A Roswell book rests on Clinton's personal bookshelf?
3/3/2000
Flying Saucers over Hollywood! by filmmaker Paul Davids offers a rare glimpse into the great Hollywood UFO films.
The evening of Sunday, February 27, was another monkey-suit night at the Beverly Hilton Hotel -- it was the 50th Annual Eddie Awards ceremony. If you've heard of an 'Emmy' and an 'Oscar,' but you don't know what an 'Eddie' is, you're obviously not a member of the American Cinema Editors Inc. The award is their equivalent of Academy Awards -- and their coveted golden statues are the honey of their hive.
When I arrived at the Beverly Hilton, seeing so many editors in tuxedos was in itself a miracle that may rank right up there with Fatima. Editors are the slobs of the entertainment business. They spend their lives in T-shirts and jeans. But from the moment my hovercraft touched down on the roof of the Beverly Hilton and I crammed into the elevator, I was squashed between a dozen editors in tuxedoes, all swarming to this hotel to find out if they or their buddies would win. The anticipated highlight of the evening would be Arnold Schwarzenegger presenting an ACE GOLDEN 'EDDIE' AWARD to James Francis Cameron.
Getting down from the roof parking lot was murder. I found myself packed into an elevator with an attitude -- the elevators in the Beverly Hilton are about the only thing lacking glamour. They're like something out of the 1920s, and you always wonder whether they're going to stop between floors, as if you'd rot before getting to your table with the pretty souvenir book and bottles of wine awaiting you. In this case, if the elevator had gotten stuck, I would have rotted between some major luminaries of the editing profession. James Blakely was there: 90 years old and still working as an editor at Fox -- he does the airline versions of their movies. And other famous editors were all sharing the same cramped space, including my old friend Howard Smith, co-editor of 'THE ABYSS.' Ann Coates was there, famous for editing some of Hitchcock's pictures, and Steve Rifkin, who recently edited 'THE HURRICANE.' Rifkin was rightfully a bit upset that 'THE HURRICANE' was overlooked for an ACE nomination, possibly because it hadn't been released until December 29, and not enough editors saw it before voting. Rifkin, by the way, edited one movie involving aliens that never got released. It's called 'STRANDED' and was made by New Line Pictures. In the movie, some aliens crash into a farmhouse, their spaceship is busted, and guess what? They're STRANDED. (Sounds like an original twist no one ever thought of before, except maybe Steven Spielberg in a little picture called 'ET.')
Jim Cameron was the main reason I had come to the event. After all, as AlienZoo.s eyes and ears in Hollywood, I felt a solemn responsibility to y.all to get you the inside scoop on the man who not only brought us 'ALIENS' from deep space, but also aliens of the deep sea in 'THE ABYSS.' Besides, anyone who could turn Arnold 'THE TERMINATOR' Schwarzenegger into a movie star definitely deserves a life achievement award, and who wouldn't want to be there to rub shoulders with him? Anyone who could make a film called 'TRUE LIES' has got to be near and dear to the entire UFO community. The government has been telling us lies that it claims are true about UFOs for half a decade and counting!
I wasn.t stranded in the elevator. But I was stranded at my table, #104. The buildup and the introductions went on forever. Editors love anecdotes, and they all seem to tell the same ones. While I was waiting for a couple of long-winded editors to get through all the minor awards and work their way up to the big ones, I couldn.t help but flip open the program book and discover the letter from President Clinton to all the editors. The Prez sent his .warm greetings to everyone gathered in Beverly Hills for the 50th annual presentation of the Eddie Awards.. That.s more than he did for the folks of Roswell for their 50th anniversary of the flying saucer crash! Is this presidential discrimination against people who believe in UFOs? Well, not exactly, as we.ll soon see.
Along the way to the big moment, director Robert Wise took the stage for awhile to present the first annual Robert Wise award. It was presented to editor Dede Allen. It turns out that Robert .THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL. Wise is the director who gave her the first break in the business she ever had.
Byron Allen was the funny-man host of the evening. He kept telling us how he tried to persuade Arnold Schwarzenegger to change his name to Arnold Schwarzecaucasian.
While all of this yada-yada-yada was going on, with the background music of the gaudiest 1940s band stingers that Tinseltown could contrive, editor Howard Smith and I exchanged some words about the editing of .THE ABYSS.. It was an ordeal to remember. Howard was forced by the studio under pain of death to chop up his and Jim Cameron.s baby after it was born . and before it had a premiere. It was judged to be too long. That was in the days before. TITANIC,. which proved it didn.t matter how long a picture was, it could still be a success if it involved vehicles that descend into the ocean. .THE ABYSS. had plenty of underwater vehicles. There were the submarines of all shapes and sizes, as in TITANIC. But there was something more--that alien underwater craft. It was so large one ought to call it a mother ship. And then there were the unforgettable aliens. First, the creature of .living water. that takes on the shape of the face of whoever looks at it. Then there were the aliens with wing-like appendages like angels that swam beneath the sea.
.THE ABYSS. was an incredible story of underwater contact. It was already a classic by the time SPHERE came along and tried to imitate it by DNA-splicing the concept of .THE ABYSS. together with the plot of FORBIDDEN PLANET.
Howard Smith says that he and Cameron long-lamented the cut of .THE ABYSS. that was released to theaters. The forced cutting, done upon pain of death, excised parts of the story that were necessary for it all to make sense. Fortunately, says Howard, the original director.s version is now available, so for all of you who never saw the film the way Jim Cameron and Howard Smith actually intended it, don.t miss the chance. Go knocking at Blockbuster or Vidiots.
Among the underwater alien underwater spaceships in .THE ABYSS. is a ship that looks like a manta ray. Last week in .FLYING SAUCERS OVER HOLLYWOOD!. I discussed how the saucers in .WAR OF THE WORLDS. mysteriously ended up with a manta-ray shape. The manta ray is the shape of the actual saucer that crashed at Roswell, if you can believe the version that.s available in the Testor.s Model Kit designed by Bill MacDonald. (See www.ufoalienart.com for MacDonald.s extraordinary spaceship designs. He worked on our film .ROSWELL. as well and you.ll find those sketches there, too.)
It turns out that my friend Michael Stuart built the manta ray-shaped underwater alien craft for .THE ABYSS.. I called Michael to get the details. He built it as a subcontractor of .DREAMQUEST,. Hoyt Yaetman.s company, which built the underwater craft for the film. The actual prop measured about four feet, was made of molded plastic, and was filmed underwater. I quizzed Michael on how it ended up with the manta-ray shape. He saw no connection to the Roswell Incident. His explanation was that it was an underwater alien craft, so the manta-ray shape seemed appropriate. Michael also reminded me that the actual aliens for .THE ABYSS. were built by none other than Steve Johnson and his company, XFX. Steve, one of the best alien creators in the business, was the man we commissioned to built our aliens for our Kyle MacLachlan and Martin Sheen film, .ROSWELL..
I shouldn.t leave out Dwight Yoakam when mentioning .ROSWELL. stars, especially since Dwight was there at the ACE Awards. He was there as a presenter. Dwight played rancher Mac Brazel in .ROSWELL,. and we touched base again at the ACE Awards.
When Arnold Schwarzenegger finally got around to introducing Jim Cameron, he read ANOTHER letter from President Bill Clinton. It wasn.t the same as the letter to the American Cinema Editors. This was a personal letter to James Francis Cameron. The letter was full of yada-yada-yada about how Bill and Hillary are such super-colossal fans of Jim Cameron and his movies. And this makes you wonder. You really have to scratch your head. Which one did our Prez like the most? We can rule out .THE TERMINATOR,. because Arnold is a Republican. We can also probably eliminate .TITANIC,. because surely sinking ships would remind our President of lost elections, past and future. So does this mean that Bill Clinton likes ALIENS and THE ABYSS the best of all of Jim Cameron.s films? Or does he prefer TRUE LIES?
We may never know the answer, but there are some answers the President probably knows, especially related to the aliens and spaceships in some of Jim Cameron.s films. The President has rubbed shoulders with Laurence Rockefeller, who funded one of the most extensive studies of UFOs during the Clinton presidency, in a volume that was distributed not to the general public, but to around one thousand VIPs. President Clinton.s CIA director Woolsey was also .briefed. on UFOs by Dr. Steven Greer, according to Dr. Greer, and surely some of the juicier tidbits made their way upstairs. Most revealing of all, when the FBI went snooping at the White House at the time of the Great Bimbo Scandal, they found a book about the Roswell Incident on the President.s personal bookshelf, right next to that book about phone sex! I am not making this up! In fact, I would make a side wager that it was a copy of UFO CRASH AT ROSWELL by Randle and Schmitt that I personally sent to President Clinton, along with a video of .ROSWELL. the movie, and my supplementary UFO videos such as .DOWN IN ROSWELL,. .REPLY TO THE AIR FORCE REPORT ON THE ROSWELL INCIDENT,. and GOLDEN ANNIVERSARY UFO BRIEFING. I even have a letter from the President thanking me for my generosity in sending him that material . material that any Republican president might have considered .subversive..
So the President thanks Jim Cameron, maker of the greatest film about underwater UFOs. And what about the UNDERWATER UFOs that are the subject matter of .THE ABYSS.? Of all the contributions .THE ABYSS. has made to alien awareness, the most important is, no doubt, the concept that aliens arriving here from distant worlds may prefer the ocean floor to our skies, when it comes to selecting a base of operations.
This brings us to the subject of the best book ever written on the subject of underwater UFOs. Of all the hundreds of UFO books I have waded through . the great, the good, the bad, and the bull . there is only one that is entirely devoted to UFOs that plumb the watery depths: INVISIBLE RESIDENTS by Ivan T. Sanderson. Published in 1970, just a year or so after the Condon Committee Report tried to make UFOs a dead issue, Sanderson.s book is a monumental achievement. You will probably have to haunt some used bookstores to find it. The book begins with an extraordinary event witnessed by Brazilian scientist Dr. Rubens J. Villela during the U.S. Navy.s Operation Deep Freeze at the Arctic. SOMETHING came roaring up out of the sea through no less than 37 feet of ice, and went on up into the sky like a silvery bullet. This happened in Admiralty Bay, which faces the South Atlantic Ocean. Widely reported in South America, the story never made the U.S. papers except as .filler..
It turns out that the incident in Admiralty Bay was once of hundreds . maybe thousands . of examples of UFOs that navigate underwater and then surface to fly into the sky. INVISIBLE RESIDENTS should be required reading for anyone calling himself or herself a ufologist. And for those who have read Milton William Cooper.s book, BEHOLD A PALE HORSE, you know that Cooper claimed the biggest shock of his life occurred while in the Navy. He reported witnessing a huge UFO emerging from undersea and taking off into space. He claimed that he and all other ship members were sworn to secrecy for reasons of national security. He says that.s when the paradigm shift occurred that changed his life.
Of course, William Cooper has claimed a lot of things, and some of them we can take with a grain of salt and sneeze at like a pinch of pepper. He became the King of Paranoia in the UFO circuit of the late 1980s and early 1990s, just as Jim Cameron became the King of the World after making .TITANIC.. Cooper.s tales of JFK having been shot by his own limo driver have been pummeled into the domain of disinformation. If you have any questions on that one, direct them to my cohort, fellow AlienZoo columnist Jim Marrs, whose book, CROSSFIRE, leaves no room for William Cooper.s theory. But regardless of the theory.s flaws and rampant paranoia . and the fact that it embraces the John Lear hypothesis about the U.S. government.s .secret treaty. with the gray aliens . I recommend that you read BEHOLD A PALE HORSE as part of your education in UFO history. Read it for its marvelous description of the underwater UFO that provoked Cooper to embark on his mission as a speaker on the UFO circuit. His book was one of the phases many ufologists passed through on their voyage from confusion to righteous anger at both the coverup and rampant disinformation.
The last I heard of William Cooper, he was holed up in his home, surrounded by FBI agents who were starving him out, and Cooper intended to go down shooting. I never heard the end of the story, or its next chapter, and would appreciate any word from AlienZoo fans who can fill in the gaps.
But the tales of underwater UFOs, dramatized so well by ACE Golden .Eddie. Award winner James Cameron, never die, and the reports keep showing up in the oddest places. And I.m not just speaking of the Bermuda Triangle. Recently, in its four-part documentary series on UFOs, the History Channel featured in Part Four an extraordinary story of an underwater UFO. It was a case with dozens of reliable witnesses. A UFO seen near a military base eventually took to the watery depths near the base and was tracked underwater as it traveled considerable distances . and then it surfaced, lifted off, and soared into space. The case seemed to have more documentation than any other case in the History Channel series.
And that might tell us why our President, with the entire world on his shoulders, still takes time to write a letter to James Cameron for the occasion of the ACE Awards. It will never be forgotten, by those in the know in UFO circles, that Cameron was the man who showed us what.s lurking in the .ABYSS.. And let.s not forget that the abyss of the depths covers no less than 75% of the Earth that lies underwater, a fact that is not lost on our President, the Pentagon, or the NSA. The NSA, in fact, may have UFO trackers throughout the globe and in orbit, watching for the Fastwalkers, as some UFOs are called in government circles . as well as the Fastswimmers.
Well, enough already with all this alien clap-trap. When James Cameron left the stage and returned to his seat, the main awards were quickly rattled off in rapid succession: Best Editing in a Comedy went to BEING JOHN MALKOVICH and Best Editing in a Drama went to THE MATRIX.
And THAT.S ALL, FOLKS! Log-on next Friday for more .FLYING SAUCERS OVER HOLLYWOOD!.