Could the black-ops military establishment be planting the truth about UFOs in Hollywood films?
2/18/2000
Flying Saucers over Hollywood! by filmmaker Paul Davids offers a rare glimpse into the great Hollywood UFO films.
Flashback three weeks: In the first FLYING SAUCERS OVER HOLLYWOOD!, Gene Barry and I plotted his re-emergence at the February 12 screening of the George Pal film WAR OF THE WORLDS, at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood. Well, the event took place last Saturday, and Gene was there with his co-star Ann Robinson, and the art director from the film, Albert Nosaki. WAR OF THE WORLDS is chock full of CODE WORDS and details that will make ufologists in the year 2000 bug-eyed if they see it again. The movie came out in 1952, five years after the Roswell Incident had faded into obscurity as a weather balloon. No one had printed in the newspapers that the Roswell debris field was southwest of Corona -- we learned about that about 30 years later. So my ears certainly stood up at attention when, in WAR OF THE WORLDS, one of the Martian saucers crashes into a farmhouse with Gene Barry and Ann Robinson inside, and in TWO SCENES in the film, Gene Barry tells people that this happened SOUTHWEST OF CORONA!
Granted that the movie takes place near Los Angeles, and there is a Corona in California near Riverside. This is the Corona they're referring to. But they could have picked a hundred or more locations for their "crash," and what they stated matches the location of the Brazel ranch in New Mexico -- southwest of Corona. And this wasn.t common knowledge from any of the published news articles at the time the Roswell Incident occurred. Go figure.
The shape of the saucers in WAR OF THE WORLDS is another zinger. Albert Nosaki describes them as triangular, but shaped like a manta ray. He submitted about 100 proposals before somebody upstairs said, "Yes, we'll take that one -- the one like the triangular manta ray." Today, the best testimony we have on the shape of the Roswell craft is that it's a triangular shape, reminiscent of a manta ray (see the Testors Model Kit, and the Kevin Randle and Don Schmitt book THE TRUTH ABOUT THE UFO CRASH AT ROSWELL). Witnesses through the years have stated that the Roswell aliens had webbing between their fingers, and their fingers had little suction cups. Did they get the idea from WAR OF THE WORLDS? Or did WAR OF THE WORLDS plant "insider information" and dish it out to the unsuspecting public? Are these the ultimate "in-jokes" of the black-ops establishment? Was this a usual modus operandi -- to plant REAL secret information in plain sight, in the public arena? As we said in the film, ROSWELL, "accurate information released by less than reputable sources" -- that's not such a bad idea (for keeping the secret).
The best book I've ever stumbled across on the subject of Tinseltown and ETs is a 681-page, oversized paperback by Bruce Rux, published by Frog Ltd. of Berkeley, titled HOLLYWOOD VS. THE ALIENS. The author has obviously spent most of his waking moments contemplating the umbilical cord that connects the world of media with the world of national security. This book, a bargain at any price, can be walked off the shelf for a mere $14, which is cheaper than a brain transplant. And you'll feel like you've had a brain transplant when you've waded through its illuminations that are too copious to count.
Rux has wrestled with a very big theory and has pinned it to the mat with the sheer weight of his ideas. That theory has several parts, so you'll have to climb the ladder with me rung by rung. First, assume that most of the sound and fury you're hearing from ufologists these days is true -- i.e., aliens DID crash at Roswell and the Deep Black intelligence world has been picking up the pieces ever since. Assume that the CIA was created in 1947 in the aftermath of the big secret of ET contact at Roswell, and that the National Security Agency was born in the aftermath of the embarrassing incident of a squadron of UFOs buzzing the nation's Capitol in 1952. The next rung of the ladder was the Robertson Panel, a Congressional hearing in the early 1950s sponsored by the CIA. The Robertson Panel was UFO-phobic. They shut the door, deciding that UFOs do not exist, are not real, are certainly not ET. The panel went along with what Congress told them after spending less time considering the issue than it takes for a high school senior to plagiarize a term paper. But the Robertson group also issued some marching orders that went more or less like this: Hollywood should be used to debunk the idea of UFOs being extraterrestrial.
Presumably this debunking was to be done for the mental health of the American people. In reality, says Rux, it was part of that inimical policy of wrapping the secret TRUTH in a complex layer of lies. A select few (the MJ-12 types) got to wrangle with the implications of KNOWING that mankind was not alone, and that ET.s were conducting a comprehensive surveillance of the geography and species of our planet. Meanwhile, the rest of us were to be put into a trance. We were not to worry our pretty little heads about it. Even if you happened to have an ugly head, you were not supposed to distract yourself from the day-to-day requirements of existence in human society by taking UFOs seriously. Ridicule set in. The famous "ha ha" factor. If you believed in spacemen, you needed to see a psychiatrist. You are now on about rung five of the Bruce Rux ladder.
Now comes the delicious part. Since the 1950s, Hollywood has inundated us with SPACEMEN and ALIENS in UFOs. Rux points out that more of Hollywood's spacemen have been ridiculous than serious -- especially in the early days of movie and television science-fiction. But throughout the flood of movies, TV shows and comic books on this subject, LOTS of information that Rux regards as TRUE and TOP SECRET has been seeded into the popular culture. The examples I cited in WAR OF THE WORLDS are only the tip of the iceberg -- and speaking of icebergs, check out the original, black and white Howard Hawks film, THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD. It's Roswell in the Arctic, with lots of little details as they've been reported decades later related to the actual event. Rux would also include as high on his list the hidden messages in a classic science-fiction film such as THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, directed by Robert Wise. Unlike the horrific three-fingered aliens in the movie, WAR OF THE WORLDS, the spaceman-alien in THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL was a HUMAN BEING, and he delivered a warning to Earth.
Now let's FLASH FORWARD to the 1990s. Along comes a man known as Command Sergeant Major Robert Dean from Tucson. Within the short space of a few years, Dean goes from being an obscure employee of the Arizona Sheriff's Department (with a lawsuit claiming he had been passed over for a promotion because he believed in UFOs) to a national figure in the UFO movement. His face has been splayed over OMNI magazine and his words have been quoted in many publications. His claim that draws all this attention is that in the mid-1960s, when he was a young man in the military in Europe, he was shown a top-secret document kept in a safe at the base that required COSMIC level clearance to see. His job got him that clearance level, he said. The document was called THE ASSESSMENT. Not only did this document tell of the reality of ET contact, with all the colorful dimensions ufologists today like to claim (i.e., crashed saucers, recovered bodies, surveillance of earth by ET spaceships, etc.) but it contained information about various ET species. According to Dean, the document mentioned four principal species -- and one of them was HUMAN. That is to say, the biology of these flying saucer occupants and travelers from deep space was identical to our own -- JUST LIKE WHAT WE SAW IN THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL! This particular ET species (you really could call them SPACEMEN) could infiltrate our population. He claimed that this thought was the scariest of all for the generals with their rows of chest medals. The conclusion was that the PENTAGON ITSELF could be infiltrated -- and how would the folks in the Pentagon know?
Dean is merely the latest in a long list of people who have come forward claiming that SOME space visitors are just like us Earthlings. (I shouldn't say "merely" because there is nothing "mere" about the formidable Dean.) To track some of the other ufologists who have made such claims, we don't need to venture from Dean's hometown of Tucson, Arizona, for Tucson is also the home of Colonel Wendelle Stevens, who has published an entire collection of UFO books, many of which deal with aliens that precisely resemble human beings.
The handsome collection of "studies" or "works in progress" (which is what Col. Stevens calls his books) that were published by UFO Photo Archives of Tucson, have many stories of human aliens in contact with earth humans. The books cover different geographic regions, with a number of them involving contact near the Amazon River in the jungles of South America.
Col. Stevens was the trailblazer of the famous Billy Meier case. Meier, of course, was the one-armed farmer from Switzerland whose collection of UFO photos and videos -- which he captured -- UFO metal samples, and UFO sound recordings boggles the mind. AlienZoo's own Jim Dilettoso, a longtime associate of Col. Stevens, is among those who intensively researched and dissected the Billy Meier evidence. Dilettoso leaned much more toward the case being factual than running in the opposite direction. He has used computers to show evidence supporting the possibility that Meier's recorded sounds and photos are REAL.
The point here is that Meier told us about HUMAN-looking aliens. He said they were from the Pleiades. His particular contact, he said, was a rather beautiful blond woman known as Semjase, who in many visits to the picturesque green hills of Switzerland instructed Billy Meier in the lost history of our planet and its relationship to its cosmic neighbors. Without trying to take sides in this controversial case -- without trying to decide whether it is fact or fiction -- the important point to note is that the case once again involves contact with HUMANS from the vastness of space.
Dozens of "contactees" prior to Meier also told us of human aliens. Of course, we could look to Biblical accounts of "angels" that could not be distinguished from people. But the recent claims probably began in 1952 with George Adamski. Note that this is one year AFTER the Robert Wise film THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL was released, with Michael Rennie playing the spaceman Klaatu. Did Adamski get his ideas from seeing the film? Or did Adamski's adventures with spacemen really happen? And was the popular Robert Wise movie of that day a sort of "leak" of the secret that alien folks like us are OUT THERE? Adamski has been debunked to death and debunked after death. Yet, if you read Timothy Good's recent book on George Adamski, you'll note that even today there's evidence that Adamski may have, in part, been telling the truth about his space visitors. (It's especially intriguing that Adamski described space as looking as though it were filled with glowing "fireflies" -- the exact same term used by astronaut Gordon Cooper to describe what he saw through his Mercury space capsule.)
George Adamski wrote no fewer than three books (beginning with THE FLYING SAUCERS HAVE LANDED) that stemmed from his California desert contact with an alien of human form he came to call Orthon. Orthon was said to hail from Venus. The only thing that differentiated Orthon from your average American male of that era was his long blond hair. He looked like your everyday hippie from 1967 -- but this was 1952! Orthon wasn't the only human-like alien among us reported by Adamski. He called them the Space Brothers -- or "The Brothers," for short.
A long list of famous contactees from Adamski's era followed into the limelight, in rapid succession. There was Howard Menger, Dr. George Hunt Williamson, George van Tassel, and White Sands engineer Daniel Fry. Menger and Fry claimed to have been taken for rides in flying saucers, by spacemen who were human. An extraordinarily wry and bittersweet documentary film was made about these "contactees," titled FAREWELL GOOD BROTHERS. Rent it to fill in some missing pieces in your ufological education. Many of the contactees had annual gatherings at Giant Rock in the Mojave Desert in California, hosted by George van Tassel. In the 1950s, it was the true Mecca of the flying saucer movement, much as Roswell became in the 1990s.
The United States was not the only country to get swept up in the contactee movement with its "human" aliens. There was an extraordinary affair in Spain, which is the subject of another of the Col. Wendelle Stevens books from UFO Photo Archives. It was called the "Ummo affair," because the human-like aliens involved were said to hail from a planet called Ummo. Over a period of months, the beings from Ummo delivered an extraordinary number of scientific papers into the hands of experts. The papers were designed to call attention to such things as the dire Earth changes ahead, which would influence Earth climate, etc. There were a number of photos of Ummo spacecraft (all saucers) with a strange symbol on the underside, like the letter "H" with an extra vertical line through the middle. Most ufologists came to consider the Ummo contactee matter a hoax, and it is today a largely forgotten footnote.
Next in our parade of human-like aliens, consider the strange case of Val Thor. As a matter of fact, the author of the book about Thor is Dr. Stranges (his real name!), and the book is called STRANGER AT THE PENTAGON. The upshot: An alien, who was a human being named Val Thor, was a guest at the Pentagon for some time; he conferred in utmost secrecy with high brass. Eventually, he departed in his flying saucer. Also note that abductee Travis Walton reported that, in addition to unearthly looking aliens being aboard the spaceship that sucked him up out of the Snowflake, Arizona forest, there were aliens who seemed to be HUMANS aboard.
We might also include in the claims of "human aliens" the lovely Omnec Onec, who was a speaker at the very first International UFO Congress. She claimed to be from Venus -- or rather "a different dimension" on Venus. She didn't convince me, but never mind about that. Someone told me that she had very unusual fingers that didn't seem quite Earthly. Personally, I never got near her fingers, so I can't comment.
We have climbed many rungs on the ladder, from where we started with the Rux book, HOLLYWOOD VS. THE ALIENS. How many of these contactee stories are true? All? None? Some? Could we ever pick them apart and separate fact from fiction? Often we encounter some compelling evidence, only to find, mixed-in, something absurd, something that could never ring true.
From Rux we come to realize that Hollywood has played its role in obscuring the issue. From the days of Buck Rogers and Michael Rennie as Klaatu in THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, we've seen more human-like spacemen in movies than anyone but Rux could possibly name. (Let.s not forget to include Exerter, in THIS ISLAND EARTH, who was human except for his high forehead, or the aliens Roy Thinnes hunted in THE INVADERS, who were just like us except for that mysterious stiff pinkie finger.)
Of course, if you asked any biologist about the possibilities that living beings precisely like humans live on technologically advanced planets in other solar systems, you'd be told that there's a snowball's chance in hell of that being true. Human life is at least partially the result of evolutionary processes unique to Earth, some of which arose purely by chance. If the dinosaurs hadn't been wiped out, we never would have evolved, etc. So you have to bend logic and reason the same way Uri Geller bends spoons in order to accept that MAYBE Adamski, Meier, Fry, Van Tassel, Menger -- and the stories about Ummo, Val Thor and even the lady from Venus -- might not be fiction. Certainly it is a fact that none of them were presented as fiction at the time, and some people (and a number of witnesses) have sworn by the validity these cases (with the probable exception of the case of Omnec Omec).
So consider this: Suppose Command Sergeant Major Bob Dean correctly reported what he read in THE ASSESSMENT -- that there are aliens that look like Earth people. Suppose at least some of the contactee stories are true? Then, just as Rux claims, hasn't Tinseltown done a fantastic job of churning out science-fiction that hides the truth by shrouding it in fantasy? Or did Hollywood invent the fiction first, and this parade of colorful characters then step onto the podium to claim Hollywood fantasies as THE TRUTH? For the most part, I'll put my money on the former, rather than the latter. Any time anyone ever mentions the movie of WAR OF THE WORLDS again, I will keep hearing those words of Gene Barry, turning over and over of my mind: "The thing crashed into a farmhouse SOUTHWEST OF CORONA. . . SOUTHWEST OF CORONA. . . SOUTHWEST OF CORONA. . ."
Think about it. I won't, however. Not now. My head is spinning, because this is all so intense. It's time that I climb back into my hovercraft and fly back home to Hollywood Boulevard. See you next week when you log in for more FLYING SAUCERS OVER HOLLYWOOD!