UFO-Contactee Movies

[lpetrich]

I wasn't sure whether this belongs here or in Creation & Alternative Science, so here goes.

Film Status Update | They Rode the Flying Saucers Patrick described how he has been working on his film for nearly 9 years.

I have completed a rough cut and am on the way to a finished second cut of the film. While it is still too long for the average person to sit and watch, it’s getting there.

But there are a number of steps yet to accomplish: animation and graphics, music, sound mix, rights and clearances, acquisition of stock footage, etc.

At the beginning of this year, Patrick hoped to complete it by November 20, the 65th anniversary of George Adamski's alleged meeting with his ET friend Orthon in the southern California desert a little north of Desert Center. That is now becoming less and less likely, he concedes.

The good news is, I suspect most of the production will be accomplished by then. It is just a matter at that point of the various hurdles of securing distribution, fundraising, etc., to get this all finished and off to the races.

It should be nice to see, this documentary about alleged close encounters of the friendly kind.

[lpetrich]

Hollywood has done some more-or-less contactee-themed movies, like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Carl Sagan's Contact, even if not as many as about villainous ET's. In CE3K, the arriving ET's act like nasty pranksters for much of the movie, and they implant images of Devil's Tower WY as where to go to. At that geological structure, they then give everybody a spectacular light show with their flying chandeliers. In Contact, we Earthlings receive an interstellar radio broadcast, then discoverer Ellie Arroway goes on a trip through some wormholes and visits the ET's. She comes back with no independent evidence. It is all erased, and she seems to say that believing in her trip is a matter of faith. I didn't like that erasure in the book -- it seemed too contrived -- and I've never seen the movie because of that. IMO, she ought to have grumbled about how the lack of independent evidence for what may seem like a preposterous tall tale. "It makes me look like crackpots and fakers like George Adamski and Billy Meier."

[lpetrich]

Adamski The Movie: Life of 1950s Flying Saucer Contactee Heading for Big Screen - YouTube

Plans for a Hollywood version of the life and times of 1950s flying saucer contactee George Adamski are underway in 2017.

Adamski Foundation Director, Glenn Steckling, has revealed he is currently in discussions with unnamed parties in Los Angeles, who are interested in bringing the true facts about Adamski to cinema audiences worldwide

I've thought that a biography movie about him might be nice. I've even thought a bit about how some of it might go.

It might start with GA riding in a flying saucer above Los Angeles, chatting amiably with his ET friends, and looking at the constellations of stars above and the constellations of city lights below. Then his birth in Bydgoszcz, Poland, then Bromberg, Germany, in 1891. His family soon emigrated to the United States, settling down in Dunkirk, NY. His family's poverty forced him to curtail his formal education, and when he grew up, he enlisted in the US Army. He served on the Mexican border, and over the 1920's, he did a variety of jobs. In the early 1930's, he settled down in southern California and got involved in its alternative-religion scene. He founded an alternative-religion study group called the Royal Order of Tibet, allegedly channeling ascended Tibetan masters. He even wanted to found a monastery, and the movie could include some video of his plans.

The ROoT was never very successful, and he and some of his followers moved to the slopes of Mt. Palomar, home of that famous observatory. After trying farming, they ran a roadside diner, and GA had his first contacts during this time. His first one was in the southern California desert, and he got some of his followers to drive him there. They saw a big cigar-shaped spaceship, or so it seemed, and GA went into the hills and met Orthon, an angelic-looking gentleman with long blond hair and wearing a dark brown jumpsuit. His flying saucer was nearby. They then conversed about a lot of things with gestures and telepathy. Like Orthon warning about how horribly destructive nuclear bombs are. At the end, Orthon went aboard his flying saucer and flew off.

Then another encounter. This time, GA went to a Los Angeles hotel, and he found two gentlemen who seemed to know who he is. He went into their car, and they drove off into the desert. They met Orthon and his flying saucer, left their car behind, and flew off in it. They soon saw a huge cigar-shaped mothership, and went aboard that spaceship. After going past machinery and a control room, they arrived in a lounge, where some very angelic-looking crewwomen were waiting for them. They had some very nice conversation before GA had to go some hours later.

GA made some more such trips, and he became very famous. Famous enough to go on a world tour, complete with meeting Queen Juliana of the Netherlands. He became rather erratic in his later years, once thinking of doing some fortunetelling and once claiming to have gone on a trip to Saturn. The latter was almost too much for some of his followers. He died in 1965.

[lpetrich]

The movie could end with mention of SETI efforts, and the hopes of some SETI supporters of finding ET's as friendly and as talkative as the ones that GA claimed to have encountered.

GA wrote some books about his adventures, like his part of Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953: him and Orthon), and Inside the Spaceships (1955: going aboard his friends' spaceships).

What GA learned on his alleged trips was a sort of cross between Star Trek and some very batty woo-woo -- his ET friends lived in a sort of United Federation of Planets of the Solar System.

But there is a little problem. In ItSS, GA's good friend Desmond Leslie wrote

The latest book to appear concerning the planet Mars has been written by Dr. Hubertus Strughold (This Green and Red Planet). It proves that if our instruments and their information are correct, intelligent organic life as we know it could not last ten seconds on Mars. But Strughold ends by admitting that perhaps we have overlooked “some crucial factor” and really the only way to be quite sure is for us to travel to the other planets for ourselves and find out firsthand.

We have done that, sending spacecraft across the Solar System, and the results have been most disappointing. Venus, Orthon's homeworld, turns out to be a "hell planet", superhot with a superthick atmosphere. Here are some reconciliations:

• GA adventures are figments of his imagination.
• The CIA or whatever did some fakery to make GA seem to have his adventures.
• Our spacecraft were miscalibrated, giving erroneous readings.
• GA's ET friends live in enclosed colony cities.
• They live on the moons of the outer planets, and are referred to as from those planets as shorthand.
• GA's ET friends are ethereal entities, not subject to the harsh physical conditions of the rest of the Solar System.
• "Venus" and "Mars" and "Saturn" and the like are codenames for their true homes.
• GA's ET friends showed themselves in human form for his convenience, like in Contact.

Finally, I'm concerned that Hollywood might butcher it in some way, like having GA's ET friends have some brawls with Men in Black, or showing some spaceship crewwomen in gratuitous states of undress.

[Ozymandias]

I have so far never seen a good movie on first contact with aliens. I didn't think much of either Contact or Arrival.

[lpetrich]

[quote=""Ozymandias""]I have so far never seen a good movie on first contact with aliens. I didn't think much of either Contact or Arrival.[/quote]
What might you prefer?

[Politesse]

I liked Arrival, but it had to be despite the hash it made of linguistics. If you're going to make an academic hypothesis the core of your movie, read a damn book or two first!

[Worldtraveller]

[quote=""Politesse""]I liked Arrival, but it had to be despite the hash it made of linguistics. If you're going to make an academic hypothesis the core of your movie, read a damn book or two first![/quote]
Nah. There's only like a few dozen people who might notice, and they won't affect movie ratings.

Your 'requirement' would prevent most sci fi from being made.

[Politesse]

[quote=""Worldtraveller""]

I liked Arrival, but it had to be despite the hash it made of linguistics. If you're going to make an academic hypothesis the core of your movie, read a damn book or two first!

Nah. There's only like a few dozen people who might notice, and they won't affect movie ratings.

Your 'requirement' would prevent most sci fi from being made. [/QUOTE]

I know, that's why I like it anyway.

'tis why we don't get many Asimov movies, and why this might be a good thing. Lookin' at you, Will Smith and Robin Williams.

[lpetrich]

[quote=""Politesse""]I liked Arrival, but it had to be despite the hash it made of linguistics. If you're going to make an academic hypothesis the core of your movie, read a damn book or two first![/quote]
Was it the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?

Ask A Linguist FAQ: The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

One of Whorf's central arguments in his paper on language determining thought was that the Hopi terminology for time gave the Hopi a different and unique understanding of how time worked, distinct from the typical Western conception of time. Pinker (1994) argues that Whorf had never actually met anyone from the Hopi tribe and that a later anthropologist discovered, in fact, the Hopi conception of time was not so different from the traditional Western understanding of it.

The problem of translatability: if each language had a completely distinct reality encoded within it, how could a work be translated from one language to another? Yet, literary works, instruction manuals and so forth are regularly translated and communication in this regard is not only possible, but happens every day.

I was unable to find anything online on Hopi grammar, so I could not check out what might have inspired that claim. Hopi might be like Chinese, which lacks verb tenses and instead uses adverbs to indicate time. One might naively infer from that that Chinese speakers have much less of a sense of time than speakers of most Western languages.

[lpetrich]

[quote=""Politesse""][
'tis why we don't get many Asimov movies, and why this might be a good thing. Lookin' at you, Will Smith and Robin Williams.[/quote]
Robin Williams played the titular character of The Bicentennial Man, about a robot who wants to become human. This was the premise of the short story and the novel that that movie was based on.

Will Smith appears in I, Robot as a police detective who must investigate some troublesome robot behavior. But someone investigating aberrant robot behavior is the limit of that movie's resemblance to IA's collection of short stories, as far as I can tell.

[Politesse]

[quote=""lpetrich""]

[
'tis why we don't get many Asimov movies, and why this might be a good thing. Lookin' at you, Will Smith and Robin Williams.

Robin Williams played the titular character of The Bicentennial Man, about a robot who wants to become human. This was the premise of the short story and the novel that that movie was based on.

Will Smith appears in I, Robot as a police detective who must investigate some troublesome robot behavior. But someone investigating aberrant robot behavior is the limit of that movie's resemblance to IA's collection of short stories, as far as I can tell.[/QUOTE]

He would have absolutely hated the ending; Asimov was interested in the fear people had of robots, but despised killer robot plots, and in general, plots resolved by blowing something up.

[Politesse]

[quote=""lpetrich""]

I liked Arrival, but it had to be despite the hash it made of linguistics. If you're going to make an academic hypothesis the core of your movie, read a damn book or two first!

Was it the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?

Ask A Linguist FAQ: The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

One of Whorf's central arguments in his paper on language determining thought was that the Hopi terminology for time gave the Hopi a different and unique understanding of how time worked, distinct from the typical Western conception of time. Pinker (1994) argues that Whorf had never actually met anyone from the Hopi tribe and that a later anthropologist discovered, in fact, the Hopi conception of time was not so different from the traditional Western understanding of it.

The problem of translatability: if each language had a completely distinct reality encoded within it, how could a work be translated from one language to another? Yet, literary works, instruction manuals and so forth are regularly translated and communication in this regard is not only possible, but happens every day.

I was unable to find anything online on Hopi grammar, so I could not check out what might have inspired that claim. Hopi might be like Chinese, which lacks verb tenses and instead uses adverbs to indicate time. One might naively infer from that that Chinese speakers have much less of a sense of time than speakers of most Western languages.[/QUOTE]
Yes, the short story and therefore film were based - loosely - on the Sapir-Whorf or linguistic relativity hypothesis. But the author seems to have thought that language could actually create perception in this model, rather than merely shaping it in certain directions.

As for the Hopi language, it does not use tense, but rather a system of grammatical moodsthat distinguish between what is real and what is only potential (and a host of other subtle time markers as needed). On brief experience I would argue that Hopi people absolutely do tend to have a different sense of time than do your average Europeans, but that the reason isn't necessarily language. The "later anthropologist" was Ekkehart Malotki, and I would recommend his paper as a fascinating read, though why Pinker thinks it disproves linguistic relativity escapes me entirely; it certainly seems to suggest a very different way of both thinking and speaking about time than Latin languages lead one to.

Outside of the cinema, I'm neutral on the linguistic relativity hypothesis, but one does not need to agree with it to see that using future-tense-centric alien languages to somehow foresee the future is more fantasy than science, and encourages the common New Agey misconception that Whorf thought language could shape reality rather than just perception of the same.

That quoted bit about translations strikes me as quite silly. To borrow Whorf's metaphor (which he borrowed from Einstein), is it impossible to step off of a train because one's frame of reference would change if one did? Whorf wrote often about "calibrating" between languages, a term which has passed out of vogue in the social sciences, but in any case he obviously was aware that what we call translation was possible; his mentor Sapir was a prolific dictionarian.

[lpetrich]

(The I, Robot movie...)
[quote=""Politesse""]He would have absolutely hated the ending; Asimov was interested in the fear people had of robots, but despised killer robot plots, and in general, plots resolved by blowing something up.[/quote]
Trying to avoid killer robots is what made him come up with a safety mechanism for robots: his Three Laws of Robotics.