A Sea Change In Hollywood Sci-Fi?

Silver Screen Saucers

GUEST BLOGGER

Jack Witek

Apart from waging war on digital rights and the commons of information communications technology, facing off against anti-monopoly activist campaigns, ruining beloved intellectual properties in a combine of by-ups, various narcissistic lifestyle cults-cum-quasi-religions, and escape into the embraces of drug addiction and petty criminality, Hollywood has two major obsessions: the military and alien life, and in combination the military facing off against alien life.

Silver Screen Saucers ordinarily takes a critical eye to Hollywood and how its partnership with national security state public relations bumps up against and influences its sci-fi productions, from the 1953 Robertson Panel to the ‘works’ (if we can be generous) of Michael Bay and Peter Berg today. But here I would like to look at three sci-fi blockbusters from this summer, and how they have beat a different track, in spite of their ostentatious major studio backing, and how they each in their own way speak against the cultural hegemony, in a Trojan fashion, via the medium of old-trope genre icons – Star trek Into Darkness, Iron Man Three, and Man of Steel. And not to wander too far from this site’s focus, each film also touches directly on disclosure of alien life. Each of them are essentially first contact films, ‘disclosure’ as it is called, dealing with the aftermath of first contact. Indeed, tapping into UFO lore, in the overture to the main story, Star Trek Into Darkness begins with the Enterprise saving a primitive type-0 civilisation from environmental catastrophe. After the expediencies of the situation force the crew to reveal themselves and their technology in the open, the inhabitants begin worshipping them as gods.

 

~

 

“He tasks me. He tasks me and I shall have him! I'll chase him 'round the moons of Nibia and 'round the Antares Maelstrom and 'round Perdition's flames before I give him up!”

- Khan Noonan Singh, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

“Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.”

“But oh! shipmates! On the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep. Is not the main-truck higher than the kelson is low? Delight is to him — a far, far upward, and inward delight — who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth ever stands forth his own inexorable self.”

- Ishmael, Moby Dick.

PLOT SPOILERS AHEAD

Star Trek Into Darknessnot only returns to a Trek favourite in reviving Khan, it solidly returns the franchise to its conscientious socio-political roots. As the Wikipedia entry states: “Star Trek: The Original Series addressed issues of the 1960s, just as later spin-offs have reflected issues of their respective decades. Issues depicted in the various series include war and peace, the value of personal loyalty, authoritarianism, imperialism, class warfare, economics, racism, religion, human rights, sexism, feminism, and the role of technology. Roddenberry stated: ‘[By creating] a new world with new rules, I could make statements about sex, religion, Vietnam, politics, and intercontinental missiles. Indeed, we did make them on Star Trek: we were sending messages and fortunately they all got by the network.’”

Into Darkness addresses wartime disaster politics. In the aftermath of the genocidal destruction of Vulcan in the previous film, certain figures within Starfleet like Admiral Marcus (reminiscent of General Keith Alexander, the inverse of people who watch the films today and wish they could live in that future age, who seem instead to wish they could have been around in an age of empire) take their cue amid the shock and paranoia, engaging in deeply covert off-planet arms build-up and militarisation of Starfleet. The mastermind of this military coup-in-waiting, Admiral Marcus - after the plucky Enterprise crew stumble upon his designs thanks to Kirk’s vengeance-driven indefatigably irascible irresponsibility - attempts to destroy them in a false flag military attack to be blamed on the Klingons, a believable, sellable, yet utterly overblown threat.

This all begins when Marcus himself comes into contact with a cryogenically frozen super-soldier and condemned war criminal from Earth’s war-ravaged past, Khan Noonan Sing, recruiting his expertise to militarise Starfleet. In an attack obviously reminiscent of the London 7/7 terrorist bombings, Khan, betraying him and going it alone, strikes at Marcus’ underground covert military bureaucracy and development base on Earth. Marcus, in a bid to clean up the situation, manoeuvres Kirk and the Enterprise on a mission to assassinate Khan in an orbital strike conducted under martial law. Kirk eventually sees that he is being played, and resolves to bring down Marcus.

As Harry Knowles writes in his review:

“The first film saw a 9/11 shock and awe attack on Vulcan that resulted in its complete annihilation. The attack also targeted Earth... In addition, that very first attack – it took Kirk’s father – a father that, in our beloved Trekverse, lived and served as a constant inspiration for Kirk. In JJ’s, old Tiberius has the swagger and the libido of Shatner’s Kirk, but he isn’t prone to preach his ideals to Starfleet. Instead, he’s raised with at least one step-father that he has zero respect for – and is prone to reckless adrenaline rushes. Shatner’s Kirk was an adventurer at heart, marvelling at the infinite variety of civilizations out there around the stars. We can see some of that with Pine’s Kirk – he’s anxious to get out there, but he hasn’t believed in Starfleet for most of his life.

Now – is this Starfleet still based on the idealism of the 1960’s America? No. With Star Trek Into Darkness, the Darkness of the film isn’t Khan. It isn’t the Klingons or the Romulans; it’s the Darkness that has infected policy in Starfleet. In other words, this is a metaphor for post-9/11 America. In JJ’s Verse, he has a Kirk that doesn’t yet value the core beliefs of Starfleet... Meanwhile, the rest of his crew... good souls like Spock and Scotty... They raise these issues with Kirk, but Kirk doesn't want to hear it. He’s us. Kirk has always been us. But just like Kirk, we’ve changed.

Vengeance has become something our Country seeks. Since 9/11 we have adjusted our core beliefs and laws to make things more convenient for a government that has been given a licence to seek vengeance to protect us at all costs.”

Whereas the original Wrath of Khan dealt with the hyper-aggressive military mind of the rogue Khan, in this alternate timeline ‘remake’, it is Marcus as symbol of the military-industrial-complex who is the main focus, and where the original film borrowed heavily from and riffed on Moby Dickin a script peppered with some truly awful dialogue and dodgy exposition, the solidly written Into Darkness explores some of the depths of what Wrath of Khan only hinted at poetically (and iconically). Journalist Chris Hedges, writing in his Truthdig column, in the article Life is Sacred, states that the ascendant metaphor for our corporate political world order is Moby Dick: “All my means are sane,” Captain Ahab says of his suicidal pursuit of Moby Dick, “my motive and my object mad.”

 

The film’s main arc follows Kirk coming to terms with his mortality, and learning the value of family - of a family he never really had. Starfleet strays, but is brought back into the fold of peaceful civilisation. Kirk breaks the rules, but ultimately learns the hard and fast way why those rules matter so. This much cannot be said of President Obama, whose popularity ratings in real terms must surely be dwarfed by the box-office take of the new Star Trek in the wake of so many scandals and so much open criminality under his watch.

A month before the release of Into Darkness, Nation Books published investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill’s Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield. In a talk with Noam Chomsky and Amy Goodman at Harvard university in April, he said:

”We’re here at a time when a popular Democratic president, who is a constitutional lawyer by trade, has expanded, intensified, continued and, most importantly, legitimized, in the eyes of many liberals, some of the most egregious aspects of what the Bush administration called its counterterrorism policy and the Obama administration continues to call its counterterrorism and national security policy. And despite the fact that this very popular Democratic president campaigned on a pledge to radically change the way that the U.S. conducted its business around the world and, upon taking power, issued a number of executive orders that were purportedly aimed at shutting down secret prisons, ending torture and closing Guantánamo, what has actually happened is that the Obama administration has made cosmetic changes, tweaked the language, made a few adjustments to the detention program, to the—what’s called the targeted killing program, but it’s anything but targeted, as we’ve seen so often—it’s an assassination program. And this administration has sold the idea to many liberals in this country that this is a clean war, that it’s a smarter war than the ones that were being waged by his predecessor.”

Scahill also wrote the massive expose Blackwater: The Rise of the world’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, bringing this issue to the public’s attention, so much so that during Into Darkness Scotty cross-examines one of Marcus’ thugs over whether he is a private contractor.

But these undertones of the film are apparently too faint for some to pick out, as seen with this credulous and missing-the-point-much Wired review. But, at any rate, surely you are on the right track with a sci-fi when religious fundamentalists target you over a hinted-at-sex scene.

~

When in 2002, Avengers Assemble mastermind Joss Whedon tried to get his classic show Firefly off the ground, it was shut down by Fox during the run-up to the Iraq invasion. Axed, slaughtered off-guard. Unceremoniously, they even refused to air 3 of the 14 episodes that had been made, and even those weren’t shown in order or broadcast at any reasonable time for a new property. Backtracking, they washed their hands of it, and presumably everything that the show so beautifully symbolised. Over a decade later, Iron Man Three, based on Warren Ellis’ Extremis comic (as is the entire trilogy, though he hardly gets much credit for it) takes an utterly unavoidable, overt line against the War on Terror™ qua mass media manipulation. In the wake of Avengers Assemble, of the alien invasion of New York, Stark is suffering from full blown PTSD. We have our supervillain, the technocrat venture capitalist Aldrich Killian, using as a wind-up menace the terrorist Mandarin, who it turns out is an out of work actor from Croydon, London, with the Vice President of the US in his other hand. As he says in the film, the pinnacle of modern war is to control both sides and profit from the dialectic chaos. As the Mandarin likes to regale: “True story about fortune cookies: they look Chinese, they sound Chinese, but they're actually an American invention. Which is why they're hollow, full of lies and leave a bad taste in the mouth.”

Much as Kirk faces his own humanity in Trek, Stark undergoes a similar journey. The alien incursion into New York from Avengers has left him disturbed and having panic attacks. He obsessively escapes into working on his suits, the luxury of being a former arms-dealing billionaire heir in the technologically exponentially advanced near future. Alright for some. The moral lesson Tony learns, to borrow from Fight Club, is that he is not his company, not his fortune, not his techno-paradise sea-cliff villa, not his fancy suits. He has to learn to deal with his vulnerability, and not hide behind his suit systems - weapons Killian and the Vice President use against him. As he brings down the media projection that is Mandarin, Stark realises, perhaps, the futility and fragility of his own media-based ego that he has always hidden behind. At the end of the first film, when he declares to the assembled press that “I am Iron Man,” it’s a slightly awkward confession, and a stunt. By the end of the third film, when he again says the line, it’s an ironic affirmation of character. And just as in the first film he had the choice to continue to build armaments or to turn his company back around to fulfil its founders’ ambition to bring clean, renewable, cheap energy to the world, in the last instalment of the trilogy, we have the Extremis technology, that, like atomic energy, can be used to heal and to build or to kill and wipe out. Oddly paralleling the healing serum made from Khan’s blood in Into Darkness. The same themes: the power to destroy or the power to create and to mend. A sort of techno-alchemical transmutation of one into the other. And, at the end of it all, he also has to deal with Pepper Pots being more fully an equal for him now that she has been subjected to Extremis.  

~

“You will give the people of Earth an ideal to strive towards. They will race behind you. They will stumble. They will fall. But in time, they will join you in the sun. In time, you will help them accomplish wonders.”

- Jor-El, Man of Steel.

Man of Steel, put out by industry iconoclasts Legendary Pictures, is to Superman what Nolan and Legendary’s Dark Knight trilogy was to Batman – a deconstruction of a cultural icon and its rebuilding from the ground up. Gone are the camp red pants, the flamboyant villains, the endlessly iterated good samaritanism and mythic small town rural iconography. Whatever the merits or demerits of any of the previous Superman productions, this is a Man of Steel for the new century, not forsaking its roots, but respectfully getting closure and moving on and up.

Just like with Into Darkness and Iron Man Three, but really going to the heart of this story, are issues and themes of transhumanism. Eugenics. Supes, Kal-El, comes from a civilisation founded on it. In the last days of planet Krypton’s existence, when a sclerotic, decadent political order reigns in a time of imminent environmental crisis owing to energy mismanagement, the military caste, led by General Zod, instigate a coup. Zod is no longer the thug in tight pants and cloak with his gang of intergalactic goons harrying Supes while he tries to rescue kittens from burning trees. Here, he’s more of a Hitler archetype. An anti-Christ figure, in fact. He is a racial supremacist and a genetically engineered military force of nature, who believes he alone and his caste can guide Krypton out of this decline and re-establish the glory of the old galactic empire.

Superman, Kal-El, at this point a helpless baby, is the first child in living memory to be born of natural birth, not genetically engineered and grown. While Zod is the leading military mind of his time, Supes’ father, Jor-El, is the leading scientist, who, if he was listened to, could have averted the planetary disaster. In the end, the counsels and agitations of both are ignored by the ruling class, and all that’s left is to fight and gnaw like rats in a sinking ship. Bertrand Russell, in The Impact of Science on Society, wrote:

“Some part of life – perhaps the most important part – must be left to the spontaneous action of individual impulse, for where all is system there will be mental and spiritual death.” But in Kal-El, shipped off to Earth, in a region of former colonisation, is hope. ‘Hope’ is his house sigil, the symbol on his chest, clearly echoing Obama’s electioneering, and, in a nice last word, actually reclaiming Superman qua Superman from the filthy clutches of career politicians.

About a year ago, when I first started hearing of their being a new Superman film, I internally groaned. And I wonder if that is not a similar reaction that people are having to Disney’s The Lone Ranger, which is doing disastrously right now. I could be off, but did people see the cowboy hat, the whorehouse and the train chase in the trailer and just despair a little? Superman, while super, is still a man, a blue-eyed Caucasian archetype at that. A neo-Jesus archetype. But Man of Steelactually subverts the very bedrock of the comic icon by taking the ubermensch figure and making him, in fact, a living retort to the chauvinistic, hyper-aggressive transhumanist eugenics that he paradoxically, inexplicably comes from, and that through the selfless love of his parents he escapes. “What if a child dreamed of becoming something other than what society had intended. What if a child aspired to something greater,” Jor-El muses.  

One of the other things that has dramatically changed in the Superman universe is the role of Lois Lane. Whereas before she was clueless to her boyfriend Clark Kent’s actual identity, this time around, played beautifully by Amy Adams (please see her in The Master if you haven’t, she is a scary lady in that film), she is the investigative journalist going against the wishes of the military and putting her own career on the line, who tries to break the story that we have made first contact. Script-writer David Goyer on why they made this change:

“I just thought it was silly. If you're going to make her smart, if she's going to be Superman's love interest, Lois needs to stand on her own as a character; she needs to be really smart and have a lot of gumption, and she can't just be the damsel in distress, or else why is Clark/Kal interested in her? People say that a hero is only as good as his or her villain, but I also think the same is true of his or her love interest. It strained credulity for me that it took Lois ten or twenty years to figure out that Clark was Superman. I call bullshit on it, especially if she's sleeping with him. That was something that we talked about with DC, and said, ‘Maybe it's time to move on from that.’”

Zod, and what’s left of Krypton, including his right-hand-lady Foara, a sort of Eva Braun from space, eventually catches up with him on Earth. They bring a terraforming platform, a World Builder, rescued from an old, abandoned neighbouring solar colony, and get to work turning it against Earth with the goal of turning our planet into a clone of Krypton, making it habitable for them, but In the process wiping out all native Earthlings. Supes, stuck in the middle, and in order to save us all in the face of relentless Zod, in a momentous decision, ends him, snapping his neck, and thus commits pre-emptive genocide against the genocidal. It’s a poetic contradistinction, alright.

But returning: Again, paralleling Star Trek, and Extremis, the World Builder is strikingly reminiscent of Wrath of Khan’s Genesis Device, a life-giving terraforming machine that Khan tries to use as a weapon against the Enterprise in the original film. Which brings us back full circle, to ‘ancient aliens’, to the Biblical iconography and symbolism, to the power to destroy or create, technology as a double-edged sword, even gnosticism. The old guard in literary criticism and theory maintain that the antique is ever contemporary, and that’s certainly an ethos that is partly guiding these new franchises. Actually, you only have to look at the posters to Man of Steel, Into Darkness and Iron Man Three to see Biblical ‘fall’ motifs depicted fairly strongly.

Samuel Johnson said: “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” In sci-fi blockbusters like these, one could alter the maxim: We make myths of ourselves, we embody Campbell’s ‘Hero with a Thousand Faces’, to escape the pain of being a human, to escape the tyranny of the historical moment, in pre-emptive artistic retort to what E.P. Thompson called ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’, with stories. As Laurie Penny wrote recently:

“Ultimately it’s all about stories – who gets to tell them, who gets to be the hero and who’s stuck as the sidekick. Sweeping social change usually happens in stories first, and science fiction often has an agenda. What could be more political, after all, than imagining the future?

It goes like this: somebody dreams up a far-out notion of how the world might look if things were different and writes it down or acts it out and, gradually, people are given permission to imagine other lives. The first black president of the United States cropped up in science-fiction stories in the mid-1960s... People do the work of changing the world – but stories give us permission to reimagine it.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and story writer Katherine Anne-Porter, in her 1940 introduction to Flowering Judas, wrote:  

“For myself, and I was not alone, all the conscious and recollected years of my life have been lived to this day under the heavy threat of world catastrophe, and most of the energies of my mind and spirit have been spent in the effort to grasp the meaning of those threats, to trace them to their sources and to understand the logic of this majestic and terrible failure of the life of man in the Western world.

In the face of such shape and weight of present misfortune, the voice of the individual artist may seem perhaps of no more consequence than the whirring of a cricket in the grass, but the arts do live continuously, and they live literally by faith; their names and their shapes and their uses and their basic meanings survive unchanged in all that matters through times of interruption, diminishment, neglect; they outlive governments and creeds and the societies, even the very civilization that produced them. They cannot be destroyed altogether because they represent the substance of faith and the only reality. They are what we find again when the ruins are cleared away.”

Jack Witek is an aspiring academic and sometime blogger, based in the South of England. He lives with his pet cat Adramelech, and personally welcomes our new transhuman overlords. @JackWitek

UFO Secrecy, Deep Politics, and the Batman

Silver Screen Saucers

GUEST BLOGGER EXCLUSIVE

By Jack Witek

Image credit: Collider.com

It was the worst of times and the best of times for the opening of the final film in the magisterial Dark Knight trilogy, a film inspired by A Tale of Two Cities. What had inspired James Holmes to murder? Culture Wars commentary points the finger at the films themselves and the nihilistic ‘culture of death’ as Alex Jones calls it, or it blames the 2nd Amendment. Was Holmes a patsy set up or only partly involved, as the alternative research community is arguing? Is the fact that he seems drugged out of his mind in court proceedings an indicator of anything? Or that he was once a star neuroscience student at a university complex once owned by the Army, and a hundred other oddities springing up like mushrooms?

At the beginning of Chapter Three in A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens observes:

‘A Wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page. It was appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore. My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life's end. In any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?’

Commenting for heraldonline James Carroll writes:

‘Apocalyptic fantasies have been a staple of creative expression at least since the Book of Revelation, which, in the West, defines much of the language of the genre: salvation through destruction, cities under attack, angels versus devils, the end of history, and so on. ”The Dark Knight Rises,” with a plot hanging on the detonation of a nuclear bomb, efficiently follows the ancient form, with a 21st Century resonance. We bring our real-life anxieties into darkened theaters, so why shouldn't movies pluck dissonant chords tied, consciously or not, to nuclear dread or 9/11? Perhaps bringing such doomsday anxieties into movie houses is a way of not unleashing them on the world.’

Carroll goes on to conclude:

‘It seems clear that, across the globe today, barriers to inhuman behavior that was once unthinkable have been weakened. Mass shootings are a sign of this — children expressly targeted in Norway last year. So is the plague of suicide bombing that has befallen the Middle East, the self turned into an indiscriminate weapon. Innocents not seduced but destroyed. Blurred distinctions between fantasy and reality, between watching and doing, between war and detached manipulation of technology: These are marks of a precious psychological barrier being lowered. A dark night falling.’

I will be addressing this awful, insulting and borish criticism in more depth at the end of this article, but before I get even further ahead of myself, a word about UFOs and classified energy and propulsion technologies, as after all is this not the cult website Silver Screen Saucers I am very happy to be guest blogging for? To wit, Bruce Wayne, Wayne Enterprises and the Batman embody much of the contradictions, power dynamics and symbolism inherent in the image of the UFO cover-up that we in ufology have formed over the decades. In A.D. After Disclosure, Richard Dolan and Bryce Zabel push the edges in making a map of the world with conspiracy drawn in and Disclosure played out, and in blogging on the official website in an article titled Breakaway Civilisation, Richard notes:

The Dynamic Duo: Zabel and Dolan.

‘With a secret fleet of vehicles utilizing field propulsion and able to explore beyond Earth’s orbit, it is easy to see how the cadre of people involved in such a program would develop new vistas of experience and imagination.

Such a group would continue to be funded secretly and covertly by a combination of public and private funds. In effect, it would constitute an invisible empire, with technology superior to the rest of the world, able to explore areas of our world unavailable to the rest of us. It would probably have a significant built infrastructure, possibly underground and “off the grid” in important ways. It might even have interactions or encounters with non-human intelligences behind the UFO phenomenon. Most certainly it would be concerned somehow with managing the problem of “others” here on Planet Earth. All of the above would indicate that the group members would have deeper scientific and cosmological insights.

Yes, this might qualify them as a separate, “breakaway,” civilization. 

Such a group would have great independence from the established system of power and control, although I would doubt its members would live in a completely separate environment all the time, like some Alternative 3 scenario. Most likely they would need to work in “our” world, if for no other reason than that Earth is where the action is. They would probably move back and forth between the realities of their deeply classified world and the official reality that the rest of us inhabit. Undoubtedly not an easy life.’ 

Not for Bruce Wayne, not for them, one can hypothetically imagine. As an ironic wink, in The Dark Knight the police have a photo of Batman tacked to their ‘Most Wanted’ board, next to a still from the Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot film, and I’m sure John Keel, author of the Mothman Prophecies would have got a kick out of Batman and his glowing red eyes swooping over the hallucinogen induced terrors in Gotham in the first film. But Christopher Nolan, his co-writer brother, and his producer wife, set out to strip the pomp and cartoon from the franchise, like the effects of the Scarecrow’s psychotropic weaponized hallucinogen from Batman Begins, as with ayahuasca which the blue flower compound is reminiscent of, they purged the franchise, reflecting back some of society’s basest elements, most terrible shadows and most transcendent hopes and fear.

In A.D. After Disclosure, Richard and Bryce postulate that what began with the likes of a Majestic 12 within the military as it was then, has since become a private esoteric and corporate affair, the conspiracy of silence, which translates to the League of Shadows and, of course, Batman himself. The interface of old and new money, basically. Directly analogous to the question of classified ‘free energy’ technology and the implications for Disclosure and the UFO, the plot of the third film revolves around the clean energy fusion reactor that Wayne developed and Bane turned into a bomb, the bomb module itself being evidently directly designed to conform to the dimensions of the Trinity test site nuclear device, known as the Gadget. Richard and Bryce argue in After Disclosure that one of the main factors in the policy of UFO cover-up is the possibility of reverse-engineering recovered craft and working out the energy systems that drive them. This presumes of course there are any nuts and bolts systems driving these or that it was an alien disc that crashed in Roswell or anywhere else, and not something entirely different, even if it was ‘nuts and bolts’ as Joseph P. Farrell will attest. Of course it needn’t even be that they directly reconfigured alien technology, they could simply have been inspired by it to figure it out for themselves. Nick Pope has said as much himself, while also flatly denying the possibility of recovered craft. In an articleby Lee Spiegel on the Calvine UFO photo that the MoD had secreted away: ‘Naturally, we wanted the propulsion system,’ he added. ‘And if we couldn't get it, we wanted to at least try and understand the principles on which it might work because that might play into research and development.’ Christian Lambright makes an interesting case for the US military being inspired by alien technology in his book X Descending, which also chronicles the psychological operation known now as the Bennewtiz Affair. Were they hiding Bat crafts of their own at the Manzano weapons storage facility? Richard and Bryce argue that the fear of the weaponization of such ‘free energy’ technology, or the fear of starting a new arms race after you yourself have weaponized it and losing your monopoly of power, could well be the crux of the secrecy.

Ufology began pragmatically, more or less. The pool had yet to be unalterably muddied by the contactees, by channels, by abduction, crop circles and mutes, by the Bennewitz Affair or Exopolitics. This early groundedness was not least of all owed to the fact that the first ufologists were from military and intelligence backgrounds themselves, even chairpersons of whole civilian UFO groups. One of the earliest and to this day staunchest rational advocates of the subject, Jacques Vallee, pointed out in Messengers of Deception, as his military intelligence source ‘Major Murphy’ warned him, that in some cases this was no doubt not accidental. Like any good scientist, with some prodding, Vallee collated his suspicions and paid attention to the uncomfortable details swept aside in the rush to the utopic Disclosure and alien contact. He has never swayed from his stance that the UFO is a physical object manifesting intense energy of a physics known or unknown. Where he departedat the end of the ‘60s from almost everyone else was that he could never take it for granted that in every case or even in most cases they were literal physical aliens from an exoplanet. As Arthur Koestler said to him, hearing the accounts of experiencers left him with the same feeling one has after a bad seedy joke.

Has the UFO been used as a cover for groups on earth, military intelligence operations, perhaps? Mind control experiments? This is again reminiscent of the blue flower compound from Nolan’s Batman films that is used by the League of Shadows. Peter Robbins notes that somewhere, there is a factory that makes the legless block tables that are always encountered in regression accounts despite leading questions, such as ‘describe how many legs the table has’. Well, perhaps. But that in and of itself doesn’t account for the pathological, the goofy, the downright absurd that is a lot of the abduction and contact accounts. In Batman Begins, Ra's al Ghul counsels Bruce that: ‘If you make yourself more than just a man, if you devote yourself to an ideal, and if they can't stop you, then you become something else entirely.’ Which is? asks Bruce. ‘A legend, Mr. Wayne’. And on his private jet, a conversation with Alfred: ‘People need dramatic examples to shake them out of apathy and I can't do that as Bruce Wayne, as a man I'm flesh and blood I can be ignored I can be destroyed but as a symbol, as a symbol I can be incorruptible, I can be everlasting.’ What symbol? asks Alfred. ‘Something elemental, something terrifying.’ Bane, in The Dark Knight Rises: ‘Theatricality and deception, powerful agents for the uninitiated. But we are initiated, aren't we Bruce?’

And that word on violence and meme propagation, on the invidious accusations from Alex Jones that these films are psychological conditioning. Alex Jones, a man who I nonetheless respect greatly, has said on his radio show review that he walked out halfway through the film in disgust at its acclimatising police state propaganda. Apparently the film is nothing more than a giant corporate mind job to vilify protesters, Occupiers, as terrorists and violent anarchists, that it lionises the police and the militarised corporate security state in Wayne Enterprises. Well, in brief, it appears evident Jones was not watching the same film I was. I mean, of the police in the film, the ones on the bridge are depicted essentially as fascists who were ‘just following orders’, the Commissioner is disgraced as a liar, before atoning nearly with his life, a young rookie tries to shoot Batman, and the other senior cop who refers to Blake as an irresponsible ‘hothead’ and thus ensures Bane’s surprise siege, is himself a careerist dolt who abuses his bloated force for celebrity. And Jones says this film lionises the police?

Anne Hathaway as Selina Kyle (a.k.a. Catwoman) in The Dark Knight Rises (2012).

It bespeaks the tunnel vision that befalls great martyrs to causes, like Jones, the very kind of martyr that is encountered in the trilogy on a grand scale. It seems to deny the role of the artist, which is primarily to make art. Yes, it is a giant Hollywood funded production with extensive corporate sponsorship, but does that invalidate Christopher Nolan’s vision and the work of his family and the creative geniuses he surrounds himself with? Corporations don’t care often about the message, as long as they can make money off of it, co-opting it in the process. But Nolan, I feel, is beyond that. Apparently Nolan and co are all paid agents, or unwitting dupes, but what is this based on? The story arc of this final film is perfectly continuous with what was began in 2005, so do we then surmise that they foresaw Occupy and paid off Nolan years in advance? This is pathetic and absurd. And after all, does Max Keiser not fill auditoriums and TV studios to the full with people who cheer his message of ‘Let’s hang some bankers’? I’m not comparing the two, but Iran has just announced it will hang four defendants on charges of two billion dollar banking fraud, perhaps as scapegoats for internal corruption. Selina warns that: ‘There's a storm coming, Mr. Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches, because when it hits, you're all gonna wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us.’ Also, the argument that these films glory in violence is rather weak, and reflects more on the mindset of the antagonists in the Culture Wars than it does on these films, where all of the worst violence isn’t even shown in-frame. Compare to Inglorious Basterds, or the Saw films. The true violence explored in these films is psychological, spiritual. It is all about the dark night of the soul. The comic book inspiration for these films also lies heavily with Grant Morrison’s Arkham Asylum and Alan Moore’s Killing Joke. I remember that David Fincher’s Fight Club gained the same criticism from media commentators, that it encouraged anarchist violence, which always completely ignored the fact that the films, like the Dark Knight trilogy, are a meditation on violence, on movements, on secret societies, of how they become the mirror of that which they are fighting. Interestingly enough, one of the prisoners in Gotham’s Blackgate is seen reading Mein Kampf, with a big fat swastika on the red cover. In Jon Ronson's Them: Adventures With Extremists, the book that chronicles his infiltration with Jones into Bohemian Grove, of his own separate adventures with the Bilderberg group, and other organisations and ideological movements, he comes to the conclusion that while these secret societies do exist, people like Jones – and here he does indeed unfairly and unsparingly and untruthfully lump Jones in with the KKK and other groups – however righteous they may be, are only the extreme mirror of the same groups. I always felt this was an interesting if very overstated insight, but in some ways I think it is indeed applicable, not that you won’t have already heard this same criticism of course. But I am not here to bash Jones, simply to criticise some of his statements. After all, like the ‘gang of psychopaths’ that Wayne refers to the League of Shadows as being, as Ronson found out in his later adventure with The Psychopath Test: ‘This - Bob was saying - was the straightforward solution to the greatest mystery of all: Why is the world so unfair? Why all that savage economic injustice, those brutal wars, the everyday corporate cruelty? The answer: psychopaths. That part of the brain that doesn't function right. You're standing on an escalator and you watch the people going past on the opposite escalator. If you could climb inside their brains, you would see we aren't all the same. We aren't all good people just trying to do good. Some of us are psychopaths. And psychopaths are to blame for this brutal, misshapen society. They're the jagged rocks thrown into the still pond.’

Chalk it up to passion: director Christopher Nolan during the the filming of the critically acclaimed The Dark Knight Rises (2012).

Jonathan Nolan said: 'A Tale of Two Cities' was, to me, one of the most harrowing portraits of a relatable, recognizable civilization that completely folded to pieces with the terrors in Paris in France in that period. It's hard to imagine that things can go that badly wrong.’ In The Dark Knight Rises, you have the orphan child drawing with white chalk Batman wings onto walls, which later John Blake adopts, as it were, and this symbolises the dual nature of the beast, in contrast to Bruce Wayne’s blacked out lone wolf, er, bat. Gotham’s version of the Canadian student movement’s Red Square, or Anonymous’ V mask. What Steve Bassett calls the ‘Truth Embargo’ has been ongoing for generations now, and trust in the state has not only been abused, it has been used as a weapon, if Jacques Vallee and Dr. Joseph P. Farrell are right. People are looking elsewhere for their truth now, even to irrationality and cults, fleeing ‘from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.’ But certainly to the mythic.

Now, some people want to be swept away by the UFO, but do they appreciate the shadow it casts into the past, into our future, of the masks and the marks, and what they are really asking for? ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way— in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.’

Jack Witek is the 'James Bond of Ufology', or so Richard Dolan insists, but you can take it up with him. Jack is a full time dilettante in aforesaid, and generally a reasonable chap. He Needs to Know, and feels you do to. He lives by the sea in Plymouth, England, with his insufferable alien-hybrid cat, Adramelech, or Adra for short. 'Adra, PUT that Man in Black down, NOW!' et cetera. You can catch him in one of the city’s many fine drinking establishments sipping herbal tea and nibbling quinoa crackers with his head buried in the latest UFO book, trying to look inconspicuous yet mysterious and strangely attractive.

See more of Jack's work at his blog site, Unidentified Flying Media.