Lights, Camera… Disclosure?

By Bryce Zabel

Silver Screen Saucers Consulting Editor

Exclusive to Silver Screen Saucers from material originally published in A.D. After Disclosure.

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Some UFO researchers believe that the entertainment industry is part of the effort to acclimate the public to accept the concept of alien life. Hollywood, it has been argued, has collaborated with the intelligence community to release disinformation, and at other times leak a few details to prepare people for eventual contact with non-human life.

Certainly several 1950s movies look like CIA-sponsored attempts to deal with Roswell. Researcher Bruce Rux cited 1951’s The Thing from Another World, considered to be the first realistic flying saucer movie, which reflected certain elements of the crash and recovery at Roswell four years earlier. The film’s maker, RKO, was up to its eyeballs in intelligence assets. It was owned by billionaire defense contractor and test pilot Howard Hughes, plus it was a subsidiary of Time-Life, which was owned by CIA-connected Henry Luce. The movie also captured the essence of the Top Secret government study, Project Twinkle, which was then classified.

Some of the other movies of the era look suggestive, also. Several key industry players had connections to military intelligence and later the CIA.

On set: The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)

Edmund H. North, the screenwriter of the 1951 UFO film, The Day the Earth Stood Still, had worked in the Army Signal Corps during the Second World War. It would seem that the secret-keepers wanted to float some trial balloons before the public, and that Hollywood producers were happy to oblige.

If so, their message seems unclear. Although The Day the Earth Stood Still demonstrated alien tough-love, many other movies from this period were invasion-oriented. They included Earth Versus the Flying Saucers, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and The War of the Worlds. Were these also examples of CIA influence? And were they the result of official policy, or some unauthorized leak?

If there is continued intelligence community influence amid the out- pouring of ET-related movies today, it is even harder to know what the message is.

Spielberg and E.T., 1982

Consider the career of Steven Spielberg. When he developed Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977, some wondered if he was part of a government acclimation program. Spielberg has always denied this, saying that he simply believes in extraterrestrial life and knows a good story when he sees one. Although such a denial is to be expected, Spielberg’s choices in this genre support his position. His films have hardly been limited to a monochromatic meme about contact, something one might expect if he were receiving inside information. His early films, such as Close Encountersand E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, both portrayed the Others as benevolent scientists. His later treatments, however, showed no such optimism. Taken, his epic television series, depicted abductions as the core UFO secret, The War of the Worldspresented Martian predators wiping out humanity, and his television series Falling Skies featured the resistance against an alien invasion of Earth. Spielberg has also been behind such diverse projects as Men in Black, featuring Earth as a cosmic way-station, the historical fantasy Cowboys and Aliens, and Transformers, with its robotic threat. The easiest explanation for this extraordinary diversity of treatment is that Steven Spielberg, like other people, reads the literature.

The same can be said for the rest of Hollywood. During the 1990s, TV series such as The X-Files (“The Truth Is Out There”) and the historical conspiracy Dark Skies(“History Is a Lie”) portrayed the government as involved in a UFO cover-up and willing to go to almost any lengths, often extra-legal, to maintain the secret. Both were subject to much speculation, usually either as a means to prepare the population, or else to provide disinformation.

Yet, why would the covert elite authorize dramatic content highlighting their own lies and deceit? If anything, Hollywood’s natural method of operation may work in opposition to Disclosure. Its product is of such uneven quality, its messages so diverse, that any citizen hungering for its truth will receive only confusion.

If the Breakaway Group indeed had been using Hollywood as a means either to prepare the public for the eventual truth, or else to obfuscate and bury the truth still deeper, the moment of Disclosure will have caught them off guard, as it will have caught everyone else.

Bryce Zabel is co-author with Richard Dolan of A.D. After Disclosure: When the Government Finally Reveals the Truth About Alien Contact, which will be published in May 2012 by Career Press New Page Books of New York.

A.D. After Disclosure is available for pre-order at Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.  Join the A.D.discussion at AfterDisclosure.com and on Facebook.