UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

Since its original cinematic release in 1977, Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi masterpiece Close Encounters of the Third Kind has been the subject of fervent speculation in the UFO conspiracy community. Many UFO buffs are convinced that the movie was produced as part of an official acclimation program in anticipation of an alien “disclosure” event. This speculation can be traced back to the production of the movie itself. On 23 July 1976, after a hard day’s shoot, around forty of the cast and crew, including stars Richard Dreyfuss and Melinda Dillon, gathered in the sticky night air of Mobile, Alabama, to hear a lecture delivered by the movie’s appointed advisor on UFOs, Professor J. Allen Hynek (the famed astronomer had been flown in for a brief cameo in the closing scenes). Shortly after Hynek’s lecture, actor Bob Balaban (who plays the character of translator David Laughlin), began to discuss with his colleagues an intriguing rumour that had been circulating during the production—“a rumour,” wrote Balaban in his production diary, “that the film is part of the necessary training that the human race must go through in order to accept an actual landing, and is being secretly sponsored by a government UFO agency.”

In 2014, I had the opportunity to interview Close Encountersproduction designer, Joe Alves. I asked him if ever he had heard any such rumours during the shoot, and if there was any substance to them. “There were a lot of rumours,” he told me, ambiguously, before changing the subject.

Back in 1977, even Spielberg himself seemed to be dropping hints: “I wouldn’t put it past this government that a cosmic Watergate has been underway for the last 25 years,” the director remarked during a Close Encounters promotional interview, “eventually they might want to tell us something about what they’ve discovered over the decades.” During the same interview, the director spoke with relish of “rumours” that President Carter was due to make “some unsettling disclosures” about UFOs later that year. Needless to say, no such disclosures were forthcoming.

Particularly curious is that the Carter Presidential Library contains no record of the film-loving President ever having viewed Close Encounters while in office. However, in a 1977 Canadian TV interview conducted directly after the movie’s theatrical release, Spielberg said matter-of-factly that Carter had viewed the movie “Last Saturday.” Spielberg remarked, “We haven’t heard the direct feedback,” but added, “We hear he [Carter] liked it quite a bit.” The following March, The Phoenix Gazette cited Close Encounters as “Jimmy Carter’s favorite movie,” noting that “The President has seen the movie many times.” This is not the only discrepancy over the official record concerning Carter and Spielberg. Officially, Spielberg never set foot in the Carter White House and had never met the President, and yet a solitary photocopy of a photograph discovered in the Carter Presidential Library proves that the two men did meet. The photo shows Carter and Spielberg engaged in conversation and is signed: “To Steven Spielberg, [from] Jimmy Carter.” An accompanying White House stationary note signed by White House Social Secretary Gretchen Poston and addressed to Spielberg reads: “The President thought you would enjoy receiving the enclosed photograph.”

This apparent secrecy almost certainly resulted from a desire among Carter’s staff to keep the Administration from being further publicly associated with flying saucers. Famously, Carter had his own UFO sighting in 1969 in Leary, Georgia, witnessing a bright white round object that approached his position before stopping and then receding into the distance. Carter was with twelve other people at the time, all of whom witnessed the strange phenomenon. Needless to say, a UFO-spotting President viewing the ultimate UFO movie at the White House and having get-togethers with its alien-obsessed director would have been a PR nightmare.

By far the most outlandish of the conspiracy theories surrounding Close Encounters relates to Project Serpo—an alleged human/alien exchange program between US military personnel and a race of extraterrestrials from the Zeta Reticuli star system. The story goes that, in July of 1965, twelve astronauts were taken to the planet Serpo aboard an alien spaceship and remained there for thirteen years. In exchange, the aliens left one of their own in the custody of the US government. This story didn’t emerge until 2005 in the form of a string of anonymous emails that were sent to selected UFO researchers, including Project Camelot/Avalon’s Bill Ryan, who created a website dedicated to the “leaks.”

The Serpo story lead some in the conspiracy community to speculate that Close Encounters was partly inspired by the alleged alien-human exchange program of 1965, which assumes that Spielberg himself was privy to inside information on the UFO issue. In the movie’s final scenes, a taller alien (designed by effects expert Carlo Rambaldi) is seen to exit the mothership and communicate with the character of Claude Lacombe via a series of hand gestures. Immediately before this we see twelve scientists clad in jumpsuits preparing to board the mothership and take permanent leave of planet Earth. Roy Neary joins the group as its thirteenth member.

It is important to note that the Serpo story, which has not a shred of evidence to support it, did not emerge until 2005, twenty-eight years after the release of Close Encounters. It’s probably safe to assume then that former inspired the latter, rather than vice versa.

Whether or not there is any truth to the conspiracy theories surrounding Close Encounters, Spielberg’s movie remains hugely significant for the fact that it played a central role in Hollywood’s mid-to-late-1970s economic revival—its $338 million worldwide box-office gross forced crusty studio executives to recognize America’s vast and largely neglected youth market and to adapt their output accordingly. Two other alien-themed movies of the period would also play a key role in this industrial paradigm shift: Star Wars (1977) and Superman(1978). Together, these three films about the wonders of the universe acted as adrenalin, shot straight into the heart of a dying industry (though many critics would argue, perhaps justifiably, that this adrenalin acted as poison in the long-term, stifling creativity and individuality in Hollywood). Spielberg’s film also reignited public curiosity about UFOs as an enduring enigma, and its release closely coincided with the thirtieth anniversary of the Roswell Incident. Just one year later, Jesse Marcel would spill the beans on his first-hand experiences of that event, opening the floodgates for hundreds more closely-corresponding Roswell testimonies.

With Vietnam and Watergate still fresh in the mind, Close Encounters came as a reassuring hug for America towards the end of a decade of disillusionment, and Spielberg’s movie would redefine Hollywood’s working relationship with aliens for much of the 1980s, resulting in movies such as E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, Starman, Batteries Not Included, and The Abyss, to name but a few. Thanks to Close Encounters, what for so many decades had come only to conquer, could now come in peace.

Mention the word “Chupacabra” to most people and it will almost certainly provoke imagery of strange, hairless dog-like animals mainly seen in the southwest area of the United States. They are actually coyotes with a few genuinely odd issues that go beyond just mange. It should be noted, however, that what passes for the Chupacabra today is very different to the original Chupacabra that surfaced on Puerto Rico in the mid-1990s. One of the most striking things about the Puerto Rican creature is that in more than a few cases it has been described as having wings. This is, of course, nothing like what has been seen in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and Oklahoma. I’ll share with you a few examples from my own files.

In 2004, I headed out to Puerto Rico with a team from the SyFy Channel to make a show on the Chupacabra. The show was titled Proof Positive. One of the witnesses was a woman named Norka, whose encounter occurred midway through 1975, twenty years before the Chupacabra phenomenon began. It was dusk, on a stiflingly hot, weekday night and the atmosphere – as day began to surrender to nightfall – was as normal and tranquil as it had ever been. It wasn’t long, however, before normality and tranquility gave way to something hideous. As Norka drove carefully and slowly along the twisting, climbing road, something suddenly surfaced from the huge, dense trees that stood proud and tall, like gigantic green curtains, and which dominated each side of the road.

Doing barely twenty miles an hour to begin with, Norka was easily able to slow down as a curious beast loomed into view. Norka, looking into the cameras of the SyFy Channel, said that only about twenty feet in front of her was the strangest, most terrifying animal it had ever been her misfortune to encounter. For all intents and purposes, it looked very much like a bat. Except, that is, for one astonishing thing: the abomination was around four to five feet in height.

Not surprisingly, Norka could scarcely believe her eyes as the monster shuffled slowly across the road, its muscular legs taking slow but deliberate strides across the hot tarmac. With her eyes transfixed on the beast, Norka could see that its body was dark brown in color. Two large wings were folded tight against its back. The clawed fingers on its hands – that drooped in curious, limp fashion from its bony wrists – were of a distinct, white-yellow hue. Of a near-identical color were two enormous fangs that protruded from its gaping, almost slack-jawed, mouth. Most frightening of all to Norka were the eyes of the creature: focused intently on Norka herself, they were almost blazing, like red hot coals. It was soon gone from sight.

While I was on Puerto Rico in the summer of 2004, I gave my phone number to all of the Puerto Rico-based crew-members on the Proof Positive shoot, just in case any of them got any leads of the chupacabra variety. As a result, and late one morning not long after I returned home, I received a phone call from a woman I’ll call Rosa. I listened both carefully and intently as Rosa told me how, on a Friday night, around thirteen years previously, she was having a night on the town, in Old San Juan, with one of her girlfriends. The evening was normal, fun and just like any Friday night anywhere on the planet. At least, it was until they decided to head home.

For reasons which neither Rosa nor her friend could ever fathom, both developed a sudden and overpowering urge to drive to El Yunque. It was, said Rosa, as if the pair was in a kind of hypnotic haze. Around 1.00 a.m. they arrived at the base of the rain forest and took a long and winding road – one that I know very well – into its depths. They had driven along the compact, coiling road for around fifteen minutes when they encountered something that was as remarkable as it was terrifying: a very strange animal making its slow way across the road.

Whatever the creature was, it was certainly no regular resident of Puerto Rico. Somewhere in the region of four and a half feet in height, its color was gray, it moved across the road in a curious, tentative fashion (as if, said Rosa, it wasn’t even used to walking), and sported a pair of what were undeniably wings on its hunched back. The wings, she added, were so long, they dragged on the ground for a couple of feet behind the beast. There was one more thing: the animal had a pair of self-illuminating red eyes. That much was apparent when it stopped in its tracks and gave the friends an icy stare, after which it continued on its odd, clumsy, penguin-like walk to the left side of the road and vanished into the trees.

Then there was my 2005 trek around Puerto Rico with Paul Kimball’s Redstar Films team from Canada. A resident of a small village that was home to a cool-looking church, one which rather reminded me of an old English castle, our source had an encounter in early 2005 with…well…something. It clearly wasn’t your average chupacabra, but it did end with multiple animal mutilations; so, in that sense, the story has relevance. The month, the man thought, was February, and the time, definitely late evening. He was walking past the old church when an ear-splitting roar filled the air. It came from an area dominated by tall, thick trees and barely fifty feet away. Frozen rigid in his tracks, he stared intently at the woods.

Suddenly, something terrifying happened: a huge, feathery beast burst through the trees and took to the skies. Whatever the creature was, it was no ordinary bird; the incredible size of it, somewhere in the region of a man, made that abundantly clear. The man could only stare in awe as the infernal thing flapped its mighty wings and vanished into the distance.

To keep matters balanced, it’s very important to read the words of Ben Radford on the matter of the Puerto Rican Chupacabra. He said that: “…the origin of the mysterious vampire beast el chupacabra can be traced back to a Puerto Rican eyewitness who saw the 1995 film Species, which featured a nearly identical monster. Though both vampire legends and ‘mysterious’ animal predation date back many centuries, there seems to be no evidence of any blood-sucking ‘chupacabra’ before the 1990s.”

Ben also says: “The chupacabra has two origin stories invoked to help explain its sudden appearance: the first is that the creature is an extraterrestrial brought here by visiting aliens; the second is that the chupacabra is an escaped entity created in a top-secret U.S. government genetics laboratory experiment gone wrong—essentially a classic conspiracy-laden Frankenstein scenario. Not coincidentally, these two origin stories are identical to those of Sil, a chupacabra-like monster in the film Species.”

Ben notes too that in some cases wings have been reported, as have feathers on the backs of the animals. Ben, however, is strongly of the opinion that Species played a major role in the development of the phenomenon. I’m not so sure, primarily because (a) there are cases that predate the 1990s by not just years but by decades; and (b) during the course of my now-eleven trips to Puerto Rico I have had the good fortune to speak to a lot of witnesses to the Chupacabra, and who come across as very credible. What’s important, though, is that whatever your opinion on the undeniably controversial matter of winged-things versus odd-looking coyotes, the Puerto Rican beast is nothing like the one that roams the southwest. And it never has been.

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }