Has Hollywood made one small step - or a giant leap for mankind with so few movies about the moon?
7/14/2000
Flying Saucers over Hollywood! by filmmaker Paul Davids offers a rare glimpse into the great Hollywood UFO films.
We went, we found a few rocks, we came home, and we haven't gone back since. For the last quarter century, since the end of the Apollo lunar program, that's been the Establishment version of America's romance with the moon. We're doing it better, faster, cheaper with unmade orbital photo missions like Clementine, and after holding the Clementine photos in utmost secrecy for about a year, the Clementine team unleashed thousands of lunar photos a few years ago, all at once. It was very reminiscent of what just happened about two months ago with the sudden, overnight release of about 25,000 photos of the planet Mars, after the photos remained secret for one year or more. Regarding the moon, critics charged that NASA's airbrush artists and Adobe Photoshop specialists used their year of hiding Clementine photos to remove all UFOs and wipe out evidence of ET bases. NASA replied "nonsense!" Nothing there but dust and rocks and endless gray, black and white, and maybe, just maybe, some ice in a crater at one of the poles.
Richard Hoagland (enterprisemission.com) gave passionate and eloquent press conference at the National Press Club a couple of years ago to present the evidence of the remains of ancient ET "archeologies" in many places on the lunar surface. For evidence, he presented unexplained reflections on astronaut visors as well as some of NASA's lunar photography taken from lunar orbit. The photos showed what Hoagland claimed were objects such as a seven mile tall tower, a "castle-like" structure above the lunar surface, and hints of striking, orderly geometry that Hoagland said was likely to be the remains of ancient lunar cities. He charged that there's been a NASA coverup of proof of prior civilizations on the moon, and that astronauts are prevented from telling the truth about what they discovered up there. Astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who allows that Hoagland may be correct with some of his other theories involving ET's and ancient alien artifacts on Mars, staunchly denied in a debate with Hoagland on the Art Bell show that astronauts are hiding proof that the Moon was once inhabited.
In support of Hoagland's arsenal of charges, there have been numerous supportive books (not all of which Hoagland supports as being accurate, by the way), such as George H. Leonard's book SOMEBODY ELSE IS ON THE MOON and Steckling's WE DISCOVERED ALIEN BASES ON THE MOON, as well as SECRETS OF OUR SPACESHIP MOON, and NASA consultant Maurice Chatelain's book, OUR ANCESTORS CAME FROM SPACE. The late Maurice Chatelain actually claimed that astronauts encountered alien spacecraft on the moon and saw the ET ships lined up along a crater rim. He said he was in a position to know the truth because he claimed he was one of the key personnel involved with NASA communications. He charged that NASA has been painstakingly hiding the communications and evidence of ET contact and the most mind-boggling discoveries in history. Chatelain implied that we haven't returned because, as a piece of real estate, "the moon ain't ours."
A few years ago, Richard Hoagland invited me to accompany him to the National Space Science Data Center (NSSDC) at NASA Goddard, where we were the welcome guests of the photo division. They opened their archives to us and even joined with us in the search for anomalies. We came away with what Hoagland felt were some significant discoveries of objects such as bridges on the moon, archologies of what possibly could be "beehive-like" ancient habitations, and even a weird, porous-looking, rocky "something" in orbit around the moon, that nearly struck the lunar mission that photographed it. There was evidence of bizarre domes on that orbiting object. I even located a suspicious area in one lunar photo that I will insist in the future be referred to as the Paul Davids Lunar Highway, in recognition of its discoverer.
In a lively, friendly, and spirited meeting with the staff of NSSDC, the staff and even the chief of the division admitted to us that they had no explanations for what Hoagland and his team showed them, and their curiosity was mightily aroused. They were puzzled, and they promised they would try to get better generation copies and negatives from Houston. NASA-Houston's response was as baffling as it was irate and defensive. Not only did NASA-Houston refuse to fulfill NASA-Goddard's request for better renditions of the old lunar photography, but they also took steps to close down the archives that we inspected and made them less accessible for further research expeditions.
How has Hollywood weighed in on the mighty issue of the secrets of the moon? It all began with the first space film in history, French filmmaker George Melies A TRIP TO THE MOON, a silent film in which a rocket smashes into the man in the moon's face. Primitive and farcical, it was nevertheless a big hit early in the 20th century.
It was quiet on the lunar front for many decades, until in the late 1940s the brilliant science-fiction filmmaker, George Pal, produced DESTINATION MOON with input from German scientific talent such as Willy Ley and Werner von Braun. The career of George Pal has been covered previously in FLYING SAUCERS OVER HOLLYWOOD, when we described Pal's black-and-white feature. Released about two decades before men actually arrived on the moon, DESTINATION MOON showed a Hollywood interpretation of what it was presumed such a trip would be like. There were no ETs or ET artifacts waiting for humankind on the moon, in Pal's version.
The 1950s offered one other serious film about a flight to the moon, FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON, based on Jules Verne's 1863 novel, written 106 years before the first lunar landing. The space vehicle was indeed novel. A well-made film that is rarely if ever seen today, FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON was further evidence of how men such as Jules Verne and H G. Wells were science-fiction visionaries who foresaw many aspects of the future before it came to pass.
Nonsense about the moon spewed out of Hollywood in the 1950s in the form of Saturday afternoon serials, the most prominent being RADAR MEN FROM THE MOON. As cheap, phony, and silly as anything Ed Wood (PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE) ever directed, the RADAR MEN FROM THE MOON serials, which featured moon-men bouncing around the earth making trouble for humankind, were nevertheless quite popular, joining other serial fare of that era. The black-and-white low budget sci-fi double features of the 1950s included a few with trips to the moon, where astronauts discovered everything from tribes of beautiful women wandering around without spacesuits, to dinosaurs on the moon. This was done with a level of sophistication several notches below Zsa-Zsa Gabor's campy space monstrocity called THE QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE. Has anyone seen the one-eyed Purple People Eater?
In the early 1960s, Hollywood offered the first serious and ambitious film about the moon since the earlier achievement of George Pal. Special effects champion and pioneer Ray Harryhausen lent his considerable talents to a film titled FIRST MEN IN THE MOON, produced by Charles Schneer. Schneer teamed with Harryhausen on several fantasy, mythological, and science-fiction films that included the space invasion films EARTH VS THE FLYING SAUCERS (which showed Washington DC under attack by saucers) and TWENTY MILLION MILES TO EARTH (in which a Venusian beast, known as the Ymir, attacked Rome).
FIRST MEN IN THE MOON should be of serious interest to modern-day ufologists, for the following reasons. It shows the moon inhabited by humanoids that look very much like Grey aliens, with small frail bodies, large heads, and big almond-shaped eyes. It conveyed large habitats on the moon, primarily built beneath the lunar surface. It also played with the notion that someone had been to the moon from earth, decades before the modern-day astronauts arrived - someone who got there with the help of an anti-gravity discovery (Cavorite) that powered a space vehicle much like the one in FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON. The Harryhausen movie strays farthest into fantasy in a sequence involving a gigantic moon creature that looks like a cross between a cow and a giant caterpillar.
It wasn't until 1968 that Hollywood REALLY got serious about lunar secrets, with Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. With that epic film, the public confronted the concept that our modern space program would, in the future, discover extraterrestrial intelligence on the moon and would keep the information secret. Kubrick's film dramatizes a major space coverup, which Hollywood disseminated a year before the Eagle landed on the moon at Tranquility Base. The space travelers, who encounter the great, rectangular "Monolith" on the moon in 2001, spread the lie that the moon is under quarantine because an epidemic had broken out among the astronauts at the lunar base. The discovery of the "Monolith," that was somehow involved with causing man's early development from ape-man to modern human, is guarded with such intense secrecy in Kubrick's movie that even MJ-12 would have to be envious.
After 2001, there was a long gap in lunar-based motion pictures. The end of the Apollo program in 1972 put dreams of the moon into deep freeze, and over twenty-five years passed before Hollywood took the moon by storm again. This next time they didn't land. I'm referring, of course, to Tom Hanks' lunar journey in Ron Howard's APOLLO 13, which soared away with a long list of Academy Awards. Richard Hoagland would call that film pure "science-fiction," because it avoided any mention of what he believes is the truth - that the Apollo 13 mission was actually sabotaged. The Ron Howard film, aided and abetted by a veritable army of NASA advisors, told the official version of the accident that occurred on the Apollo 13 journey, and the crisis management from Houston that helped the spaceship return to earth with the astronauts alive. Whether there were any hidden dimensions to the Apollo 13 disaster remain in the realm of conjecture and debate.
In 50 years, folks, that's about it. Unless I've overlooked some important feature(s) that escaped my attention, it appears that there have been just five serious, ambitious productions about the moon in half a century of cinema: DESTINATION MOON, FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON, FIRST MEN IN THE MOON, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, and APOLLO 13. Why there have been so few is anyone's guess. The fantasy of lunar travel may have lost its luster early on, when lunar orbital missions, astronaut lunar walks, and roving showed nothing of what was reported by 1950s ufologist George Adamski. Adamski, of course, claimed that he visited the moon in a flying saucer from Venus, and reported seeing forests, rivers, and habitats on the back side of the moon. He even claimed that the moon had a thin atmosphere that was thick enough to breathe in certain localities.
What's your vote? Is there a NASA coverup of archeology and ancient structures on the moon, or are the gray, white and black of lunar rocks, craters and dust all there is? Reportedly, producer Armyan Bernstein (THE HURRICANE, AIR FORCE ONE) recently optioned a book titled BACK TO THE MOON, a fictionalized, hypothetical story about a revival of our lunar space program. How quickly will it make it to the screen? Given the speed with which Hollywood has embraced lunar journeys in the past, place your bets whether we'll get back to the moon in REAL LIFE first, to check out what may be lunar ice in that crater at the southern pole.