieber’s adventures with the gray entities with wrap-around big black eyes that go bump in the night. Include THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES, of course. And THE FOURTH KIND is a Supposedly True UFO Film but in that case the operative word is definitely “supposedly.”  Internet bloggers have made it clear that this is a UFO version of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. Never happened as an actual case, but maybe it was inspired by a few things that did.

What does the deficiency of stories based on true cases really mean? If you’re a Black Ops agent whose job is to keep the lid on the supposed UFO invasion, you’d only want to see a few of those productions get made. It’s like a big booster shot that you only get once in a rare while. But it helps to keep the Big Secret if Hollywood keeps producing UFO tabloid fiction at the level of Ed Wood.

Let’s now consider the TV series. There have been more aliens on TV than in theaters. CONEHEADS, ALF, THE INVADERS, MORK AND MINDY, X-FILES, THE TWILIGHT ZONE, OUTER LIMITS, STAR TREK, ALIEN NATION, V, DARK SKIES and mini-series such as Steven Spielberg’s TAKEN. There’s also THE TRANSFORMERS, the all-alien robot show about the Autobots and Decepticons from Cybertron. That show gave me my first “big break” as production coordinator of 79 animated episodes from 1985 through 1986. All considered, the various TV series about aliens tended to reduce all of this far-out stuff to the mundane. How could you get too excited about aliens living in your neighborhood if they have pointy cone-shaped heads and are brought to you by Cheerios, Oreo Cookies and AT&T?

Hollywood also churns out UFO documentaries. Most of these claim to be true in most details. From the Bermuda Triangle to the secret NASA Shuttle tapes or the supposed Roswell Alien Autopsy, this entertainment usually appears on the tabloid TV shows. Things have been changing, though. The History Channel has its own UFO franchise. So does the Discovery Channel. UFO Magazine’s publisher, Bill Birnes, has become a TV personality with UFO HUNTERS. The UFO subject is now at the edge of legitimacy. However, President Obama has done his part to keep things from getting out of hand. On May 2^nd, 2011 at the Correspondents’ Dinner, a humorous affair that’s always a cross between a roast and a ribbing, Obama equated “birthers” with the conspiratorial types who question whether the U.S. really sent astronauts to the moon and with those who are still prying into Roswell.

Which leads me to ask: Mr. President, is there really something foolish about prying into the Truth about Roswell? And why do you think so? Why is this a matter for ridicule without a clear-headed look at the facts, as reported so precisely in WITNESS TO ROSWELL, by Donald Schmitt and Tom Carey? 

Never mind. Let’s not hold our breath waiting for an answer. The fact is, the great Hollywood alien space race has been enough to make all our heads spin. And that seems to have been the idea all along, because nobody ever could have foreseen in the 1950’s that this would become a one hundred billion dollar business. By now, all movie-goers are probably entitled to an honorary Ph.D. in the field of Hollywood Space invasions. We’ve been well prepared. The fear Orson Welles stirred up in 1938 will never return. Now we have learned how to “kick some alien butt” and “rid the galaxy of alien scum” thanks to Tommy Lee Jones and his fellow Men-in-Black. Does it sound like a space war is really coming? Or that real aliens are sticking their noses (if they even have noses) into humanity’s business?

The bottom line in all of this for me: While we were filming ROSWELL, some very mysterious people were extraordinarily interested in exactly what we were doing. Within a few months of the film being broadcast for the first time, the games seemed to end. No more clicking on the phone lines. No more “knowledgeable informants” trying to shape our thinking and our project.

Maybe General MacArthur knew what he was talking about long ago when he took the podium at West Point. That could explain a lot of things. And maybe astronauts Edgar Mitchell and Gordon Cooper were on the right track, too, when they insisted that world governments know aliens are real and that they aren’t talking. Why aren’t they talking?  Hollywood has given us more than a hundred possible answers. But we still don’t know what the real answers are.

Paul Davids with his Roswell movie star

The aliens we created for ROSWELL: THE UFO COVERUP have shown up in photos everywhere from Penthouse centerfolds to online blogs, usually accompanied by false claims that they are “the real thing.” Some conspiratorial folks have suggested that maybe we were shown “the real thing” by the NSA or CIA before designing those movie prop aliens, so we’d get them just right. And they often claim that maybe some of those photos that look so much like our movie props are real alien photos secretly slipped into the pile. Do you wonder and does it keep you up at night? Well, don’t expect any answers from me. Sorry. My lips are sealed. I’ve been sworn to secrecy.

Or maybe not.

But leaving all ambiguities aside, something very big certainly has changed in this picture, since producers, writers and directors began trying to use Hollywood to get the word out. Thanks to new technologies, there has been a breakdown of the control of the Hollywood content providers, who used to have a godlike power over the public. For nearly a century, the incredible power of media has been exclusively in the hands of a select oligarchy that could unilaterally select content, and could shape, censor and advertise messages using vast tools of multimedia, from print ads to billboards. Usually this was done exclusively in the name of entertainment – and profits.

YouTube now gives the power to YOU to distribute movies and videos. And the internet gives you the power to instantly distribute still photos to very large groups of people. It is harder than ever before to prove any of those movies and videos and photos are real. The tools to tamper with photography have never been more sophisticated. “Seeing is believing” should no longer be true, whether the evidence is couched in the fiction of a Hollywood movie or posted by some anonymous source on the worldwide web. Unfortunately, this leaves us more at the mercy of those who have something to hide – and keeps us under the thumb of those who are devoted to keeping the public in the dark about things the public wants to discover and deserves to know.

Copyright © 2011, Paul Davids.

Visit Paul Davids at www.pauldavids.com or email him at starrynightmovie@aol.com  

 

Paul Davids is a Princeton graduate who has 79 credits on the TRANSFORMERS TV show plus a credit on the original TRANSFORMERS movie (1985) and then went on to co-write and executive produce the Showtime original film ROSWELL, nominated for a Golden Globe as Best Motion Picture for Television (1994). He has co-authored six STAR WARS books for Lucasfilm with his wife, Hollace Davids (THE GLOVE OF DARTH VADER, LOST CITY OF THE JEDI, ZORBA THE HUTT’S REVENGE, MISSION FROM MOUNT YODA, QUEEN OF THE EMPIRE and PROPHETS OF THE DARK SIDE). He has also produced, written or directed the following motion pictures: SHE DANCES ALONE, TIMOTHY LEARY’S DEAD, STARRY NIGHT, THE ARTIST AND THE SHAMAN, THE SCI-FI BOYS, JESUS IN INDIA and BEFORE WE SAY GOODBYE. He is currently completing the film: THE LIFE AFTER DEATH PROJECT, with Whitley Strieber’s wife Anne Strieber as executive producer with Hollace Davids. He has written and performed a song about Hollywood called WE LOVE YOU, WE HATE YOU which Dr. Demento chose as the lead-off for his March 19^th online streamed radio show (visit www.drdemento.com) You can also find WE LOVE YOU, WE HATE YOU at ITunes and Amazon.com