Inspiration or coincidence?

A UFO cinephile examines the source material

During a chat with Stephen Colbert in 2023, Steven Spielberg offered his most optimistic forecast for the UFO phenomenon. “What if it’s us? Five hundred thousand years into the future, that is coming back to document the second half of the 20^th century and into the 21^st because they’re anthropologists?” he said. “And they know something that we don’t quite know yet, that has occurred. And they’re trying to track the last hundred years of our history.”

Time-traveling homo sapiens would mean our species survived. Or at least a portion did. Whether or not Spielberg exploits that theme in his upcoming UFO film – reportedly titled “The Dish,” set for release next year – is anyone’s guess. But it’s safe to say that back in 1977, when “Close Encounters of The Third Kind” came out, the idea of UFOs embodying future-human technology wasn’t on the radar. Everybody knew UFOs came from other planets.

Since then, however, that certitude has collapsed. The possibility of time travelers, ultraterrestrials, cryptoterrestrials, interdimensionals, etc., has given us a new three-letter acronym to cover it all, NHI (nonhuman intelligence). And at least one culture vulture, Paul Meehan, is asking us to consider the impact of possible NHI on filmmakers, starting with Spielberg.

Meehan’s speculation may be tangential, perhaps even inconsequential, but it’s a welcome break from clinging to fantasies of UFO “disclosure.” That ship, at least for the foreseeable future, has sailed.

One might’ve hoped the spectacular ineptitude of America’s new custodians and their breezy disregard for protected information, personal and official, might inadvertently spill UFO secrets into the sunlight. But given the administration’s open contempt for federal employees – military, intelligence or otherwise – any potential whistleblower with moral qualms about sitting on illegally sequestered information has surely gotten the message by now: Not even the handwringers in Congress and their legislative aspirations can guarantee your security, pal. Your daughter still walking to that elementary school with the woke name?

Vision quest

Governance as we know it is just a couple of Supreme Court decisions away from annihilation right now, so it’s kinda hard to give a shit about Anna Paulina Luna’s little JFK/UFO task force or the whereabouts of Nancy Mace. So now we wanna talk about the Immaculate Constellation project? Really? Putin probably knows more about Immaculate Constellation now than the Gang of Eight does.

OK, so our house is on fire. Let’s get back to the movies!

The teenaged Spielberg, who will earn 23 Academy Award nominations and win three times, produces his first full-length film in 1964, “Firelight.” He shoots it in Phoenix, his own backyard. The plot involves nocturnal lights-in-the-sky UFOs and an alien plot to abduct residents from the fictitious town of Freeport.

Thirty-three years later, the real-life Phoenix Lights create a sensation in the night skies, and Arizona residents jam local switchboards with eyewitness accounts. The following day, March 14, 1997, four 20-somethings – Glenn Lauder, Jacob Reynolds, Ryan Stone and Mitch Adams – are reported missing after having gone off-roading in the nearby Estrella Mountains the night before. They are neither seen nor heard from again. Their disappearances remain unsolved.

Rewind to “CE3” and its haunted protagonist, eyewitness Roy Neary. While analysts secretly struggle to decode the meaning of the UFOs’ five-note signal – which turns out to be the coordinates of the mother ship’s eventual landing site – Neary is obsessed with dislodging a vision stuck in his head. From suppertime mashed potatoes to garden dirt heaped atop the dinner table, he unwittingly reconstructs Devil’s Tower, the targeted image from those encrypted messages.

“Eventually, the mapmaker in the movie deciphers the geographical coordinates and figures it out,” says Meehan. “But the Richard Dreyfuss character figures it out on his own – he’s built a three-dimensional model of the target. This is remote viewing, OK?”

The prescience hypothesis

A lifelong sci-fi cinephile, Paul Meehan has subjected himself to roughly 350 flicks involving UFO or extraterrestrial themes going back to 1898 with George Melies’ silent man-in-the-moon short, “The Astronomer’s Dream.” He jokes about being permanently scarred from investing so much of his life in so much mediocrity. However, in that foggy grey zone between correlation and causation, the author of 1998’s Saucer Movies: A UFOlogical History of the Cinema is tracking big-screen plotlines that foreshadow actual events.

“The pattern became clear to me when I wrote Saucer Movies. I call it the prescience hypothesis,” he says. “I’m not saying the aliens were influencing people, I think moviemakers were inadvertently accessing this psychic stuff without meaning to. A filmmaker does something similar to what remote viewers do – they think in pictures. According to the theory, psychic functioning takes place on the side of the brain that has to do with art and intuition.”

Decades ago, Meehan began to wonder if the skeptics were right, that maybe UFO reports really are incited by the movies. Never mind that the first modern UFO flap, in the summer of 1947, flashed in a cinematic vacuum and injected “flying saucers” and “Roswell” into pop culture. Meehan wanted to substantiate skeptics’ claims by comparing sighting waves with Hollywood release dates.

He started with Robert Wise’s classic “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” the first major motion picture to depict spaceship occupants (“UFO” wasn’t even part of the language) walking among us. The film opened with a bang in March 1951, imagining an ET craft landing in Washington, D.C. and issuing an ultimatum to Earthlings.

A whole new Jeopardy category

Given the movie’s hype and novelty, one might have predicted an epidemic of sightings in the days and weeks after its release. After all, hundreds of thousands of Americans with the Ground Observer Corps were volunteering to scan the skies for Soviet bombers. Instead, the massive wave of 1952 didn’t hit until the following spring and summer. As if mimicking the film, the real-life encounters culminated over the nation’s capital on consecutive weekends in July. Just like in the movie, America’s military response was futile. The bogeys goaded jet fighters into hot pursuit, played cat-and-mouse, then left them in the proverbial dust in a display of absolute domain dominance.

Meehan’s research revealed — over the next half century — significant lag times between movie releases and sighting outbreaks. Most notable was Roland Emmerich’s “Independence Day” invasion flick, which debuted in July 1996. But the skies stayed relatively quiet after that, at least until a ridiculously outsized triangle startled hundreds, if not thousands, over Phoenix eight months later.

In his 2023 book, Alien Abduction in the Cinema: A History from the 1950s to Today, Meehan points out that Spielberg’s original conception of the mothership was a black triangle. Upon visiting India and getting a look at an oil refinery glittering against the night sky, however, the director scrapped the triangle for the chandelier-looking deluxe-model UFO that touched down over Wyoming’s most famous butte. Even so, Spielberg managed to weave a black triangle into the logo of the movie’s secret science researchers.

And say, speaking of obscure movie trivia — if you want drunken flibbertigibbets to leave you alone at the next Happy Hour, try shutting them up with the origin story of little green men. Meehan blames it on 1957’s “Invasion of the Saucer-Men,” which featured spindly bulb-headed big-eyed slit-pupiled space aliens. The movie was filmed in black and white, but viewers are told the “men” are little and green.

But wait. There’s more.

‘. . . and becomes emotionally distant’

Sharing first-contact honors with “The Day The Earth Stood Still” is “The Man From Planet X,” also from early 1951. The latter space alien wore a suit and a bubble-like helmet hooked up to a breathing apparatus, joining 1953’s “Phantom From Space” as the only renderings of ET visitors requiring artificial life-support systems.

“Invaders From Mars” director William Cameron Menz in 1953 was way ahead of Budd Hopkins and Whitley Strieber in confronting abductions and alien implants. But it wasn’t until 1968 that the word abduction was used to describe the kidnapping of human beings. That distinction belongs to made-for-TV schlock art “Mars Needs Women.”

“Devil Girl From Space” in 1954 was the first to link abductions to deficiencies in ETs’ sexual reproduction department. Meehan cites “I Married a Monster From Outer Space” in 1958 as the first to offer reasons for genetic manipulation: Female natives of Andromeda are dying off because their local star is unstable, and Andromedan scientists are trying to make Earth-babe DNA compatible with theirs. They even assume human form to trick lady Earthlings. “Knowing the person she thinks is her husband is really an imposter,” Meehan writes in pithy summation, “she stops having sex with him and becomes emotionally distant.”

“Earth vs. The Flying Saucers” from 1956 was the first to explore shooting down UFOs with directed ultrasonic weapons; media wouldn’t begin examining that option for another 50 years. “Starship Invasions” was the first to introduce the underwater bases scenario in 1977. “Village of The Damned,” a British production, broke new ground with hybrid children in 1960, and they were evil little bastards. An American version of the film was tabled because the studio feared backlash from fundamentalist Christians taking issue with the implied virgin births.

Where did the ET botanists go?

“Five Million Years to Earth” offered the first look at insectoid abductors in 1967. But Hollywood didn’t attempt to portray Reptilians until “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai” in 1984. And the classic gray aliens were first featured in NBC’s “The UFO Incident,” based on the Betty and Barney Hill abductions, in 1975.

When filmmakers finally began to tackle the abduction phenomenon at scale in the 1990s, Meehan says the plotlines tended to degenerate into standard horror cliches that could’ve been swapped out for zombies, vampires, Nazis, whatever. In fact, of the hundreds of productions he’s endured, not a single one has delivered to his satisfaction an acceptable portrait of a space alien. However, when pressed to supply his own acceptable portrait, Meehan draws blanks. Maybe that’s because of the evolving nature of the mystery itself.

He points to case histories – to name a few, July 1965, Valensole, France; November 1973, Goffstown, New Hampshire; November 1975, North Bergen, New Jersey; the more famous Lonnie Zamora case from Socorro, New Mexico, in April 1964 – in which witnesses reported UFO occupants fixated on collecting plants and soil samples. These visitors were all wearing what appeared to be uniforms and/or suits, some with life-support hookups. Today, stories like those are rare if not altogether nonexistent.

“Yeah, early on, it was as if they were not interested in anything to do with people,” Meehan says. “I think this was to create the impression that they were scientists who were simply coming here to study the Earth, like what we saw in (Spielberg’s) ‘E.T.’ I think it was deliberate deception to make people think they were dispassionate astronauts involved in pure research. Then this abduction stuff comes along, and suddenly there’s no more helmets, no more space suits – what’s up with that?”

Meehan has a personal story that goes back decades and shapes his pessimism today. It’s complicated. It may involve run-ins with hybrids, who knows.

“My feeling is, we really can’t handle the truth. Maybe it’s beyond our science and beyond our reasoning,” he says. “In the ancient Greek world, Apollo was the god of reason and logic, and Dionysis was the god of un-reason. This whole thing has a Dionysian feeling to it.” Bottom line? “It scares the crap out of me.”

OK — that’s enough. Movie time’s over, folks. Back to the stock market, Dead Brain Worm, and the measles, which are reanimating just as surely as the Siberian mammoth.