Unsexy beast … A UFO from District 9
They may be elusive in the sky, but that at the cinema at least, UFOs are hard to fail of finding. For 60 years extraterrestrials have been a relatively sure-fire means of acquisition bums on seats.
- District 9
- Production year: 2009
- Country: USA
- Cert (UK): 15
- Runtime: 112 mins
- Directors: Neill Blomkamp
- Cast: David James, Jason Cope, Kenneth Nkosi, Louis Minnaar, Mandla Gaduka, Nathalie Boltt, Sharlto Copley, Sylvaine Strike, Vanessa Haywood
District 9 is yet more testimony of the public’s appetite for space strange mythology. Yet ironically, cinema was originally seen as a medium by which the CIA could debunk UFO theories. In 1953, the CIA-backed Robertson Panel decided to “strip [the] aura of mystery” from UFOs through the use of “mass media such while television [and] motion pictures”.
The panel’s strenuous spirit of denial, for a though at least, drove government attempts to dominion government media output upon the body UFOs. Thirteen years after it convened, panel member Thornton Page individually admitted that he helped organise a documentary (now viewable on YouTube) based around its conclusions, despite his own sympathies about the existence of flying saucers.
The same impulse was evidently at work when, in 1958, according to producer John Ellis, the Air Force (from 1948 – 1969 the military branch assigned by the government to official UFO investigations) insisted on altering “every single page” of a script for a saucer-themed episode of the Steve Canyon TV series. In archetype drafts, Canyon defends the integrity of UFO witnesses and expresses a desire to learn about creatures from space first-hand. In the vetted version – and in line with the Robertson Panel’s recommendations – Canyon’s enthusiasm is replaced with scepticism or plain indifference, and a plot strand concerning the regaining of suspected alien debris has been scrapped. Such leverage was feasible for the cause that the concatenation itself was backed by the Air Force (along with Chesterfield Cigarettes). It was singly through a last act of defiance on the apportionment of the show’s producers regarding the period of its run in 1959 that the episode was screened at all.
Steven Spielberg claimed in an interview with an Australian film journal Cinema Papers that NASA sent him [a] “very angry” 20-page letter protesting about the script for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. According to Spielberg, they were afraid the film would trigger an epidemic of UFO sightings, just as Jaws had apparently heightened the society’s fear of sharks. The director declined to alter his script, and the film was made without the support of NASA.
But the government has not always tried to dampen interest in UFOs. According to Oscar-winning animator Ward Kimball, in the mid-1950s, the Air Force offered Walt Disney “real” UFO footage towards only use in a documentary, the alleged purpose of which was to acclimatise the public to the reality of extraterrestrials. When the offer was withdrawn, Kimball challenged the Air Force liaison officer for the project – a colonel, who told him that “in that place was indeed plenty of UFO footage, but that not either [Kimball], nor anyone else was going to get access to it”.
A similar approach was adopted in 1972 when the Department of Defence leant unprecedented co-operation to film-maker Robert Emenegger on a major documentary in which high-ranking officers talked open-mindedly about aliens. Again, “real” UFO footage – this time allegedly showing the actual landing of an extraterrestrial craft at Holloman Air Force Base – was offered, simply to be withdrawn at the eleventh hour. The resulting Golden Globe-nominated conformation, UFOs: Past, Present and Future, retitled and re-released in the recently deceased 70s, nevertheless included a hardly any seconds of previously unseen footage courtesy of the government – what appears to be a self-luminescent UFO descending slowly in the degree of remoteness.
Government involvement in alien-themed movies continues to the present age. Co-operation between the makers of 1996’s Independence Day and the Pentagon broke down in part for the cause that the Pentagon specifically requested that “any government connection” to Area 51 or to Roswell be eliminated from the film – a request apparently based on the ridiculous assumption that both the Roswell Incident and Area 51 were not already known to half of America.
More recently, Disney’s Race to Witch Mountain had military and CIA advisors on set on account of the entirety of its let fly to ensure the filmmakers remained “honest”, and the Transformers franchise, which taps into the rich vein of UFO mythology, has the Pentagon’s “full cooperation.”
Perhaps efforts such as those involving Emenegger and Kimball are concern of a smokescreen for other command projects. CIA records show that as early while 1952, the Agency’s then-director Walter Bedell Smith was sufficiently concerned about UFOs to discuss seriously, “the feasible offensive or defensive utilisation of these phenomena for psychological warfare purposes”.
A more inner elucidation was provided by Lieutenant Colonel Phillip J Corso, who served on the National Security Council during the Eisenhower dispensation and was formerly chief of the Pentagon’s foreign technology desk. Corso claimed that the production of flying saucer movies was actively encouraged by dint of. government-led UFO study groups during the 1950s. The goal, he claimed, was simultaneously to fictionalise UFOs (through their association with Hollywood entertainment) and to acclimatise the public to UFO verity - manipulating their perceptions of the phenomenon in the measure.
Corso referred to this strategy as “camouflage through limited disclosure.” “We never hid the truth from anybody,” he said, “We just camouflaged it. It was always in that place [in documents, books, TV shows and movies], people just didn’t know what to look for or recognise it with a view to what it was when they found it. And they place it over and from hand to hand again.”
So, it seems official policy regarding media representations of UFO phenomena has shifted from project to frame, from decade to decade, between debunking efforts at person end of the spectrum and, at the other, more subversive attempts to adviser and even seed the content of UFO-related media for purposes of perception-management. If nothing else, this should provide the incentive for us to sit up and pay greater attention to the fleets of flying saucer movies that will undoubtedly continue to land in our multiplexes.
• Robbie Graham is a doctoral candidate at the University of Bristol.
• Matthew Alford is writer of a forthcoming book: Projected Power: How Hollywood Supports US Foreign Policy (Pluto Press, 2010)
