In the eighth instalment of the the Silver Screen Saucers guest blogger series, well known Fortean bloggerRed Pill Junkie (a.k.a. Miguel Romero) draws our attention to a little-known Spanish UFO movie...
Platillos Volantes is notable for a number of UFOlogical reasons - not least among which is its bold exploration of what RPJ refers to as "UFOlogy's ugly bastard son - the Contactist (or “contactee”) movement." Even more intriguing is that the movie is based on a true story - one with a bizarre and tragic ending. Read on...
Terrassa, Spain, 1972: On the railroad tracks near this industrial Catalonian city, agents of the Civilian Guard make a ghastly discovery – two male bodies, neatly dressed in black suits and white shirts, their heads cleanly severed by the locomotive that rolled over their necks. With no apparent signs of struggle or foul play, the guards suspect some sort of suicide pact, which is later confirmed after they find a handwritten letter in one of the men’s jackets. The note reads:
The Extraterrestrials call us. We belong to the Infinite.
Thus begins the movie Platillos Volantes (Flying Saucers), written and directed in 2003 by Oscar Aibar, starring Jordi Vilches & Angel de Andrés, which tells the story of Juan Turu Vallés & José Félix Rodríguez Montero, two blue-collar workers living in the last years of Franco's regime, joined together in an odd friendship by their passion for – or rather obsession with – interplanetary craft and their yearning to call their benevolent occupants. The men’s friendship ultimately leads them to attempt the ultimate test: discarding their mortal vessels – their bodies – in order to make the trip to Jupiter.
The film is both social commentary on the oppressive atmosphere suffered in Spain after 40 years of the Generalisimo's rule, as well as the dramatization of a true event which signalled a loss of innocence in the public’s enthusiasm for UFOs and the chance they offered us to look up to the stars and dream of a better world. But more than this, Platillos Volantes stands out in the history of cinema because of its rare portrayal of Ufology's ugly bastard son – the Contactist (or “contactee”) movement.
Indeed, the Space Brothers – and the folks who claim to be in contact with them – have never sat well with most UFO researchers, so eager to bring to the field the respectability that will finally grant them the prodigal-son-like welcome into the halls of Academia of which they've always dreamed. They want to focus on the physical traces, the burn marks, the radar signals and the official reports; but messages of universal love sent by Venusians? Nothing but tabloid fodder and New Age freak shows, they complain.
And yet long before the world became amazed by flying saucers and the possibility of interstellar travellers, there were individuals attempting to channel the wisdom of superior intelligences beyond our earthly realm. At the core of every religion is the idea that such communication is not only possible, but worth pursuing. The Contactist movement reminds us that this phenomenon, whatever its true origin and intentions, chooses to appeal to the strong irrational undercurrents of the human psyche. Some people will never care about irrefutable evidence or peer-reviews; they long for something more basic and ancestral: Salvation.
Platillos Volantes could not be further from the typical Hollywood treatment of UFOs. Not only does it not rely on flashy special effects or CGI to carry its story, but, unlike many movies that claim to be based on real cases, the historical events which inspired it are very well documented and its script is largely faithful to the facts. The Ufological accuracy of movie is due at least in part to Iker Jiménez – one of the most prominent Spanish Ufologists today, who was hired by the producers as an on-set consultant. This arrangement, of course, brings to mind Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), which benefited from the advice of the late Dr. Hynek, who also made a brief cameo in Spielberg’s movie. Like Hynek, Jiménez also had his chance in front of the camera.
But there are other reasons why the serious Fortean researcher should consider adding Platillos Volantes to their must-see list:
· The Apocalyptic overtones which have always been predominant in the Contactist discourse, along with the belief that only a few 'chosen ones' will be saved from the final holocaust to become modern Elijahs and be transported to the heavens.
· It shows how governments might have a tendency to investigate UFO groups, not necessarily because they fear that the UFO buffs will discover some dark secret protected by alphabet soup organizations, but because often times the political and moral beliefs of the people who are attracted to the mystery of life on other planets would be perceived as 'radical', 'subversive' or down-right 'communist' – especially with the paranoia of the Cold War when an innocent plea for nuclear disarmament would inscribe your name in the black list (not to mention the student protests and union strikes in Spain heralding the winds of change, which were being fiercely repressed by the old guard).
· It details some particular aspects of the Contactist belief system, such as the use of 'automatic writing' as one of the most favored methods to channel the messages of the Space Brothers; as well as the strict ascetic regime which was considered necessary in order not only to keep open the 'channel' with the UFOnauts, but also to induce an actual physical mutation on the Contactees themselves – indulging in simple pleasures like a good salami was strictly forbidden. Such ideas are just the new iteration of the ancient hermetic tradition which seeks enlightenment through abstinence.
· Finally, with the bizarre demise of the two protagonists, it underscores why we should all have heeded Jacques Vallee's warnings detailed in his book Messengers of Deception, which have might averted tragedies such as Heaven's Gate mass suicide – tragedies that are very likely to be repeated during the final countdown to 2012.
If what you seek in a UFO flick is a constant bombardment of CGI effects, humongous explosions à la Michael Bay, and scantly-dressed sexy girls working out their vocal chords during each close-up shot, then you should probably steer clear of this film. However, for the smart movie-goer who is also intrigued by the history of Contactism – and who's not challenged by screen subtitles, as are 99% of the American movie audience – then Platillos Volantes is a film you might want to add to your Amazon Xmas wish list... maybe as a gift to that annoying New Agey cousin of yours who never stops yapping about the Pleiadians and the Brotherhood of Light.
Red Pill Junkie —a.k.a. Miguel Romero— is a 38 year-old interior designer by trade, and student of paranormal phenomena by calling. He's been interested in weird mysteries for as long as he can remember. When he's not searching the web looking for his daily fix of Forteana, he can be found blogging, fooling around, & offering his services as news administrator at The Daily Grail.
His residence in Mexico City will grant him front seats to the return of Quetzalcoatl in 2012 — scalpers willing.
I decided to wait a day for my blog, since I wanted to get a few more photos and it was a holiday.
This week we have some new people on island. We have some archeologists here to look around some of our buildings that are going to have lead paint remediation around them. Since lead paint has been peeling off of buildings since they put the cable houses here in 1903, they'll have to remediate a lot of the soil around those buildings. The archeologists are just making sure that historical artifacts are preserved before the work is done.
Michelle and Chris with the USGS, came to band the Laysan ducks. Many of the bands put on a few years ago, aren't readable anymore. Hopefully, they'll change out most of those old ones and band a lot of our younger ducks so we can get a better idea of our duck health and population.
Other than that, it's been hot for October. It made digging the well on Eastern Island a bit more difficult, but since I'm not out in the field all day, I kind of like it that way.
Here's the Gulfstream IIB bringing our mail (and people and supplies).
This is one of the cable houses that the archeologists are digging around. I don't think they've found too much interesting stuff yet.
This Laysan duck was standing just outside the garage on Friday, so I took some photos of his band. This band actually started out green with white letters. Now, it's just white. I hope Michelle finds him again to reband him.
We went back to finish the well on Eastern Island. We didn't get it as deep as we wanted, because the sand kept caving in, but hopefully it's deep enough.
Done! (Except for putting in the pump, running the hose, putting up the solar panels, and all that.)
This big plastic thing will be a little duck pond. We'll have a rain catching roof above it to keep it full of water. These "guzzlers" are a lot less likely to have botulism problems. We'll be using the new well to fill that big tank behind.
I was out riding around today and saw some White-tailed tropicbirds flying around the orchard. We only have a few of these around and the only way I notice them, apart from all of the other thousands of white birds that fly around, is to hear them. They sound almost like a Red-tailed tropicbird, but different enough to notice.
They are really pretty birds. They nest in the ironwood trees, unlike the red-tailed tropicbirds, that nest on the ground.
An early pioneer in the research of anomalous phenomena - from ghosts to UFOs and everything in between - Charles Fort is to get his very own eponymously titled Hollywood movie.
Charles Fort is to be produced by Robert Zemeckis for Universal Pictures and adapted from the 2002 Dark Horse Comics series Fort: Prophet of the Unexplained, which portrayed Fort as an adventurous investigator pursuing aliens and murderers in turn-of-the-19th-century New York City.
"Fort, which is being described by some who know the material as a "period Ghostbusters," is the first project set up under Zemeckis and his Imagemovers' newly minted first-look deal with the studio [Universal].
Charles Fort was an early-twentieth-century American researcher and writer whose focus was "anomalous phenomena" and the unexplained. Books Fort wrote such as The Book of the Damned (1919) and New Lands (1923) were some of the first to explore everything from levitation and teleportation to alien abduction and other paranormal pursuits. Fort was essentially a curious skeptic who enjoyed collecting data to support explanations for things that he felt were no less possible than the scientifically accepted ones.
In addition to Zemeckis, Dark Horse's Mike Richardson is producing the film, as are Imagemovers partners Jack Rapke and Steve Starkey."
Will Charles Fort be embraced by Forteans and UFOlogists? Or will it be seen as an unforgivably sensationalised distortion of the life and achievements of a true trailblazer in the world of the weird? We'll find out for sure when the movie hits cinemas sometime in 2013.
As Hollywood’s first Area 51 movie – creatively entitled Area 51 – edges nearer to the big screen (no official US release date has yet been set, though it is expected sometime in Spring, 2012), over at The Presidents UFO Website, tireless researcher Grant Cameron has a new, in-depth paper about Area 51 and the Bob Lazar S-4 story.
It’s a must-read for any student of UFOlogy – especially those who are interested in the government’s covert efforts to manipulate media representations of UFOs. In this context, Grant revisits two cases involving filmmaker Robert Emenegger: the bizarre 1988 TV broadcast of UFO Cover-up Live, and the 1974 government-backed documentary UFOs: Past Present and Future. And there’s a whole lot more besides in Grant’s epic article, so check it out.
In 1953, director William Cameron Menzies gave the world Invaders from Mars – a fascinating if typically clunky addition to what was then the burgeoning UFO subgenre. The movie did what it said on the tin: there were invaders, and they were from Mars, and – aside from the film’s none-too-subtle communist invasion allegory (then obligatory for movies of its ilk) – that was pretty much it. Yet Invaders from Mars bears closer scrutiny from a UFOlogical perspective, with one scene in particular screaming out for analysis.
The scene in question sees the film’s hero – an implausibly square-jawed astronomer – declare the Martians’ arrival as no surprise. He explains that the government has been studying the saucers for a number of years and is well aware that they are extraterrestrial in origin.
In the fashion of a public service announcement, the astronomer goes on to describe various real-life cases catalogued by the Air Force’s “Project Saucer” (officially named Project Sign), including the UFO-related death of Captain Thomas Mantell in 1948 and the “Lubbock Lights” of 1951. The astronomer illustrates his eight-minute lecture with genuine news-clippings and UFO photographs: “Life can, and does, exist on other planets,” he intones, before displaying scale models of the multiple saucer types he says are known to exist by the Air Force.
This lengthy scene clearly was devoid of narrative function and it did not appear in the US theatrical cut of the film. That it was scripted and shot at all raises questions about the possibility of subversive government involvement in the filmmaking process – a notion that cannot easily be dismissed in light of the US government's documented historical efforts to manipulate the content of Hollywood's UFO movies. Such efforts typically were geared towards debunking the UFO phenomenon; in a few select cases, however, the objective apparently was to acclimate the public to the notion of UFO reality (with the Robert Emenegger case of the early 1970s standing as perhaps the best example of this approach).
Watch the Invaders from Mars scene (as well as the rest of the movie) and see if you're not intrigued...
