Could the meaning of life be that we're all involved in a game of cosmic tag?
2/11/2000
Flying Saucers over Hollywood! by filmmaker Paul Davids offers a rare glimpse into the great Hollywood UFO films.
After all those fabulous Golden Globe parties that I told you about last week, I zoomed over Hollywood Boulevard in my hovercraft again and set my coordinates for Pasadena. Getting ready to crash (not crash-land, as in .ROSWELL,. I mean crash as in sleep, the big nightly FADE OUT), I turned on my TV to Turner Classic Movies and a black-and-white Woody Allen was frantically chasing after people on a wide field, asking them if they REALLY thought the aliens were about to land.
Woody Allen and aliens? An impossible mix? You probably think that no aliens in their right mind would ever abduct him, upon pain of being talked-at to death about all his neurotic anxieties. Well, think again.
Classical Woody Allen info, Take One: As improbable as it sounds, Woody Allen HAS mixed it up with aliens . on screen, at least. Woody Allen scored a home run with STARDUST MEMORIES, philosophically, if not financially. If you haven.t seen it, I urge you to do so. You need to know that .STARDUST MEMORIES. is Woody.s tribute to Fellini.s 8 1/2, about a director.s self-doubts and struggles while making a film. That.s one of his common themes, and Woody tackled it again more recently with CELEBRITY, which was even MORE like 8 1/2. Throughout STARDUST MEMORIES, people are coming up to Woody saying, "You know, I don't like the movies you make now, the serious ones, but I used to like the older ones, when they were FUNNIER."
At the climax, Woody finds himself at a field where a group of UFO enthusiasts are waiting on the landing of a flying saucer. Woody is there to film the contact, which he hopes will be the great ending he has been looking for. Of course, being a neurotic intellectual, he is a skeptic, and he refuses to believe the aliens are really coming. But everyone else on the field is convinced that they.ll show up, so he waits with cameras ready to roll, just in case.
Everyone in STARDUST MEMORIES has his own opinion or theory about why the aliens are coming and what they will do when they arrive. And at last, they land. Woody is shocked and flabbergasted at this great historical moment. He admits that all his life he's been wrong -- there are ETs from Out There who are coming here!
When the aliens converse with the frustrated filmmaker, they speak with electronically filtered voices that sound suspiciously like Woody Allen himself, talking to HIMSELF. It's a ploy Woody has played before, because he so frequently talks to himself in his films. But here, he assumes the alien role as well as playing himself. The main thing Woody wants to know from these aliens is the question every seeker wants to ask every sage: WHAT IS THE MEANING OF LIFE? The aliens tell him to ask them another question; the one he asked is "off limits." These aliens, who are obviously Woody.s alter ego, unfortunately don.t have any more of a clue about life.s ultimate purpose than any of us poor humans do -- at least no clue that they'll reveal in a blatant and obvious way.
Realizing he's not going to get an answer, Woody asks whether there is any purpose in his writing and directing films. If he can.t discover the purpose of life, is there any reason for him to go on, to keep churning out movies? The aliens DO answer that one. They tell him to keep making movies like his OLDER ones, "when they were FUNNIER!"
The lesson is, I suppose, that if life does have meaning, humor has something very important to do with it. Ufology has been slow to learn that lesson, because ufologists have been in trench WARFARE with the Establishment for about fifty years. It.s hard to laugh when you are virtually certain that some very powerful people are lying to you about very important things that involve man.s ultimate place in the universe.
If you're a UFO writer such as the late Major Donald Keyhoe, how could you find any humor in the fact that the Air Force censors you, ridicules you, debunks you, and discredits you -- all because you decided to tell the public what you personally know to be the truth: that flying saucers are real, they absolutely do exist, and they are almost certainly not from the earth? And, like Budd Hopkins, Whitley Strieber, David Jacobs (author of THE THREAT), and Dr. John Mack (author of ABDUCTIONS and PASSPORT TO THE COSMOS), what if you'd want to talk to the public about something beyond UFO hardware -- namely, the humanoid beings that apparently pilot many of the mysterious craft, then humor is usually even further removed from your agenda?
After all, is there anything FUNNY about alien abduction? If it happened to you, you would find it to be one of the most apocalyptic, life-transforming experiences that any human being could undergo. It would be an experience so immense (and probably frightening) that no human mind, no matter how much forethought were given to the possibility, could easily grapple with it. And post-abduction trauma, reintegration into everyday life, is generally more painful than physical therapy for broken bones, judging from the conclusions of prominent writers who believe the "abduction phenomenon" is really taking place.
To be sure, when it comes to the topic of abduction by aliens, Hollywood often twists it, exaggerates it or just plain gets it wrong. If you saw FIRE IN THE SKY, Hollywood.s fictionalized version of the Travis Walton abduction, you kind of got the impression that all those aliens in the mothership must have been genetically related to Joseph Mengele. The EXPERIMENTS they conducted on poor Travis! Torture! Nevermind, for a moment, that it.s not what Travis Walton claimed happened to him. The movie was supposed to sell tickets. Maybe we can be glad it didn.t. I recall attending the premiere in Westwood with Richard Hoagland. Everyone was fired up as they entered the theater. At last, they were releasing a UFO movie that was THE TRUTH. As they exited the theater, they had quite another impression: The truth, according to Travis, as he told it in his book, would have been just fine, but Hollywood had to improve on the truth, as usual. (Be sure to read Travis' new edition of his book to compare it with the movie. The book is: FIRE IN THE SKY, THE WALTON EXPERIENCE.
I doubt very seriously that anyone has ever had a laugh by reading Budd Hopkins (MISSING TIME, INTRUDERS, WITNESSED) or Whitley Strieber (COMMUNION, TRANSFORMATION, CONFIRMATION). Other prominent UFO writers, from Kevin Randle (UFO CRASH AT ROSWELL, THE ABDUCTION ENIGMA, etc.) to Jenny Randles (SKY CRASH, FROM OUT OF THE BLUE), have all taught us a sort of Golden Rule of Ufology: This is no laughing matter. The stark lesson is that beings from superior technologies have it all over us . they rule our skies at will, they snatch our citizens, and perhaps they butcher our cattle in a gorier manner than we butcher them ourselves. We do it for hamburger. They do it for . for what? For WHAT exactly? It.s driving us absolutely CRAZY that we don.t know what they do with all of the cow tongues and rectums that they collect. (If it.s for THEIR idea of a Big Mac, I will NOT be visiting their planet anytime soon . unless, of course, aliens are not to blame for the mysterious mutilation slaughter of cattle.) The media tries to keep us guessing: Is it the work of Satanists (not one was ever arrested), or natural predators (not likely), or military experiments that track radiation in the soil that shows up in the grass the cows eat (a stretch)? And then we learn that alien races may have, in fact, played a role in creating our religions! The Bible is full of the evidence . just read Barry Downing's THE BIBLE AND FLYING SAUCERS, or THE SPACESHIP OF EZEKIEL. No, none of this is any laughing matter indeed.
Sometimes it seems that the deeper you go into ufology, the worse the outlook gets for us humans. After all, taken to the logical conclusion, the fact that advanced ETs appear to be visiting our planet means that the human race is not in control of its own destiny. That is, unless you believe the message of a film such as INDEPENDENCE DAY. The moral from Hollywood in that mega-hit film: No matter how bleak it gets for the human race in the war of wits with ETs, good old American chutzpah will win the day for us in the end. We'll kick ass when bad aliens come around . IF, in fact, aliens have asses, which is well beyond the limited scope of this particular article.
One new, humorous UFO writer has reared his head lately . Richard Belzer, the actor of TV fame best known as Detective John Munch in the hit TV series HOMICIDE. Belzer certainly knows how to make his point with humor in his new book UFOs, JFK AND ELVIS. The book's title sounds like a sendup -- not something a serious ufologist would be interested in. But serious ufologists should, by all means, read it. It IS a sendup -- and it sends up the bad guys who are pulling the wool over our eyes. It adds up the explanations and excuses that The Establishment has offered for the UFO conspiracy, and it makes us crack up at how stupid those explanations have been. Or, if you will, it cracks us up thinking about how stupid WE are if we buy their nonsense.
One of the toughest "explanations" to swallow in recent years has been that 1954 crash dummies explain 1947 Roswell aliens. Powerhouse newscaster and former Roswell resident Sam Donaldson surely didn't buy it when he heard THAT one from the Pentagon. And the latest is that a stupid math error accounted for the recent loss of the Mars Polar Lander. The guys at NASA and JPL and Lockheed Martin got the metric system mixed up with the English system of weights and measures. Converting between the two systems is just way beyond any of the complex stuff they covered to get their Ph.D. degrees. How many centimeters are there to the inch, anyway? Don't ask ME! But you.d better not ask THEM, either! They're only rocket scientists.
Richard Belzer knows how to belt them out of the park with humor, and he does ufology a great service. He knows that what.s going on is just like the fairy-tale, THE EMPEROR'S NEW CLOTHES. Remember the Hans Christian Anderson story? The Emperor had no clothes, and everyone laughed when they saw him in his "altogether" -- in other words, NAKED. They were, however, supposed to pretend that they could see him wearing a lovely new wardrobe. What many of the humorous UFO writers (and filmmakers of comedies like MEN IN BLACK) are trying to do is show the government in its "altogether." Official Washington can pose and posture and harrumph and be skeptics all they want, but those guys who are making up explanations about weather balloons and crash dummies . who declare even today that there are no GOOD cases of UFOs and no evidence -- they have got absolutely no clothes. Not even a smelly sock!
Now here's a twist for you to ruminate over. Do some of the alien visitors ALSO have a sense of humor? Most abductees would declare definitely not. But along comes a fairly new book from Los Angeles Times journalist Philip Krapf, who worked at the Metro Section desk for 25 years as a copy editor before his retirement. His book is THE CONTACT HAS BEGUN, from Hay House. Krapf was a skeptic all his life, but he declares that in June of 1997, he was, for three days, abducted to a mothership at the far side of the Moon. Krapf says that within this mothership, the aliens (whom he calls Verdants, as in little GREEN men) had built something like a Holiday Inn, to make their human guests feel more at ease. Also, to make it seem like just a big, ordinary convention, the Verdants WORE NAME TAGS! They shortened their long, unpronounceable alien names to easily pronounced English names like Gus and Gina and wore their names on tags pinned to their& their what? Their alien garments. (These aliens were not in their .altogether..)
The veracity of Philip Krapf.s account is something we can explore another day. Is this more Hans Christian Anderson? Or did this really happen, as Phil attests? That.s another matter beyond the scope of this article. I do not claim to have an answer, only an option on the film rights. I suppose the point about humor, though, is that what.s good for the human goose is also good for the alien gander. Meaning, what.s good for Woody Allen and Richard Belzer and the filmmakers who made .MEN AND BLACK. is also good for the aliens. If we can POKE fun at them, perhaps they feel entirely free to do it to us.
The next time you find a HAPPY FACE in a wheat field in England, don.t assume that it was a hoax done by humans. It could be that Woody Allen.s aliens have returned to tell us all the secrets of life. But their point may not be .DON.T WORRY, BE HAPPY.. Their point may be that the joke.s on us! Could the meaning of life be that we.re all involved in a cosmic game of TAG . and we.re IT!
Don.t forget to log-on to www.alienzoo.com next Friday, as our hovercraft soars once again over Hollywood Boulevard. See you then, with more FLYING SAUCERS OVER HOLLYWOOD!