Historic sightings, stubborn skeptics make Tinseltown a cradle for ufology.
3/10/2000
Flying Saucers over Hollywood! by filmmaker Paul Davids offers a rare glimpse into the great Hollywood UFO films.
Hollywood and its surroundings have contributed to the UFO enigma in many more ways than the production of motion pictures and TV shows. The history of ufology reveals that many developments in the half-century-old controversy have originated in or near Tinseltown. That Hollywood would play a role beyond science fiction is no surprise to those who live here. The town has always been populated by outspoken personalities who are quick to use the organs of the media . from newspapers to radio and books . to take positions that are judged to be .out there. by Americans who live far away from the cracked corner of the world situated west of the San Andreas fault line.
We could start with the February 25, 1942 sightings . the night of the famed Los Angeles invasion of UFOs, seen off the coast of Los Angeles, west of Hollywood. The military fired on the mysterious craft. If those UFOs were from space, rather than from Japan (as some at the time speculated), then our ET neighbors got an unpleasant sample of our idea of a friendly greeting on that fateful night. You.d think they would have ray-gunned us out of existence, or gone away and never come back, after General George C. Marshall tried to give them a taste of cannon fodder. But no, the .unidentifieds. were only beginning their history of nesting on all sides of Hollywood Hills. If we can believe the recent book, .TOPANGA COUNTY SIGHTINGS,. UFOs have become enamored of the hill country to the north of Hollywood like so many Africanized bees.
Hollywood gave us two controversial characters in the early days of ufology: Frank Scully and Dorothy Kilgallen. Scully, an entertainment industry writer for Variety, wrote a sensational book at the dawn of the 1950s titled .BEHIND THE FLYING SAUCERS,. and thereby contributed in a gigantic way to spawning rumors of a flying saucer crash in nearby New Mexico. Long out of print, .BEHIND THE FLYING SAUCERS. is the closest thing to a .cult classic. book in the UFO field that you can find. Scully believed himself to be the recipient of factual, secret information about a UFO crash, and the foreword to his book can be read today as a fabulous manifesto against Pentagon secrecy on the UFO issue. The warnings were sounded in those pages like a trumpet call, years before President Eisenhower warned of the encroachment of a military-industrial complex that could potentially usurp the very notions of freedom, democracy, and our Constitution.
Scully apparently got the location in approximately the right part of the U.S.(though he never said it happened in Roswell), but the details seem all askew as we look at them today. He reported a crashed craft measuring roughly 100 feet in diameter, with more than a dozen .little men. aboard who were quite human in appearance, and even had teeth. Although an overnight bestseller, the book was viciously debunked. Eventually, the government went after the two men who appeared to have been Scully.s sources. They were arrested as flim-flam men who had conned some investors with a bogus oil scheme, and they were given a sort of show trial, complete with huge headlines. It was evident that the prosecutors cared far more about the publicity than the punishment, because once the conviction of fraud was announced, the men involved were never sent to prison. They were let off with a slap on the wrist. Scully was made to look like a fool, and .BEHIND THE FLYING SAUCERS,. which was like a revelation of the Roswell Incident seen through a twisted glass darkly, went down in flames.
Dorothy Kilgallen, a popular columnist, became another Hollywood addition to ufology and a possible victim of the ways in which the Establishment played hardball with .believers. in the 1950s. The author got in a bit over her head reporting on the reality of flying saucers. She wrote about the .ghost rockets. that flew over Norway, the rumors of crashed discs in that part of the world, and leaks from sources in Great Britain about the reality of the European crashed saucer case. Kilgallen met an untimely death at a young age, thus setting a precedent of suspicion, where people who become too vocal about flying saucers are likely to be silenced. While such news reports might seem common or harmless enough today, this happened back in the days when popular books included "THEY KNEW TOO MUCH ABOUT FLYING SAUCERS." Cold War paranoia was rampant. If you talked too much, you disappeared.
Similar suspicions have surrounded the death of the mother of all female Hollywood icons . Marilyn Monroe. Many Americans have harbored a belief that her death was not a suicide, but rather a case of murder and coverup. As the years went by, leaks about Monroe.s affairs with John and Bobby Kennedy surfaced. Then came the rumor that JFK had told her .the truth. about flying saucers. There.s even an FBI memo to that effect . one that looks suspiciously real, if not absolutely proven authentic. There survives a rumor that Marilyn was killed because she was about to call a press conference, not just to reveal her affairs with the Kennedy brothers, but to spill the beans about what JFK had told her about saucers and EBEs, or .extraterrestrial biological entities,. as they were called then.
Hollywood continued to fan the flames of flying saucer rumors at the turn of the 1980s by laying the groundwork for the exposure of the longest-running UFO coverup, the Roswell Incident. Things changed when Major Jesse Marcel was featured on a segment of .In Search Of&. The program was followed in due course by very strange goings on emanating from North Hollywood, from the apartment of one William Moore.
Bill Moore co-authored 'THE ROSWELL INCIDENT' with Charles Berlitz in 1980. The book leveled, for the first time, a strong .j.accuse. about what happened at Roswell. The outline of the authors. accusation took a very specific form, with many details (that used to be just rumors) now filled in . in living color. Yes, alien bodies were recovered at the crash at Roswell, Moore said. With some help from the relentless and devoted research of physicist Stanton Friedman, Moore and Berlitz filled in the names of the officers at the Roswell base who played a role in the UFO affair. Moore and Berlitz brought Roswell back on the map, more than three decades after the 1947 incident . a purported weather balloon . had vanished from the headlines. In the post-Scully, post-Marilyn Monroe era of the post-Watergate era, the Roswell ETs had popped .out of the bag..
It was also from Moore, and his regular UFO newsletter that was cranking from his Xerox machines in North Hollywood, that the United States learned about MJ-12. Timothy Good was busy touting the MJ-12 revelations out of England, in his blockbuster book .ABOVE TOP SECRET,. while Moore.s friend, Jaime Shandera, announced the story of how Shandera had received negatives of the MJ-12 documents in Hollywood. At the time (the late 1980s and early 1990s) most ufologists thought MJ-12 was the news story of the century. The MJ-12 documents, which appeared to be a briefing paper for President-elect Eisenhower about the Roswell crash and the implications of extraterrestrial incursions of Earth, seemed to be the most conclusive evidence of a government coverup anyone could hope to find. The documents might have proved to be a colossal hoax, done with the skill and detail that could only be accomplished by a consummate .insider. . someone who knew all the details of UFO history, as well as the political machinations of the Truman and Eisenhower eras. On the other hand, if the documents were real, they represented the greatest revelation of the century.
Because the stakes were so high, the battle to prove or disprove the MJ-12 papers took on the appearance of World War III, waged between pro-ET ufologists and the debunkers. It was a three-ring ufological circus, with the rings in Hollywood, eastern Canada, and Washington D.C. Moore was in Hollywood, Friedman was in Canada, and Phil Klass was the Establishment's man in Washington. As a UFO naysayer, Klass treated this as the fight of his career. All of ufology was treated to months . and even years . of these heavyweights slugging it out about whether MJ-12 was real or a hoax.
In the middle of the fight, Captain Kevin Randle of Iowa jumped into the ring. Though this former Air Force intelligence officer, with a distinguished career service record from Vietnam, was pro-UFO and pro-Roswell, he became anathema to Stanton Friedman because he declared MJ-12 to be a hoax. Randle, who soon went on to write more UFO books than nearly anyone else in the field, in about 1992 was putting the finishing touches on his book, .UFO CRASH AT ROSWELL,. co-authored with Donald Schmitt, director of special investigations for the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies in Chicago. Randle declared that Roswell was real, but MJ-12 was spicy baloney.
Soon, Hollywood would re-enter the muddle. In 1987, in broad daylight, in the proximity of my two children, I watched spellbound as a domed disc paid a visit to my part of L.A. . Highland Park, to the east of Hollywood. The event eventually is written up in IUR (the newsletter of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies) and later as a multi-part article in .UFO MAGAZINE.. I was caught in a swirl of events in which, like a human cannonball shot out of a circus cannon, I land in the middle of the world of ufology. By 1994, director Jeremy Kagan and I were completing .ROSWELL,. the Kyle MacLachlan-Martin Sheen movie. The movie peels back the layers of the coverup like the peelings of an onion. And like an onion, it brings tears to your eyes. It makes you want to shout .I.M MAD AS HELL AND I.M NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE. (Remember the movie .NETWORK.?), like you want to go to Boston Harbor and dump something other than tea . like the final report of Project Blue Book, the Condon Committee Report, and all the rest of the deceitful mind-manipulating garbage that served the UFO coverup so well.
By 1994, I wasn.t the only one trying to sort things out. The federal government was trying to sort things out, too. The General Accounting Office was asked to look into all matters Roswellian by New Mexico Congressman Steven Schiff. The GAO made a lovely mess of things. It.s hard to ferret out any dimension of the case they didn.t botch, except one. They did establish that the outgoing messages from the Roswell base in 1947 had been burned long ago by someone without authorization. (By .burned,. we may as well infer .moved to a secret location that no one will ever find,. unless it.s Harrison Ford doing a sequel to .RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK..) The GAO also declared the MJ-12 documents to be a hoax. No national security violations were involved in the release of the documents, they said, because they weren.t genuine government documents. Go figure.
Flash forward to 1999. A group of ufologists is invited to a private conference in Newport Beach (just a bit south of Hollywood), by Bob and Ryan Wood. Joe Firmage, the ex-CEO of a billion dollar corporation called USWeb, was there to greet the invitees and take them for a spin on his yacht. I was one of the invitees. In fact, I even got to take over the helm of the yacht for part of the spin outside the harbor. The occasion? It seems that slightly less than ten gazillion ADDITIONAL MJ-12 documents had recently shown up . mysteriously. They all dealt with the government coverup of UFOs and ETs. Many of these documents were not copies. By all appearances, they were the ORIGINALS. Very old. And stamped with copious security markings. (If you don.t know about this, stop everything and go visit www.majesticdocuments.com.)
Are we still to conclude that MJ-12 was a hoax? Have the hoaxters been working overtime for years, in an effort to turn what started out as merely a good hoax into the hoax of the millennium? For the moment, everyone.s tongue seems to be tied. Yes, debunker Phil Klass took the usual sorts of cheap-shots. The recipient of the documents (one being Tim Cooper) was accused of being the forger. But the plot had thickened. Documents of the mass and complexity of the new MJ-12 documents are the sorts of things that could keep the federal courts busy for years, sorting it all out and perhaps rewriting American history.
Most of U.S. history will remain the same after the rewrite. I mean, we.ll still get to keep George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, for they were pre-Roswell. But you may have to add the the non-voting, non-citizen ETs that showed up in 1947 in New Mexico, and write a few more stanzas to our national anthem. You know, it won.t be merely .the rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air.. We.ll have to add a stanza about the red glare of the UFO that burst over Mac Brazel.s ranch, and the Men in Black who were still there come dawn.s early light.
In the year 2000, our camera points its lens to the land east of Hollywood, toward Pasadena, home of the famous Skeptics Society. Phil Klass is getting on in years now, and he.s still explaining most UFO cases as being the planet Venus. A newly anointed chief debunker is arising in the hills east of Hollywood, and his name is Michael Shermer. He publishes SKEPTIC MAGAZINE, and he writes books with weird titles, such as WHY PEOPLE BELIEVE WEIRD THINGS. I joined him for a few hours last week, and he certainly set my mind at ease by assuring me that Roswell absolutely did not happen. He assured me there was no Roswell Incident until Major Jesse Marcel opened his big fat mouth in the mid-1970s. So the case is definitely closed, as far as the skeptics are concerned. They buy every bit of the government's version of the case. Not the first version, the flying saucer nonsense. And not the second version, the weather balloon. Instead, they buy the third version, the Mogul research balloon. And the crash dummy report. They love the crash dummy report. It's a big hit. For them, it must be nice to be able to go to sleep at night knowing that no alien ever crashed in New Mexico, and that people who believe flying saucers are flown by ETs are victims of rampant pseudo-science.
Here.s a prediction. The next moves will not come from Hollywood. They will come from Texas and New Mexico. Surfacing from Texas will be the original photo negatives of the Roswell Incident .weather balloon. announcement made in General Ramey.s office. We.ll find that General Ramey was holding a telegram in his hand. We.ll ZOOM IN on that telegram. We.ll sharpen it up a bit using computer chips that General Ramey never imagined would exist. We start to read the details of a secret we were never supposed to know about. Guess what, folks. There were bodies at the Roswell crash, according to that telegram, and they weren.t crash dummies. They weren.t human, because they weren.t called .casualties.. The telegram calls them .victims of the wreck.. Not long thereafter, more files from New Mexico will be opened. You think ten gazillion MJ-12 documents constitute a lot of pages? Wait until you see how many 1947 Roswell documents suddenly show up!
I.ve had a sneak preview of some of them. They.re very old. They talk about the flying disc crash. Some of them are signed by names I recognize from the Roswell case. Some of the signers are now dead. Are these documents to be construed as the work of hoaxters, too? Like those 10,000 crop circle patterns that were made in the dead of night over the course of a few weeks by English pranksters Doug and Dave? The skeptics had better hope so. Boy-oh-boy had they better hope so. It.s going to be their last .firewall. of defense before they have to embrace .pseudo-science. and look forward to a lifetime of sleepless nights. If the skeptics are proven wrong, I will not cry for them, Argentina.
As the sun sets slowly in the west, we.re back in Hollywood. Television begins reporting on the mysterious Roswell files that have surfaced. But wait, we.re getting ahead of ourselves.
This is FLYING SAUCERS OVER HOLLYWOOD! inviting you to log-on next week for your next dose of reality. You.re getting hooked, you say? You ain.t seen nothin. yet! But for this week, Porky Pig of Tinseltown is belting out his closing remarks -- THAT.S ALL FOLKS!