April 9, 2026 • 49 mins
In this episode of Sound, Light & Frequency, Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman dig into the true origins of UFO storytelling in Hollywood, using The Day the Earth Stood Still as a gateway—but quickly expanding the conversation into the earliest days of flying saucer cinema. They trace the genre back to the little-known film Flying Saucer, whose director controversially claimed to be using real footage, blurring the line between fiction and reality right from the start. From there, the discussion moves into the cultural shockwaves of the early 1950s, including the famous Washington, D.C. overflights of 1952, and how that very real moment of national anxiety echoed through films like The War of the Worlds and The Thing from Another World. As Bryce and Brent point out, these weren’t just monster movies—they were reflections of a society trying to process the possibility that something unknown might already be here.
Along the way, the episode takes on the kind of personal, unpredictable turns that define the series. Bryce shares a “Wonder Years”-style story from his childhood, where basement magazine skirmishes led him to his first encounter with the famous McMinnville UFO photos—taken just miles from where he grew up—and sparked a lifelong fascination. Brent, in turn, reveals a far more recent and unsettling connection: his own daughter quietly experienced a UFO sighting years ago, only choosing to share it with him much later. These stories feed directly into a broader conversation about ontological shock—what happens when people confront something that doesn’t fit their understanding of reality—and how both Hollywood and real life struggle to process it.
The episode also leans into the fun and friction of Bryce and Brent’s dynamic, including a spirited disagreement over the merits of the 2008 remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still. But beneath that debate is a deeper question that runs throughout the hour: were these films simply products of their time, or part of a longer continuum of storytelling that has been preparing us—intentionally or not—for the idea of contact? By the end, Days the Earth Stood Still becomes less about a single movie and more about a series of moments—on screen and off—where reality and imagination begin to blur, and where the biggest question of all keeps resurfacing: what if the story we’ve been watching for decades isn’t just a story?
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
The production designer of the film, consulted Frank Lloyd Wright
to come up with the perfect minimal semless design of
Clatu Saucer, and he quoted to imitate an experimental substance
that I have heard about, which acts like living tissue.
If cut, the rift would appear like a wound, leaving
a continuous surface with no scar. Well, people are talking
(00:22):
about biologics right now, right David Grush it's his favorite
new word, biologics.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Well, I love that. Frank Lloyd Wright said that he's
heard about Yeah, from who where?
Speaker 1 (00:52):
I'm Bryce Able. Have you ever wondered if there's a
secret connection between Hollywood and UFOs.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
I'm Brent Friedman, and you are listening to sound, light
and frequency.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
In this episode, we'll be talking about the Flying Saucer
movies of the nineteen fifties, one invasion after another.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
We're also going to reveal the origins of the unholy
alliance between Hollywood and the government to control the UFO narrative.
You know, I don't know.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
It seems like Hollywood watched nineteen forty seven's coming out
party for UFOs, and instead of seeing what was really
going on, they saw little green men and they knew
right away that we better start making some product to
make some business out of this. It didn't hurt by
the way, that the US military at the time, which
was reeling from its new roswell portfolio, thought about showbiz
(01:44):
a lot. Sometimes they wanted to stop projects, sometimes they
wanted to give them a boost. But it turned out
that in the nineteen fifties a series of mostly black
and white movies were released, and a lot of times
they had ideas that were a lot bigger than their
production budgets. Them are a little hard to watch sometimes,
but in total, if you look at all of them,
(02:04):
they're kind of a mess of camp and greed and
duplicity and misdirection and lies. And yet at the bottom
of that swamp there are some stories that were produced
that float ideas about UFOs and the phenomenon that are
still with us today. So listen, I just want to
make clear as we start talking about this, Brent, that
neither of us were alive when the first of these
(02:27):
movies were being made. So I'm kind of curious, how
did you see him in the first place.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
When I was growing up, there used to be on
Saturday afternoons on UHF channels a lot of these old
black and white movies, a lot of these science fiction
movies would play, and if I was inside watching television,
i'd flip into them. And I don't know that I
ever saw a full movie in my childhood. I'd see
(02:51):
bits and pieces of them, and they scared me as
a young kid. They were strange and weird and they
didn't make a lot of sense to me. And it
wasn't an until much later that I really developed a
taste for science fiction when I could intellectually handle it.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
You know, I didn't see any of them in any
regular way at all. In fact, the only movie I
ever tried to stay up for as a kid, I
remember setting my alarm and going to watch King Kong
Versus No, just King Kong, King Kong at three am
on the local TV station. But when I first saw
my first Flying Saucer movie, I think I got this right.
(03:26):
I was kind of a stoner college student at the moment,
and I believe I watched The Day There Stood Still
at about two am on one of the local television stations,
and I thought it was pretty good at the time,
but then again, who knows. And then over the years.
Because I've cared about this whole topic and everything, I've
seen a lot more of them, and I know that
I watched a lot, not a lot, but more than
(03:48):
a few. In preparation for this. I gave him a rewatch.
That was kind of a process. What did you think
seeing these things in twenty twenty six some of them,
now that I went back and watched, I asked, saw
on Mystery Science Theater two thousand and that was probably
my first encounter with some of these, the really campy ones,
so they already struck me as very humorous.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
It was hard to take them seriously. But it's interesting
you mentioned seeing the Day the Ear Stood Still, and
that actually was one of the first movies I watched
in full, and that was on a midnight show back
in the Bay Area when I grew up, called Creature Features,
and I specifically remember we had a babysitter one night
and I snuck out of bed. I was supposed to
(04:32):
be asleep at nine years old or whenever it was,
and I snuck out of bed to watch Creature Features
and Day the Earth Stood Still was on, and I
watched about the first thirty minutes of it, and when
gort started shooting people with his lasers. I quickly turned
off the television, went back to bed and had a nightmare.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
Well, sorry that happened. Listen, We're going to get back
to the day the ear stood still very soon. I
just want to paint a picture for people. Literally. These
movies started in nineteen fifty with a movie called The
Flying Saucer. And in order to really appreciate where we
were at that time, you have to appreciate how flying
(05:10):
saucers actually got their start. A few years earlier. In
June of nineteen forty seven, a guy named Kenneth Arnold
saw some flying saucers flying across Washington State and he said,
when he was asked by reporters about it, that they
skipped like a saucer, and the reporters picked it up
and called them flying saucers. And you know how it is,
(05:31):
when a title sticks, it sticks. So it's interesting because
you kind of live up there right now, do you
feel like you're in a saucer hotbed?
Speaker 2 (05:40):
As a matter of fact, I did a little research
on this, and it turns out that Washington State is
actually still very much a UFO hotbed. And to case
in point, I live on Woidbey Island, which is one
of the islands in the in Puget Sound, and apparently
the island is one of the most densely reported in
(06:03):
terms of UFO incidents.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
And do you know why, I'm just gonna throw a
wild guests out there, does have anything.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
To do with the navy, It actually does, right there
is a naval air station on the north end of
the island. And it turns out that there's been since
two thousand and I think five thirty cases, more than
thirty cases that have been reported just on Widby Island alone,
and most of them on the north end of the
(06:29):
island where the naval air station is. And I will
say also that I found out only a few years
ago that my daughter saw a UFO with a friend
of hers when she was eleven, and they were having
a sleepover at her friend's house, sleeping outside one summer
night on a trampoline, and about three in the morning,
they were still up talking and all of a sudden,
(06:50):
a huge craft with spinning lights, I mean just a
classic flying saucer hovered right over them and turned on
a bright light. They both looked at each other. They
didn't understand what was happening. And the next thing they
remember is they both woke up the next morning and
they thought it was a dream until they discussed it
with each other, and they decided, we can't tell any
adults because the adults told us we had to be
(07:12):
asleep by midnight, and this happened at three am and
we were still talking, so we're not going to tell anybody.
So she didn't tell me until years later, and when
she did tell me, I got very interested in, well,
how many cases are there up here? And that's when
I found out, oh, there's actually a lot because of
the Naval air station. So I went to a MOOFON
meeting a few years ago, and I'm not going to
(07:32):
go into that right now, but there we'll post on
our website a link to the article about that meeting.
It was packed, there was seventy five people in the room,
and there was a case being presented as really fascinating.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
Moufon of course, being the Mutual UFO Network, which is
kind of the There been many UFO organizations over the years.
This is the big daddy right now.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
This is this civilian research group. I think it was
founded in sixty nine.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
Yeah, yeah, So, just to set the stage just a
tiny bit more so, you got Kenneth Arnold up in
Washington State. And then that same year, two weeks after
Kenneth Arnold set the world on fire with these flying saucers.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
We have the Roswell case.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
Supposedly a craft crashed outside of America's only nuclear bomber
base in Roswell, New Mexico, in July of nineteen forty seven,
and the military even put out a press release acknowledging it.
But then, of course, the very next day they said,
never mind, it was just a weather balloon, which has
always left people like you and me, Brent, saying, well,
(08:32):
let me get this straight. These people were trusted with
the nuclear weapons of the United States of America, but
the intelligent wing of that group could not tell the
difference between a flying saucer from another civilization and a
weather balloon.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
Seems kind of odd. The whole story just throws Jesse
Marcel under.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
The bus, totally does so if you do a.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
Deep dive on him, you will see that it just
holds no water whatsoever.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
But the point everyone has to remember about nineteen forty
seven is it was a time of radical change. In
the world and in America, it was a mix of
great anxiety and great promise. World War II, by the way,
just think about it. The people that went into World
War Two didn't experience these things, but the people came
out had seen nuclear weapons, jets, raucous computers, and secrecy.
(09:20):
All these things became part of a society at that point.
So that takes us to nineteen fifty, which is kind
of intriguing because not only is it the beginning of
a new decade, but it's also the beginning of flying
Saucer movies.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
And I just.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
Wanted to tell a quick nineteen fifty story. And again
I point out I was not alive for that, but
my family had moved from the Midwest to the Pacific
Northwest at the time, and my brother was born in
Oregon when they did that, my older brother. But what
was interesting is flash forward twelve years or so from that.
I'm just a kid now, and we were playing magazine
(09:55):
fights in the basement, all right. That's when you would
take a life for a Look magazine and you would
roll it up and then you would pretend like they
were lightsabers and you'd be smashing them against each other.
We didn't have video games or anything, so that was
pretty good stuff for the time. But here's what's interesting.
So I'm rolling up a magazine and I'm going to
actually show it for the people who have watched this.
(10:17):
This is the Life magazine that I was rolling up.
This is a copy I got later, and it's got
this actress, Cecil Aubrey, who I believe is a French actress,
and I thought she's kind of cute, right, so I
should know more about this person because I was just
starting to appreciate that maybe women were kind of interesting.
And as I'm looking for the pictures of Cecil Aubrey,
(10:37):
I come across two photos. They're from McMinnville, Oregon, nineteen
fifty taken in May of nineteen fifty and they remain
today two of the best UFO photos ever seen, and
you can go look them up McMinnville UFO photos. They're fantastic.
Here's what's weird. So on there in the basement with
my friends and we realized Mcminnville's just like twenty miles away.
(10:59):
I mean, this was local. This was a piece of
local news. So that's the first time I ever started saying, wow,
what is the deal with flying saucers, et cetera, et cetera. Now,
the one thing I do want to transition to would
be just how did we get to an entire decade
based on flying saucers and what did they actually have
to tell us? Well, the first actual saucer like craft
(11:23):
that was ever seen by anybody was in a cereal
called Daredevil of the Skies in nineteen forty nine. I
don't know if it counts, but it was a cereal.
It wasn't so called flying saucer and whatever. It didn't
really count that much. But in Adam Man versus Superman
in nineteen fifty, the man Steel faces off against Luther's
saucer like machine. Now, what's really interesting about these first
(11:45):
two They did have things that looked like saucers, but
there were no aliens in them. So that was the
prevailing sense. As we entered the decade, most people had
heard about flying saucers. They assumed it was our technology,
and that seemed to be the way things were going,
and it continued. The very first flying saucer movie was
called The Flying Saucer. Okay, that makes it very simple, y'all.
(12:08):
Remember it nineteen fifty It was released in January of fifty.
And what was interesting about this one is it did
talk about a saucer crash. It was the first feature
film to address flying saucers. But the thing is, there
are no aliens in this one either, Brent. It's just
a movie that was made saying there are flying saucers.
(12:29):
But in this case, I believe the flying saucer was
from Russia. I think it was a Russian flying saucer.
Did you ever see this movie?
Speaker 2 (12:37):
I did not, but it sounds like a red scare movie.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
Yes, yeah, totally red scare. But here's what's interesting. One
of the things we do. We could talk all day
and do film reviews of all these movies, and most
of them wouldn't be great from the point of view
of just was it a great piece of entertainment? Not
usually it's certainly not in retrospect, okay. But the director
of this film, The Flying Saucer in nineteen fifty was
(13:03):
a guy named Michael Conrad, and he claimed that he
had actual, real flying saucer footage when this thing came out,
and he said in an interview, I have scenes of
the saucer landing, taking off, flying and doing tricks, all right,
That's what he told the newspaper in Ohio. He claimed
that he had been in Alaska in nineteen forty eight
(13:23):
he had actually seen and filmed these actual flying saucers,
And then he said the FBI had seized his footage.
And so he started something you and I started doing
in Dark Skies in the nineties. Brand He started blurring
fact and fiction as kind of a marketing angle for
his film.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
But it got him in trouble, didn't it did.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
Shortly after he gave that interview, he became the subject
of a two month long Air Force investigation, and later
under the Freedom of Information Act, they actually got some
documents released that showed that an agent of the Air
Force Office of Special Investigations had been dispatched to interrogate
this Conrad, ask him what he really had, what he
(14:03):
didn't have, and also to attend the first private screening
of his film. But you know where this goes. Did
he have real footage? Of course not no, so again
another one of those claims. But it does always have
a place in history because, as you point out, it
was using flying saucers for Cold War paranoia.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
Right, yeah, I mean it seems like One of the
central ideas of this podcast is looking at what we
believe is an unholy alliance between Hollywood, the government, and
secrecy UFOs this whole area. It seems like this was
the era where all of that king to be formalized.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
And it's fascinating because the other thing that we all
like to do in media is we like to cover
when something is the first time something ever happened. And
so naturally, if you're starting from zero and you start
making flying saucer movies in the fifties, you're going to
have a few of those. A couple of films came
out in nineteen fifty one that I think are very
(15:04):
memorable and have some bearing on this whole topic. On
March night, The Man from Planet X was released, and
this was the movie that had the first contact with
an extraterrestrial and a feature film. All right, it wasn't
much of a movie, but the alien was a small
humanoid with a big head. Sound familiar, yeah, right? Only. Well,
(15:25):
the funny thing about it, every time you think about
grays should go don't.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
They wear clothes?
Speaker 1 (15:30):
Why are the grays always without clothes on?
Speaker 2 (15:33):
Well, that didn't happen. Some people describe them though as
wearing jumpsuits.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
Right, jumpsuits are no clothes and in fact probably more
often jumpsuits. Anyway, this dude had a helmet, and he
had a transparent bubble helmet, a spacesuit, some kind of
breathing apparatus. That was pretty interesting. He also used a
brain wave device to control humans and turn them into
zombie slaves and he put them to work. Okay, so
(15:58):
that was the Man from Planet X interesting. Just a
month later, though, the one that we all remember comes out,
and that is The Thing from Another World, which became
the Thing in the eighties when it was remade. And
I assume that's one you probably have seen because it's
such a classic.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I love the original and I love
the remake that John Carpenter did.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
I tend to like the remakes when it comes to
these saucer movies. A couple of quick things about the
Thing from Another World. This was the first time an
alien arrived in a flying saucer, so et Flying Saucer
nineteen fifty one. It came from a novel that was
written in nineteen thirty eight, so it's not like they
got the idea for the movie from the Flying Saucers
(16:38):
of Kenneth Arnold. Their poster said, quote the weirdest visitor
Earth has ever seen. And I have to admit that
I agree with that one, Brent, because this guy who
was the thing from Another World is played by James Arness,
who famously was Marshall Dylan on gun Smoke, and he
looks like some seven foot tall vampire vegetable or something.
(17:00):
I mean, in reality, it doesn't look even that scary anymore.
But here's the angle on that one. Edward Lasker of
RKO Pictures had actually asked the Air Force for cooperation
and he got turned down. They explained that they had
just meant half a million dollars proving that flying saucers
did not exist. And when they said that, they meant
this project grudge investigation they had conducted. And they said
(17:24):
to him, out of this quote, they go, why should
we help you make a picture about one? The Air
Force will not participate in any activity that could be
interpreted as a perpetuation of the Flying Saucer hoax. So
already nineteen fifty one, it's just a big hoax.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
Nothing to see here. Yeah, So technically the Unholy Alliance
has not begun. The lines are still drawn, and the
government is quite content to let everyone feel that their
statement that it's a hoax is the definitive truth. I
think you should take us into the big Dog, though,
the big Dog of early You can look at the
(18:00):
fifties as the first half and the second half the
first half of the fifties. There is no question there's
one movie that stands out, and I think we should
do a little deep dive on that.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
Baby.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
Yeah, So that's the Day the Earth Stood Still nineteen
fifty one. It was a film by Robert Wise, and
this is pretty much still considered kind of the gold
standard of these nineteen fifties science fiction movies. And it's
basically just what you get from the title, which is
an alien craft comes down and it lands in Manhattan,
and a spaceman comes off the ship and wants to
(18:40):
talk to humanity, and of course, what do we do.
We try to kill it? Exactly, we shoot it. One
of the guards that are there gets a little trigger happy,
and as soon as he reaches for something in his pocket,
they shoot him, and that sets off a whole chain
of events where now he unleashes Gort, the robot that
scared the heck out of me one night. This large
(19:02):
death machine essentially that comes out and you're meant to
believe this is a force so powerful that this robot
could destroy the Earth. And now the rest of the
story is about how this alien is looking for evidence
to not destroy the Earth, and that's why he's come.
He's come with an ultimatum ultimately that Earth has to
(19:23):
get their act together or it will be removed.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
As long as we're talking about that, I remember the
poster of that one said from out of space, a
warning and an ultimatum, which I thought was interesting. They
didn't call it outer space. They said from out of
space for that one. I don't know why the distinction. Well,
first of all, the spaceman who takes on the name
of I'm trying to remember his name, Carpenter, isn't it. Well,
(19:50):
the space visitor is called Clatu, and he takes on
a human form of Carpenter, right, I think major Carpenter,
or he takes on it. It takes on it's a
military right now. What's interesting about that part is in
the film, the guy claw Tu dies and then he
is sort of reborn, and then he comes and warns
(20:13):
the world that if you don't shape up with your
nukes and things like that, you're going to be eliminated,
and then he descends into the heavens. Well, that seems
a little too close to something a lot of people
around the world believe in, which is Jesus Christ and
resurrections and things like that. So a guy named Joseph
Breen from the Motion Picture Association of America made them
(20:37):
put in a line to fix that. First of all,
Gort doesn't stay dead like I said. He's resurrected, but
originally he was resurrected and stayed resurrected.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
Okay, but it seems like he was going to be okay.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
Right, Okay. So here's what they did from the Motion
Picture Association. They have the woman lead. She says, does
Gord have unlimited power over life and death? And the
answer that they put into the film was that it
was only temporary, And the quote that they put in
was that power is reserved to the almighty Spirit. So
what's interesting is this is one of the first recorded
(21:12):
times where somebody representing the government came in and said,
I want you to alter your content a little bit,
because the idea that he steals the clothing a major carpenter.
Jesus was a carpenter, and then he gets killed by
the military leaders of the time, and then he ascends
into the sky after this warning message from mankind. So,
(21:32):
to be quite honest with you, I had seen it
two or three times. I don't know why. I just
never saw it in that context. But then once I
realized that people had complained about it in that context,
I guess you can.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
See it well. I also find it really interesting that
this Breen fellow to quote exactly the original line that
attributed all of the power to the alien race was
seen as two left wing for the Breen office. But
another thing that's interesting thing is, and I think that's
incredibly relevant, is John Harrington, who disclosed to me when
(22:05):
I asked him specifically why the truth wasn't going to
come out anytime soon, he said that America is a
God fearing country, right and anything that might potentially undermine
that belief system could cause panic. That's part of the
ontological shock argument. Well, and this was especially true though
in the nineteen fifties. Whether it's as true today is debatable,
(22:29):
But in nineteen fifty I think you could absolutely make
the claim that America was a god fearing country true.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
One thing you can say about this movie is the
US military overall looks pretty good in this one. I mean,
they're trying to keep order and respond. They it'll look
good in that they shoot at it. But what's interesting
is the behind the scenes of this thing is that
the producers went to the US Air Force and asked
for cooperation. They wanted that kind of agreement, and the
Pentagon ultimately provided just limited assistance through the National Guard.
(23:00):
And the reason they did this, it's a great quote.
They said, in the event of an alien invasion, the
armed services would indeed defend the nation. So I guess
that was the point. Yes, it's a UFO movie. There
are flying saucers, there's an alien, there's a threat of
destroying mankind, but we would be there on the job
to fight that. Maybe most relevant of all to this
(23:20):
whole thing, the Pentagon actually did review the script and
even though they had nixed this based on that, it
turns out that they went to Fort Mead, which was
more of a local location, and they got jeeps and
military hardware, so there was some cooperation on this. So
that is that now I got to tell you there's
you start, you fall in the rabbit hole of this thing,
(23:42):
and you start to say, okay, I want to know
more about this film, and you start to see things
that are that you didn't know before. I wanted to
point out a couple of things. This is an important film.
It was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation,
so people hundreds of years from now, if we make
it that long, are going to be able to watch it.
It was not an original piece, though again I think
that that's kind of important. It wasn't like Hollywood noticed
(24:06):
that in nineteen forty seven there was Roswell and then
there was the Kenneth Arnold thing and then said let's
get some of our writers on the studio to come
up with a movie. That's not really what happened. Robert Wise,
who you mentioned, was the producer. He went looking through
a bunch of short stories. He found one from a
nineteen forty short story called Farewell to the Master by
(24:28):
Harry Bates. So that's the one that the film was
based on. So that goes back to before we entered
World War Two, and I found that kind of intriguing.
I also remember an apropos of nothing, maybe being the
stoner up in the middle of the night. But in college,
Rango Starr released a film where it's called good Night Vienna,
and he's standing there with Gort I believe, coming out
(24:51):
of that ship and the ship this kind of is
cool though. This one is a little piece of cool
sandwich that I found. The production design of the film,
it turns out, consulted Frank Lloyd Right to come up
with the perfect minimal semless design of Clato saucer, and
he quoted I guess I don't see what source I
(25:14):
add for this, but it's a quote from Frank Lloyd
Right quote to imitate an experimental substance that I have
heard about, which acts like living tissue. If cut, the
rift would appear like a wound, leaving a continuous surface
with no scar. Well, people are talking about biologics right now,
right David Grush it's his favorite new word, biologics. I've
(25:36):
always said, well, do you mean bodies or do you
mean biologics? What is a biologic? Well, a biologic could
be a craft that could heal itself. That would be biologic.
Speaker 2 (25:46):
Well, I love that. Frank Lloyd Wright said that he's
heard about. Yeah from who where? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (25:52):
I mean maybe there's some Frank Lloyd Wright historian listening
to us right now. By all means, please let us
know and we'll pass that on. And of course I'm
going to let you say it.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
You'll probably know.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
I want you to give us your great thespian You
have thespian training, didn't you. Weren't you in a high
school play or something?
Speaker 2 (26:10):
Or I was in a high school play?
Speaker 1 (26:12):
Yes, okay, well then I'm going to let you say
there's some thesbian. The three words that we all remember
from that film.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
The three words are klattu, barada, nickto. There you go.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
Now I heard it pronounce nickto, so I don't know.
It could be well, that was East Coast I was.
I love that And people have been trying to figure
out what exactly that means. First of all, the writer
Edmund North wrote all the alien stuff. He came up
with that on his own, and so they pulled all
those things out and some linguists tried to come up
(26:46):
with what did he actually say, and based on his
best guess, it was I die.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
Repair me, do not retaliate. Wow, that's profound. So on
that topic. If you remember, we we took on the
task of trying to create an alien language for our
hive in dark Skies, and we farmed that out. We
had some expert linguist put together a whole vocabulary and alphabet,
(27:11):
and we had our own saying in dark guys, do
you remember that?
Speaker 1 (27:14):
Oh, I I'll try this as you.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
Turned to be at thesbian.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
Clarsu cr Is that right?
Speaker 2 (27:22):
No?
Speaker 1 (27:22):
I didn't even come close. No, take two, God, I
don't have a take too.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
You're gonna have to do it.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
I should have done claw tu barada nicktough because at
least could have got through all right, go go Clarcie,
Sue are okay?
Speaker 2 (27:36):
All right?
Speaker 1 (27:36):
You just wasn't that far off. No, you reverse some words,
but it is. It's fantastic though, because we literally hired
this UCLA guy and he gave us like forty pages
of language for the hive.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
Yeah, it was fantastic.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
I'm sure that guy has a real job and had
a real job where he was a linguist, and so
that was just, you know, fun for him. I mean
think about that. You get the somebody calls you up
and goes, hey, we're Hollywood producers. We got a little
money in the budget. We want you to create an
alien language. Can we have it by tuesday?
Speaker 2 (28:07):
Yeah? Exactly? What a job, What a great job. Well,
let's do this. Let's not spend too much time on
the remake from two thousand and eight with Keanu Reeves.
I don't think either of us were a huge fan
of it. I think we both prefer the original.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
But there are a couple I'm going to let you
go on, but no, I prefer the remake. But go ahead,
Oh you prefer the remake?
Speaker 2 (28:29):
I do? I do? I do prefer the remake.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
Okay, well that's officially our first disagreement.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
Well we're allowed.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
See that makes the show interesting. It's like, what are
these guys going to fight about?
Speaker 2 (28:39):
Nick? So we love that, all right. The couple things
that I found interesting about the remake where there's a
large object that's kind of moving towards the Earth, which
in today's parlance, it evokes the whole interstellar commet the
three I Atlas, but this one actually just stops and
then descends down onto Manhattan. So there's the whole period
(29:00):
in which people are seeing this object slowly move towards
Earth and then then it finally descends, but it just
made me think of that the three I Atlas. And
then secondarily, when Klatt two Keanu reeves in this movie
starts to wander the earth and look for evidence that
humans should be saved. What does he meet. He meets
another alien, a character named mister Wu who's been living
(29:23):
on Earth for some time, which kind of promotes the
whole idea of they walk among us. And he finds
mister Wu to say that humans are quite troubling, but
he still loves them.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
I have to say, that's one of my favorite scenes
in that movie. You know, it's in a coffee shop
and he just ends up sitting down with this guy,
this Clawtu, and he starts speaking in Chinese to this guy. Listen,
here's the thing. I understand that the nineteen fifty one
The Day the Earth Stood Still is a classic. I'm
glad I've seen it a few times. I will tell
(29:54):
other people to watch it, and people who are listening
should probably see it to complete their film edge, et cetera.
And it is interesting because there were more sort of
things behind the scenes about seeking cooperation or whatever, and
the times were supercharged in nineteen fifty one, with flying
saucers being reported every five seconds. What I loved about it, though,
(30:17):
was just the idea that they really leaned heavily at
the beginning into Okay, something has just landed in Central Park, right,
so people are and it's about to land, and so
people started getting rousted in the middle of the night
and brought into this secret facility where they actually bring
the alien. And for those of you who don't know,
it is Keanu Reeves who plays Klatu in the remake,
(30:40):
and I think he does a really interesting job. I mean,
it's probably easy to make fun of him, it's Keanu,
but I liked him.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
I liked him.
Speaker 1 (30:48):
And I also liked Kathy Bates as the Secretary of
Defense because she's kind of a no nonsense type and
she's willing to say, look, maybe you are not hostile,
but I haven't seen and until then, we're going to
treat you in a hostile way, which seems to be
the prevailing sense of some of these people who have
been whistleblowers or whatever. Lou Elizondo comes to mind because
(31:11):
he has always basically said, listen, I don't know exactly
what they want, or they don't want, but Prudence says,
we got, we got to prepare for the worst, which
is kind of Kathy Bates's point of view. And it's also,
let's face it, it's they spent a lot of money
on it. They made it come alive in a way
that they could only suggest in nineteen fifty one. The
nineteen fifty one is a little, a little goofy and
(31:33):
all that. But you know, they're both, they're both good. Yeah, yeah,
I just I think mostly because I remember, I guess
fondly now as I'm older, how scared I was of
the original, And you know, so when I saw the
remake years later, it was interesting, but it didn't have
that visceral response.
Speaker 2 (31:52):
For me, right that I cling to. You know, things
that had such an impact on you when you were
a kid you remember more acutely. I think. The other
thing is we move on from these movies, going back
to the original. It was actually then only a year later,
in nineteen fifty two, when there actually was a big
UFO event, not in New York City but in Washington,
(32:14):
d C. Where the movie takes place. Yes, so weird, yeah,
very And so you know, for those people who don't remember,
what is considered to be the big UFO flap of
nineteen fifty two in DC. Let me just bring you
up to speed. This is a case of life imitating
art a little bit. So back in fifty two, there
were multiple sightings of flying objects over the US Capitol
(32:37):
and the White House during two consecutive weekends. It was
July nineteenth through twentieth and the twenty sixth through the
twenty seventh. These were glowing orbs that outran military jets
that were dispatched to go try and investigate them. It
sparked a huge national frenzy, and the reports came from
credible observers, not to mention those pilots and all of
(32:59):
this was captured, this inexplicable phenomenon on radar. So the
Air Force was of course forced to hold the press
conference to quell the hysteria. Now they downplayed the events,
citing temperature inversion, which you know it's up. There was
swamp gas, a theory that was completely rejected by the
(33:19):
Weather Bureau. So this event is actually supposed to be
what spurred the creation of Project Blue Book, which was
the Air Force official investigation into UFOs. Was just a
few months later in nineteen fifty two. But also I
want to point out something else that's interesting when you
start to connect the dots, when you go back and
look at history, it's pretty fascinating. Also at this exact
(33:40):
same time was the passing of the Patent Act of
nineteen fifty two. It was the first comprehensive overhaul of
the US patent loss in eighteen seventy, and among other things,
the change redefined patentable subject matter to cover anything under
the sun made by man. Of course, the nineteen fifty
(34:01):
one I think it was called the Invention Secrecy Act,
had already allowed the government to suppress patents deemed vital
to national security. But anything made by man is a
very interesting nuance. I mean, who else on earth would
be inventing things? Now, maybe it's just a coincidence, but
you know what they say when you're investigating crime and corruption,
follow the money, and clearly patents are all about creating
(34:24):
a legal monopoly, turning inventions into tangible assets and long
term revenue stream. So all of this happened at the
same time. But nothing to see here, folks, just a
big coincidence.
Speaker 1 (34:35):
And of course there's long history of suppressed patents, and
there are even a group of patents. My old buddy
Coltheart wrote a chapter about these patents that were being
suppressed in his book In Plain Sight. The DC thing
is fascinating because first it happens over these two weekends.
So think about you. You see this one weekend and
everybody's freaking out, and I want to point out something.
(34:57):
People were freaking out. It was not so pressed. It
was a public thing that happened. It actually the Democratic
National Convention was being held and it was front page news.
But what happened in Washington, d C. Was so outrageous
it threw the Democratic Convention coverage off the front page
or below the fold. I guess is how you would
(35:18):
put it. I love the DC case because it's these
two weekends in a row. And think about that if
that happened today, a couple of weekends in a row,
things are flying around over the nation's capital. We're scrambling
jets that can't catch them. They're on radar man. And
it was a big, big deal.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
Back then. It wasn't suppressed.
Speaker 1 (35:36):
The Democratic National Convention was on it was on the
front page every day. And then along comes the UFO flap.
Knocks it down below the fold. Kind of an important thing.
And yeah, it does coincide with the beginning of Project
Blue Book in nineteen fifty two. Something else happened in
nineteen fifty two in addition to the patent thing you
(35:56):
just brought up. In November of fifty two, alleged is
when the new president Dwight Eisenhower gets a briefing in Washington,
DC about Majesty twelve. And there's that document that people
have debated whether it's real or it's not real increasingly
with what we know. If it's not real, it's still accurate,
(36:16):
which is kind of interesting. Why would you create a
non real document that has a lot of things that
are very accurate And the answer might be, well, something's
in it probably aren't accurate and they're being snuck in
as disinformation. This is a very interesting time and when
this is all going down, there are interesting films and
then there are other films. I mentioned The Man from
(36:36):
Planet X, but there's also Flash Gordon and Space Patrol
out that year, Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, you know, Zombies
of the Stratosphere. So there's always this sort of nonsense
factor that's going on with a Hollywood product, but every
so often there's the day the er stood still or
the thing from outer space, that kind of thing. But
the big Magilla that happens next is also happening in
(36:59):
a year that it's very important. So the first thing
I want to do is, let's talk about this movie.
We're going to do a whole episode about this in
the future, but right now, let's just land lightly on
the War of the World's from nineteen fifty three.
Speaker 2 (37:17):
Yeah. So, I mean the great thing about War of
the World's is it goes back again to our old
friend HG. Wells, who we talked about in the episode five,
who wrote the original story. And I'm trying to remember
when that was actually written. Do do you have the
date on where the World's.
Speaker 1 (37:32):
Be Yeah, the story is eighteen ninety seven, I believe,
and then and then nineteen thirty eight of course Orson
Wells No Relation radio show.
Speaker 2 (37:41):
Yeah, so think about that, like a story was written
in the late nineteenth century and then it gets kind
of immortalized into the public consciousness when Orson Wells does
a radio play of it presents it as real people
are hearing what they believe is an alien invasion in
thirty eight, before Roswell has happened and captured people's imagination,
(38:01):
before people have heard of flying saucers. He's creating aliens
landing on Earth, and it sets off a panic to
some degree, and that becomes the story that gets made
into movies all the way into the twenty first century.
Speaker 1 (38:15):
Yeah, we were going to call the episode the three
century franchise because it's in the eighteen hundreds, of nineteen hundreds,
in the two thousands. Yeah, well, okay, that nineteen thirty
eight Orson Wells broadcast, which is so famous for causing panic.
People debate that today. You can get some people saying, well,
it didn't cause that much panic and it was only
(38:35):
a few people that panicked and all that and all that.
Other people debate that. But I will tell you a
story that is so relevant to nineteen fifty two and
all the things we just talked about. In nineteen forty nine,
down in Ecuador, they did broadcast The War of the Worlds.
So this is nineteen forty nine, two years after Kenneth Arnold,
(38:55):
two years after Roswell, three years before the Washington DC
see over flights and all the other stuff we just
talked about. So they broadcast this on February twelfth, nineteen
forty nine, and just like in nineteen thirty eight in
the US, the radio broadcast had people freaking the hell
out all right, only it was worse than our experience.
(39:17):
It couldn't be all written off because this broadcast in
Ecuador led to riots. There were riots in the street
on the night of this broadcast and get this, twenty
people died.
Speaker 2 (39:29):
Oh my god.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
So you could sort of say people in the know
around that time would have had this in their minds
as they were thinking about public policy and also the
idea about whether people would panic or whether a piece
of entertainment, a film or a TV series could cause
people to panic. And all they had to do was
(39:51):
look at Ecuador and go, well, that didn't look good.
So you can kind of understand the mindset at that time,
which sort of takes this to where we want to
be right now. Because Brent, you brought up earlier the
unholy alliance, and the unholy alliance is really Hollywood and
UFOs and the government or secrecy. And what's so fascinating
(40:13):
about that is that if you try to look at
as we have been doing, is we've been doing this
research for this project we're doing. You start to look
into the history of things and you say, well, the
stuff that we just reported first in this episode was
you know, people going to the government saying, hey, can
we borrow some tanks. It's that kind of cooperation. Where
did it become a little more nefarious, that's the question,
(40:37):
And I think we actually have a date. The date
where it started to get more nefarious was January fourteenth,
nineteen fifty three.
Speaker 2 (40:47):
You're talking about the Robertson Panel.
Speaker 1 (40:48):
Yes, I am, because I think that is the original
sin of this whatever's going on right now.
Speaker 2 (40:54):
Well, I had not heard about the Robertson Panel until
we started doing research for this, and it's incredibly fascinating because,
like you said, this is the inflection point where it
feels like if there is an unholy alliance. It wasn't theoretical,
it was actually formalized through the results of this panel.
Speaker 1 (41:12):
Just to bring everybody up to speed, because I really
do think we need to like triply underline this thing.
The Robertson Panel was convened as a working group by
the CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency in January fourteenth created
a working group to look into it over a four
day period, and it was in specific response to those
(41:33):
sightings that you were talking about in Washington, DC, and
there were more sightings happening all the time anyway. Robertson,
by the way, refers to a man named Howard Percy Robertson.
He was a physicist. He was consulting for the CIA.
He was the director of the Defense Department Weapons Evaluation Group.
Don't know necessarily why that sounds like a big title.
(41:56):
And they instructed him to assemble a group of prominent
scientists to review all of the Air Force files going
back to Project Sign, Project Grudge, and then the one
that was just taking off them, Project Bluebook. And I
don't have the names in front of me, and they're
not really important right now. But the panel included a physicist,
a radar expert, rocketry expert, some other Air Force folks,
(42:19):
and an astronomer. And the group did spend four days,
taking some long lunch breaks, but in between they interspersed
some UFO reports, they watched films of anomalous objects, and
they had a lot of discussions about seeking possible explanations
for the phenomena. Here's what I find interesting about the
Robertson panel, and I've always found it interesting they sort
(42:42):
of issue a conclusion that there's really nothing to see here,
that these things that people are seeing aren't real. But
because people might make mistakes or the Russians might weaponize
our belief in flying saucers against us, they decided to
come up with some recommendations.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
An interesting absolutely.
Speaker 1 (43:02):
Dance that they're doing there, And this is the part
where we start to say, wow, this is the trailhead
for what was to come and even what happened to
you and me in the nineties. In the final recommendation,
it states that they recommend quote, a broad educational program
should be put into place to strip the unidentified flying
(43:24):
objects of the special status they have been given and
the aura of mystery they have unfortunately acquired. So they're
not looking into it. You know, they're not trying to
strip them of special status because they're real and they
got to hide it. According to these guys, it's just because,
oh it could be a problem, but we we can't
let it become a bigger problem.
Speaker 2 (43:44):
Yeah. Absolutely fascinating. And I think another thing to point
out is that the only reason that we know about
what was done in the Robertson panel is because apparently
Captain Edward Rupphelt, then head of the Project Blue Book,
revealed the existence of the secret Pan in his nineteen
fifty six book. By the way, I think it was
Rupepelt who actually changed the terminology from flying Saucers to UFOs.
Speaker 1 (44:07):
He certainly did. I always thought he should have a
plaque somewhere. It's just unfair. Well, first of all, he
ran Blue Book for a while, and it was fascinating
that the guy that ran Bluebook actually wrote a book
that I've got on my shelf back there and have
read where he lays out cases after cases after cases
that are really good and doesn't say that he's got
(44:27):
a good explanation for them. So he was in favor
of really getting into this discussion. And then on the
final version of his book, which was released years after
that nineteen fifty six version, he bought it all back,
he puts a final chapter appended on where he says, oh,
nothing's real about this, and don't worry about it. So
(44:48):
somebody got to him obviously for that.
Speaker 2 (44:50):
Obviously.
Speaker 1 (44:50):
Yeah, so this takes us into what we're going to
do in our next episode, because there's so much stuff here,
just so much stuff that we decided let's split it
into a couple of conversations into just one where we
race like crazy. And here's the part that is going
to inspire us in this next episode. They say that
(45:10):
Hollywood should be used to minimize UFOs and they recommend
starting with Disney. Yes, they're going to start with Disney.
They even thought cartoons would be a good way for
this educational campaign. So basically, while they were saying we
need to work with Hollywood to not let this thing
get out of hand, their first place to think about
(45:32):
was Disney. And all I can say, folks, is there
are some Disney stories that'll be a fast pass to
the Magic Kingdom for you in our next episode.
Speaker 2 (45:39):
Well, and I think that is a great tee up
for something that I'd like to leave everybody with, which
is as Bryce mentioned earlier, there were some campy, silly
movies made in the fifties, but one of the things
that happened post to the Robertson panel was there was
an obvious tone shift and you started to see more
movies that became even more mocking r They weren't just
(46:01):
because they had low budgets and everything looked silly. They
were deliberately making fun of aliens and UFOs to the
point where you had movies Abbott and Costello Encounter Aliens,
Catwomen of the Moon, plus the absurd Devil Girl from Mars,
Johnny Jupiter, there was a Jerry Lewis alien movie, all
(46:22):
of which, if you think about it, what was the
point of that? I think the point was pretty clearly
to change the narrative and to take genuine curiosity and
maybe even fear that the public had and turn it
into over the top sensationalism, basically creating the cultural permission structure,
if you will, to mock and stigmatize UFO reports and abductees.
(46:46):
And really that's the world that we lived in going forward, right.
This is what you always hear that people sit on
their stories and their reports and their experiences because they
didn't want to be made fun of, they didn't want
to be marginalized. And I think this was an intentional
decision made starting with the Robertson panel, to use Hollywood
(47:07):
at that time absolutely for disinformation.
Speaker 1 (47:11):
The question, though, raised by everything you just said, is
did Hollywood start making sillier movies because somebody told them
to or did they have another reason. Did Hollywood think,
for example, you know, the whole Saucer thing is played
out time for something different. We are going to spend
this next episode wrapping up the fifties, but I will
say this, at the end of the fifties there was
(47:33):
definitely a pivot. The first big Saucer movie, if you will,
of the sixties was nineteen sixty and it was a
Visit to a Small Planet with Jerry Lewis playing the alien. Well,
you make Jerry Lewis the alien, you're not going to
get people going Geysha'm I'm really interested in non human
intelligence because you're not getting it from Jerry Lewis for sure.
(47:54):
And that's where they also did Santa Claus versus the
Martians and Robinson Crusoe on Mars and things like that.
So there were a lot of them that just made
it very clear this isn't about something real, This is
about just something silly and we're just having fun with it.
Speaker 2 (48:08):
So we'll be.
Speaker 1 (48:09):
Getting into that. The other thing we're going to get
into in the next episode, just to give a highlight,
is there is an actual case of censorship that happened
in nineteen fifty eight with Donald Keho where CBS pulled
the plug on him during a live broadcast. So we'll
be talking about that, and Brent, I've even got a
personal story to talk about because it turns out that
my mentor, Bill Asher, directed one of these fifties films.
(48:32):
He was the guy that he also directed Beach Blanket, Bingo,
right and that kind of movie. But he got hired
to direct the twenty Seventh Day and it's a big
interest flying Saucer movie. Bill's last television series that he
ever worked on. He created Bewitched, things like that, and
he directed I Love Lucy, his last show ever in
(48:54):
his career. Was my first show in my career, and
I got a chance to hear from Bill about that movie.
He was part of the rat pack, you know, he
was the rat pack guy that never appeared on camera.
He was the guy off to the side. Anyway, more
on that. So we've got some insider kind of stuff.
It's a fascinating story. You can't get too much of it,
but we'll try.
Speaker 2 (49:13):
Can't wait.
Speaker 1 (49:14):
Yeah, all right, so listen, everybody, Thanks for being with
us this time. Brent, great as always, and I'll see
you for the next episode See Us in Sound, Light
and Frequency is an iHeart podcast produced by Stellar Productions.
It's executive produced by Nick Johnson and For Steller Jackie's Abel.
(49:35):
Our show's music was written by Anna Stumf and Hamilton Lighthouser,
and Your hosts and executive producers are Brice Abel, That's
Me and Brent Friedman Watch the Guys.
The production designer of the film, consulted Frank Lloyd Wright
to come up with the perfect minimal semless design of
Clatu Saucer, and he quoted to imitate an experimental substance
that I have heard about, which acts like living tissue.
If cut, the rift would appear like a wound, leaving
a continuous surface with no scar. Well, people are talking
(00:22):
about biologics right now, right David Grush it's his favorite
new word, biologics.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Well, I love that. Frank Lloyd Wright said that he's
heard about Yeah, from who where?
Speaker 1 (00:52):
I'm Bryce Able. Have you ever wondered if there's a
secret connection between Hollywood and UFOs.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
I'm Brent Friedman, and you are listening to sound, light
and frequency.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
In this episode, we'll be talking about the Flying Saucer
movies of the nineteen fifties, one invasion after another.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
We're also going to reveal the origins of the unholy
alliance between Hollywood and the government to control the UFO narrative.
You know, I don't know.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
It seems like Hollywood watched nineteen forty seven's coming out
party for UFOs, and instead of seeing what was really
going on, they saw little green men and they knew
right away that we better start making some product to
make some business out of this. It didn't hurt by
the way, that the US military at the time, which
was reeling from its new roswell portfolio, thought about showbiz
(01:44):
a lot. Sometimes they wanted to stop projects, sometimes they
wanted to give them a boost. But it turned out
that in the nineteen fifties a series of mostly black
and white movies were released, and a lot of times
they had ideas that were a lot bigger than their
production budgets. Them are a little hard to watch sometimes,
but in total, if you look at all of them,
(02:04):
they're kind of a mess of camp and greed and
duplicity and misdirection and lies. And yet at the bottom
of that swamp there are some stories that were produced
that float ideas about UFOs and the phenomenon that are
still with us today. So listen, I just want to
make clear as we start talking about this, Brent, that
neither of us were alive when the first of these
(02:27):
movies were being made. So I'm kind of curious, how
did you see him in the first place.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
When I was growing up, there used to be on
Saturday afternoons on UHF channels a lot of these old
black and white movies, a lot of these science fiction
movies would play, and if I was inside watching television,
i'd flip into them. And I don't know that I
ever saw a full movie in my childhood. I'd see
(02:51):
bits and pieces of them, and they scared me as
a young kid. They were strange and weird and they
didn't make a lot of sense to me. And it
wasn't an until much later that I really developed a
taste for science fiction when I could intellectually handle it.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
You know, I didn't see any of them in any
regular way at all. In fact, the only movie I
ever tried to stay up for as a kid, I
remember setting my alarm and going to watch King Kong
Versus No, just King Kong, King Kong at three am
on the local TV station. But when I first saw
my first Flying Saucer movie, I think I got this right.
(03:26):
I was kind of a stoner college student at the moment,
and I believe I watched The Day There Stood Still
at about two am on one of the local television stations,
and I thought it was pretty good at the time,
but then again, who knows. And then over the years.
Because I've cared about this whole topic and everything, I've
seen a lot more of them, and I know that
I watched a lot, not a lot, but more than
(03:48):
a few. In preparation for this. I gave him a rewatch.
That was kind of a process. What did you think
seeing these things in twenty twenty six some of them,
now that I went back and watched, I asked, saw
on Mystery Science Theater two thousand and that was probably
my first encounter with some of these, the really campy ones,
so they already struck me as very humorous.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
It was hard to take them seriously. But it's interesting
you mentioned seeing the Day the Ear Stood Still, and
that actually was one of the first movies I watched
in full, and that was on a midnight show back
in the Bay Area when I grew up, called Creature Features,
and I specifically remember we had a babysitter one night
and I snuck out of bed. I was supposed to
(04:32):
be asleep at nine years old or whenever it was,
and I snuck out of bed to watch Creature Features
and Day the Earth Stood Still was on, and I
watched about the first thirty minutes of it, and when
gort started shooting people with his lasers. I quickly turned
off the television, went back to bed and had a nightmare.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
Well, sorry that happened. Listen, We're going to get back
to the day the ear stood still very soon. I
just want to paint a picture for people. Literally. These
movies started in nineteen fifty with a movie called The
Flying Saucer. And in order to really appreciate where we
were at that time, you have to appreciate how flying
(05:10):
saucers actually got their start. A few years earlier. In
June of nineteen forty seven, a guy named Kenneth Arnold
saw some flying saucers flying across Washington State and he said,
when he was asked by reporters about it, that they
skipped like a saucer, and the reporters picked it up
and called them flying saucers. And you know how it is,
(05:31):
when a title sticks, it sticks. So it's interesting because
you kind of live up there right now, do you
feel like you're in a saucer hotbed?
Speaker 2 (05:40):
As a matter of fact, I did a little research
on this, and it turns out that Washington State is
actually still very much a UFO hotbed. And to case
in point, I live on Woidbey Island, which is one
of the islands in the in Puget Sound, and apparently
the island is one of the most densely reported in
(06:03):
terms of UFO incidents.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
And do you know why, I'm just gonna throw a
wild guests out there, does have anything.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
To do with the navy, It actually does, right there
is a naval air station on the north end of
the island. And it turns out that there's been since
two thousand and I think five thirty cases, more than
thirty cases that have been reported just on Widby Island alone,
and most of them on the north end of the
(06:29):
island where the naval air station is. And I will
say also that I found out only a few years
ago that my daughter saw a UFO with a friend
of hers when she was eleven, and they were having
a sleepover at her friend's house, sleeping outside one summer
night on a trampoline, and about three in the morning,
they were still up talking and all of a sudden,
(06:50):
a huge craft with spinning lights, I mean just a
classic flying saucer hovered right over them and turned on
a bright light. They both looked at each other. They
didn't understand what was happening. And the next thing they
remember is they both woke up the next morning and
they thought it was a dream until they discussed it
with each other, and they decided, we can't tell any
adults because the adults told us we had to be
(07:12):
asleep by midnight, and this happened at three am and
we were still talking, so we're not going to tell anybody.
So she didn't tell me until years later, and when
she did tell me, I got very interested in, well,
how many cases are there up here? And that's when
I found out, oh, there's actually a lot because of
the Naval air station. So I went to a MOOFON
meeting a few years ago, and I'm not going to
(07:32):
go into that right now, but there we'll post on
our website a link to the article about that meeting.
It was packed, there was seventy five people in the room,
and there was a case being presented as really fascinating.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
Moufon of course, being the Mutual UFO Network, which is
kind of the There been many UFO organizations over the years.
This is the big daddy right now.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
This is this civilian research group. I think it was
founded in sixty nine.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
Yeah, yeah, So, just to set the stage just a
tiny bit more so, you got Kenneth Arnold up in
Washington State. And then that same year, two weeks after
Kenneth Arnold set the world on fire with these flying saucers.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
We have the Roswell case.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
Supposedly a craft crashed outside of America's only nuclear bomber
base in Roswell, New Mexico, in July of nineteen forty seven,
and the military even put out a press release acknowledging it.
But then, of course, the very next day they said,
never mind, it was just a weather balloon, which has
always left people like you and me, Brent, saying, well,
(08:32):
let me get this straight. These people were trusted with
the nuclear weapons of the United States of America, but
the intelligent wing of that group could not tell the
difference between a flying saucer from another civilization and a
weather balloon.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
Seems kind of odd. The whole story just throws Jesse
Marcel under.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
The bus, totally does so if you do a.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
Deep dive on him, you will see that it just
holds no water whatsoever.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
But the point everyone has to remember about nineteen forty
seven is it was a time of radical change. In
the world and in America, it was a mix of
great anxiety and great promise. World War II, by the way,
just think about it. The people that went into World
War Two didn't experience these things, but the people came
out had seen nuclear weapons, jets, raucous computers, and secrecy.
(09:20):
All these things became part of a society at that point.
So that takes us to nineteen fifty, which is kind
of intriguing because not only is it the beginning of
a new decade, but it's also the beginning of flying
Saucer movies.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
And I just.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
Wanted to tell a quick nineteen fifty story. And again
I point out I was not alive for that, but
my family had moved from the Midwest to the Pacific
Northwest at the time, and my brother was born in
Oregon when they did that, my older brother. But what
was interesting is flash forward twelve years or so from that.
I'm just a kid now, and we were playing magazine
(09:55):
fights in the basement, all right. That's when you would
take a life for a Look magazine and you would
roll it up and then you would pretend like they
were lightsabers and you'd be smashing them against each other.
We didn't have video games or anything, so that was
pretty good stuff for the time. But here's what's interesting.
So I'm rolling up a magazine and I'm going to
actually show it for the people who have watched this.
(10:17):
This is the Life magazine that I was rolling up.
This is a copy I got later, and it's got
this actress, Cecil Aubrey, who I believe is a French actress,
and I thought she's kind of cute, right, so I
should know more about this person because I was just
starting to appreciate that maybe women were kind of interesting.
And as I'm looking for the pictures of Cecil Aubrey,
(10:37):
I come across two photos. They're from McMinnville, Oregon, nineteen
fifty taken in May of nineteen fifty and they remain
today two of the best UFO photos ever seen, and
you can go look them up McMinnville UFO photos. They're fantastic.
Here's what's weird. So on there in the basement with
my friends and we realized Mcminnville's just like twenty miles away.
(10:59):
I mean, this was local. This was a piece of
local news. So that's the first time I ever started saying, wow,
what is the deal with flying saucers, et cetera, et cetera. Now,
the one thing I do want to transition to would
be just how did we get to an entire decade
based on flying saucers and what did they actually have
to tell us? Well, the first actual saucer like craft
(11:23):
that was ever seen by anybody was in a cereal
called Daredevil of the Skies in nineteen forty nine. I
don't know if it counts, but it was a cereal.
It wasn't so called flying saucer and whatever. It didn't
really count that much. But in Adam Man versus Superman
in nineteen fifty, the man Steel faces off against Luther's
saucer like machine. Now, what's really interesting about these first
(11:45):
two They did have things that looked like saucers, but
there were no aliens in them. So that was the
prevailing sense. As we entered the decade, most people had
heard about flying saucers. They assumed it was our technology,
and that seemed to be the way things were going,
and it continued. The very first flying saucer movie was
called The Flying Saucer. Okay, that makes it very simple, y'all.
(12:08):
Remember it nineteen fifty It was released in January of fifty.
And what was interesting about this one is it did
talk about a saucer crash. It was the first feature
film to address flying saucers. But the thing is, there
are no aliens in this one either, Brent. It's just
a movie that was made saying there are flying saucers.
(12:29):
But in this case, I believe the flying saucer was
from Russia. I think it was a Russian flying saucer.
Did you ever see this movie?
Speaker 2 (12:37):
I did not, but it sounds like a red scare movie.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
Yes, yeah, totally red scare. But here's what's interesting. One
of the things we do. We could talk all day
and do film reviews of all these movies, and most
of them wouldn't be great from the point of view
of just was it a great piece of entertainment? Not
usually it's certainly not in retrospect, okay. But the director
of this film, The Flying Saucer in nineteen fifty was
(13:03):
a guy named Michael Conrad, and he claimed that he
had actual, real flying saucer footage when this thing came out,
and he said in an interview, I have scenes of
the saucer landing, taking off, flying and doing tricks, all right,
That's what he told the newspaper in Ohio. He claimed
that he had been in Alaska in nineteen forty eight
(13:23):
he had actually seen and filmed these actual flying saucers,
And then he said the FBI had seized his footage.
And so he started something you and I started doing
in Dark Skies in the nineties. Brand He started blurring
fact and fiction as kind of a marketing angle for
his film.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
But it got him in trouble, didn't it did.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
Shortly after he gave that interview, he became the subject
of a two month long Air Force investigation, and later
under the Freedom of Information Act, they actually got some
documents released that showed that an agent of the Air
Force Office of Special Investigations had been dispatched to interrogate
this Conrad, ask him what he really had, what he
(14:03):
didn't have, and also to attend the first private screening
of his film. But you know where this goes. Did
he have real footage? Of course not no, so again
another one of those claims. But it does always have
a place in history because, as you point out, it
was using flying saucers for Cold War paranoia.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
Right, yeah, I mean it seems like One of the
central ideas of this podcast is looking at what we
believe is an unholy alliance between Hollywood, the government, and
secrecy UFOs this whole area. It seems like this was
the era where all of that king to be formalized.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
And it's fascinating because the other thing that we all
like to do in media is we like to cover
when something is the first time something ever happened. And
so naturally, if you're starting from zero and you start
making flying saucer movies in the fifties, you're going to
have a few of those. A couple of films came
out in nineteen fifty one that I think are very
(15:04):
memorable and have some bearing on this whole topic. On
March night, The Man from Planet X was released, and
this was the movie that had the first contact with
an extraterrestrial and a feature film. All right, it wasn't
much of a movie, but the alien was a small
humanoid with a big head. Sound familiar, yeah, right? Only. Well,
(15:25):
the funny thing about it, every time you think about
grays should go don't.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
They wear clothes?
Speaker 1 (15:30):
Why are the grays always without clothes on?
Speaker 2 (15:33):
Well, that didn't happen. Some people describe them though as
wearing jumpsuits.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
Right, jumpsuits are no clothes and in fact probably more
often jumpsuits. Anyway, this dude had a helmet, and he
had a transparent bubble helmet, a spacesuit, some kind of
breathing apparatus. That was pretty interesting. He also used a
brain wave device to control humans and turn them into
zombie slaves and he put them to work. Okay, so
(15:58):
that was the Man from Planet X interesting. Just a
month later, though, the one that we all remember comes out,
and that is The Thing from Another World, which became
the Thing in the eighties when it was remade. And
I assume that's one you probably have seen because it's
such a classic.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I love the original and I love
the remake that John Carpenter did.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
I tend to like the remakes when it comes to
these saucer movies. A couple of quick things about the
Thing from Another World. This was the first time an
alien arrived in a flying saucer, so et Flying Saucer
nineteen fifty one. It came from a novel that was
written in nineteen thirty eight, so it's not like they
got the idea for the movie from the Flying Saucers
(16:38):
of Kenneth Arnold. Their poster said, quote the weirdest visitor
Earth has ever seen. And I have to admit that
I agree with that one, Brent, because this guy who
was the thing from Another World is played by James Arness,
who famously was Marshall Dylan on gun Smoke, and he
looks like some seven foot tall vampire vegetable or something.
(17:00):
I mean, in reality, it doesn't look even that scary anymore.
But here's the angle on that one. Edward Lasker of
RKO Pictures had actually asked the Air Force for cooperation
and he got turned down. They explained that they had
just meant half a million dollars proving that flying saucers
did not exist. And when they said that, they meant
this project grudge investigation they had conducted. And they said
(17:24):
to him, out of this quote, they go, why should
we help you make a picture about one? The Air
Force will not participate in any activity that could be
interpreted as a perpetuation of the Flying Saucer hoax. So
already nineteen fifty one, it's just a big hoax.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
Nothing to see here. Yeah, So technically the Unholy Alliance
has not begun. The lines are still drawn, and the
government is quite content to let everyone feel that their
statement that it's a hoax is the definitive truth. I
think you should take us into the big Dog, though,
the big Dog of early You can look at the
(18:00):
fifties as the first half and the second half the
first half of the fifties. There is no question there's
one movie that stands out, and I think we should
do a little deep dive on that.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
Baby.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
Yeah, So that's the Day the Earth Stood Still nineteen
fifty one. It was a film by Robert Wise, and
this is pretty much still considered kind of the gold
standard of these nineteen fifties science fiction movies. And it's
basically just what you get from the title, which is
an alien craft comes down and it lands in Manhattan,
and a spaceman comes off the ship and wants to
(18:40):
talk to humanity, and of course, what do we do.
We try to kill it? Exactly, we shoot it. One
of the guards that are there gets a little trigger happy,
and as soon as he reaches for something in his pocket,
they shoot him, and that sets off a whole chain
of events where now he unleashes Gort, the robot that
scared the heck out of me one night. This large
(19:02):
death machine essentially that comes out and you're meant to
believe this is a force so powerful that this robot
could destroy the Earth. And now the rest of the
story is about how this alien is looking for evidence
to not destroy the Earth, and that's why he's come.
He's come with an ultimatum ultimately that Earth has to
(19:23):
get their act together or it will be removed.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
As long as we're talking about that, I remember the
poster of that one said from out of space, a
warning and an ultimatum, which I thought was interesting. They
didn't call it outer space. They said from out of
space for that one. I don't know why the distinction. Well,
first of all, the spaceman who takes on the name
of I'm trying to remember his name, Carpenter, isn't it. Well,
(19:50):
the space visitor is called Clatu, and he takes on
a human form of Carpenter, right, I think major Carpenter,
or he takes on it. It takes on it's a
military right now. What's interesting about that part is in
the film, the guy claw Tu dies and then he
is sort of reborn, and then he comes and warns
(20:13):
the world that if you don't shape up with your
nukes and things like that, you're going to be eliminated,
and then he descends into the heavens. Well, that seems
a little too close to something a lot of people
around the world believe in, which is Jesus Christ and
resurrections and things like that. So a guy named Joseph
Breen from the Motion Picture Association of America made them
(20:37):
put in a line to fix that. First of all,
Gort doesn't stay dead like I said. He's resurrected, but
originally he was resurrected and stayed resurrected.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
Okay, but it seems like he was going to be okay.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
Right, Okay. So here's what they did from the Motion
Picture Association. They have the woman lead. She says, does
Gord have unlimited power over life and death? And the
answer that they put into the film was that it
was only temporary, And the quote that they put in
was that power is reserved to the almighty Spirit. So
what's interesting is this is one of the first recorded
(21:12):
times where somebody representing the government came in and said,
I want you to alter your content a little bit,
because the idea that he steals the clothing a major carpenter.
Jesus was a carpenter, and then he gets killed by
the military leaders of the time, and then he ascends
into the sky after this warning message from mankind. So,
(21:32):
to be quite honest with you, I had seen it
two or three times. I don't know why. I just
never saw it in that context. But then once I
realized that people had complained about it in that context,
I guess you can.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
See it well. I also find it really interesting that
this Breen fellow to quote exactly the original line that
attributed all of the power to the alien race was
seen as two left wing for the Breen office. But
another thing that's interesting thing is, and I think that's
incredibly relevant, is John Harrington, who disclosed to me when
(22:05):
I asked him specifically why the truth wasn't going to
come out anytime soon, he said that America is a
God fearing country, right and anything that might potentially undermine
that belief system could cause panic. That's part of the
ontological shock argument. Well, and this was especially true though
in the nineteen fifties. Whether it's as true today is debatable,
(22:29):
But in nineteen fifty I think you could absolutely make
the claim that America was a god fearing country true.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
One thing you can say about this movie is the
US military overall looks pretty good in this one. I mean,
they're trying to keep order and respond. They it'll look
good in that they shoot at it. But what's interesting
is the behind the scenes of this thing is that
the producers went to the US Air Force and asked
for cooperation. They wanted that kind of agreement, and the
Pentagon ultimately provided just limited assistance through the National Guard.
(23:00):
And the reason they did this, it's a great quote.
They said, in the event of an alien invasion, the
armed services would indeed defend the nation. So I guess
that was the point. Yes, it's a UFO movie. There
are flying saucers, there's an alien, there's a threat of
destroying mankind, but we would be there on the job
to fight that. Maybe most relevant of all to this
(23:20):
whole thing, the Pentagon actually did review the script and
even though they had nixed this based on that, it
turns out that they went to Fort Mead, which was
more of a local location, and they got jeeps and
military hardware, so there was some cooperation on this. So
that is that now I got to tell you there's
you start, you fall in the rabbit hole of this thing,
(23:42):
and you start to say, okay, I want to know
more about this film, and you start to see things
that are that you didn't know before. I wanted to
point out a couple of things. This is an important film.
It was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation,
so people hundreds of years from now, if we make
it that long, are going to be able to watch it.
It was not an original piece, though again I think
that that's kind of important. It wasn't like Hollywood noticed
(24:06):
that in nineteen forty seven there was Roswell and then
there was the Kenneth Arnold thing and then said let's
get some of our writers on the studio to come
up with a movie. That's not really what happened. Robert Wise,
who you mentioned, was the producer. He went looking through
a bunch of short stories. He found one from a
nineteen forty short story called Farewell to the Master by
(24:28):
Harry Bates. So that's the one that the film was
based on. So that goes back to before we entered
World War Two, and I found that kind of intriguing.
I also remember an apropos of nothing, maybe being the
stoner up in the middle of the night. But in college,
Rango Starr released a film where it's called good Night Vienna,
and he's standing there with Gort I believe, coming out
(24:51):
of that ship and the ship this kind of is
cool though. This one is a little piece of cool
sandwich that I found. The production design of the film,
it turns out, consulted Frank Lloyd Right to come up
with the perfect minimal semless design of Clato saucer, and
he quoted I guess I don't see what source I
(25:14):
add for this, but it's a quote from Frank Lloyd
Right quote to imitate an experimental substance that I have
heard about, which acts like living tissue. If cut, the
rift would appear like a wound, leaving a continuous surface
with no scar. Well, people are talking about biologics right now,
right David Grush it's his favorite new word, biologics. I've
(25:36):
always said, well, do you mean bodies or do you
mean biologics? What is a biologic? Well, a biologic could
be a craft that could heal itself. That would be biologic.
Speaker 2 (25:46):
Well, I love that. Frank Lloyd Wright said that he's
heard about. Yeah from who where? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (25:52):
I mean maybe there's some Frank Lloyd Wright historian listening
to us right now. By all means, please let us
know and we'll pass that on. And of course I'm
going to let you say it.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
You'll probably know.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
I want you to give us your great thespian You
have thespian training, didn't you. Weren't you in a high
school play or something?
Speaker 2 (26:10):
Or I was in a high school play?
Speaker 1 (26:12):
Yes, okay, well then I'm going to let you say
there's some thesbian. The three words that we all remember
from that film.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
The three words are klattu, barada, nickto. There you go.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
Now I heard it pronounce nickto, so I don't know.
It could be well, that was East Coast I was.
I love that And people have been trying to figure
out what exactly that means. First of all, the writer
Edmund North wrote all the alien stuff. He came up
with that on his own, and so they pulled all
those things out and some linguists tried to come up
(26:46):
with what did he actually say, and based on his
best guess, it was I die.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
Repair me, do not retaliate. Wow, that's profound. So on
that topic. If you remember, we we took on the
task of trying to create an alien language for our
hive in dark Skies, and we farmed that out. We
had some expert linguist put together a whole vocabulary and alphabet,
(27:11):
and we had our own saying in dark guys, do
you remember that?
Speaker 1 (27:14):
Oh, I I'll try this as you.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
Turned to be at thesbian.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
Clarsu cr Is that right?
Speaker 2 (27:22):
No?
Speaker 1 (27:22):
I didn't even come close. No, take two, God, I
don't have a take too.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
You're gonna have to do it.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
I should have done claw tu barada nicktough because at
least could have got through all right, go go Clarcie,
Sue are okay?
Speaker 2 (27:36):
All right?
Speaker 1 (27:36):
You just wasn't that far off. No, you reverse some words,
but it is. It's fantastic though, because we literally hired
this UCLA guy and he gave us like forty pages
of language for the hive.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
Yeah, it was fantastic.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
I'm sure that guy has a real job and had
a real job where he was a linguist, and so
that was just, you know, fun for him. I mean
think about that. You get the somebody calls you up
and goes, hey, we're Hollywood producers. We got a little
money in the budget. We want you to create an
alien language. Can we have it by tuesday?
Speaker 2 (28:07):
Yeah? Exactly? What a job, What a great job. Well,
let's do this. Let's not spend too much time on
the remake from two thousand and eight with Keanu Reeves.
I don't think either of us were a huge fan
of it. I think we both prefer the original.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
But there are a couple I'm going to let you
go on, but no, I prefer the remake. But go ahead,
Oh you prefer the remake?
Speaker 2 (28:29):
I do? I do? I do prefer the remake.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
Okay, well that's officially our first disagreement.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
Well we're allowed.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
See that makes the show interesting. It's like, what are
these guys going to fight about?
Speaker 2 (28:39):
Nick? So we love that, all right. The couple things
that I found interesting about the remake where there's a
large object that's kind of moving towards the Earth, which
in today's parlance, it evokes the whole interstellar commet the
three I Atlas, but this one actually just stops and
then descends down onto Manhattan. So there's the whole period
(29:00):
in which people are seeing this object slowly move towards
Earth and then then it finally descends, but it just
made me think of that the three I Atlas. And
then secondarily, when Klatt two Keanu reeves in this movie
starts to wander the earth and look for evidence that
humans should be saved. What does he meet. He meets
another alien, a character named mister Wu who's been living
(29:23):
on Earth for some time, which kind of promotes the
whole idea of they walk among us. And he finds
mister Wu to say that humans are quite troubling, but
he still loves them.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
I have to say, that's one of my favorite scenes
in that movie. You know, it's in a coffee shop
and he just ends up sitting down with this guy,
this Clawtu, and he starts speaking in Chinese to this guy. Listen,
here's the thing. I understand that the nineteen fifty one
The Day the Earth Stood Still is a classic. I'm
glad I've seen it a few times. I will tell
(29:54):
other people to watch it, and people who are listening
should probably see it to complete their film edge, et cetera.
And it is interesting because there were more sort of
things behind the scenes about seeking cooperation or whatever, and
the times were supercharged in nineteen fifty one, with flying
saucers being reported every five seconds. What I loved about it, though,
(30:17):
was just the idea that they really leaned heavily at
the beginning into Okay, something has just landed in Central Park, right,
so people are and it's about to land, and so
people started getting rousted in the middle of the night
and brought into this secret facility where they actually bring
the alien. And for those of you who don't know,
it is Keanu Reeves who plays Klatu in the remake,
(30:40):
and I think he does a really interesting job. I mean,
it's probably easy to make fun of him, it's Keanu,
but I liked him.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
I liked him.
Speaker 1 (30:48):
And I also liked Kathy Bates as the Secretary of
Defense because she's kind of a no nonsense type and
she's willing to say, look, maybe you are not hostile,
but I haven't seen and until then, we're going to
treat you in a hostile way, which seems to be
the prevailing sense of some of these people who have
been whistleblowers or whatever. Lou Elizondo comes to mind because
(31:11):
he has always basically said, listen, I don't know exactly
what they want, or they don't want, but Prudence says,
we got, we got to prepare for the worst, which
is kind of Kathy Bates's point of view. And it's also,
let's face it, it's they spent a lot of money
on it. They made it come alive in a way
that they could only suggest in nineteen fifty one. The
nineteen fifty one is a little, a little goofy and
(31:33):
all that. But you know, they're both, they're both good. Yeah, yeah,
I just I think mostly because I remember, I guess
fondly now as I'm older, how scared I was of
the original, And you know, so when I saw the
remake years later, it was interesting, but it didn't have
that visceral response.
Speaker 2 (31:52):
For me, right that I cling to. You know, things
that had such an impact on you when you were
a kid you remember more acutely. I think. The other
thing is we move on from these movies, going back
to the original. It was actually then only a year later,
in nineteen fifty two, when there actually was a big
UFO event, not in New York City but in Washington,
(32:14):
d C. Where the movie takes place. Yes, so weird, yeah,
very And so you know, for those people who don't remember,
what is considered to be the big UFO flap of
nineteen fifty two in DC. Let me just bring you
up to speed. This is a case of life imitating
art a little bit. So back in fifty two, there
were multiple sightings of flying objects over the US Capitol
(32:37):
and the White House during two consecutive weekends. It was
July nineteenth through twentieth and the twenty sixth through the
twenty seventh. These were glowing orbs that outran military jets
that were dispatched to go try and investigate them. It
sparked a huge national frenzy, and the reports came from
credible observers, not to mention those pilots and all of
(32:59):
this was captured, this inexplicable phenomenon on radar. So the
Air Force was of course forced to hold the press
conference to quell the hysteria. Now they downplayed the events,
citing temperature inversion, which you know it's up. There was
swamp gas, a theory that was completely rejected by the
(33:19):
Weather Bureau. So this event is actually supposed to be
what spurred the creation of Project Blue Book, which was
the Air Force official investigation into UFOs. Was just a
few months later in nineteen fifty two. But also I
want to point out something else that's interesting when you
start to connect the dots, when you go back and
look at history, it's pretty fascinating. Also at this exact
(33:40):
same time was the passing of the Patent Act of
nineteen fifty two. It was the first comprehensive overhaul of
the US patent loss in eighteen seventy, and among other things,
the change redefined patentable subject matter to cover anything under
the sun made by man. Of course, the nineteen fifty
(34:01):
one I think it was called the Invention Secrecy Act,
had already allowed the government to suppress patents deemed vital
to national security. But anything made by man is a
very interesting nuance. I mean, who else on earth would
be inventing things? Now, maybe it's just a coincidence, but
you know what they say when you're investigating crime and corruption,
follow the money, and clearly patents are all about creating
(34:24):
a legal monopoly, turning inventions into tangible assets and long
term revenue stream. So all of this happened at the
same time. But nothing to see here, folks, just a
big coincidence.
Speaker 1 (34:35):
And of course there's long history of suppressed patents, and
there are even a group of patents. My old buddy
Coltheart wrote a chapter about these patents that were being
suppressed in his book In Plain Sight. The DC thing
is fascinating because first it happens over these two weekends.
So think about you. You see this one weekend and
everybody's freaking out, and I want to point out something.
(34:57):
People were freaking out. It was not so pressed. It
was a public thing that happened. It actually the Democratic
National Convention was being held and it was front page news.
But what happened in Washington, d C. Was so outrageous
it threw the Democratic Convention coverage off the front page
or below the fold. I guess is how you would
(35:18):
put it. I love the DC case because it's these
two weekends in a row. And think about that if
that happened today, a couple of weekends in a row,
things are flying around over the nation's capital. We're scrambling
jets that can't catch them. They're on radar man. And
it was a big, big deal.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
Back then. It wasn't suppressed.
Speaker 1 (35:36):
The Democratic National Convention was on it was on the
front page every day. And then along comes the UFO flap.
Knocks it down below the fold. Kind of an important thing.
And yeah, it does coincide with the beginning of Project
Blue Book in nineteen fifty two. Something else happened in
nineteen fifty two in addition to the patent thing you
(35:56):
just brought up. In November of fifty two, alleged is
when the new president Dwight Eisenhower gets a briefing in Washington,
DC about Majesty twelve. And there's that document that people
have debated whether it's real or it's not real increasingly
with what we know. If it's not real, it's still accurate,
(36:16):
which is kind of interesting. Why would you create a
non real document that has a lot of things that
are very accurate And the answer might be, well, something's
in it probably aren't accurate and they're being snuck in
as disinformation. This is a very interesting time and when
this is all going down, there are interesting films and
then there are other films. I mentioned The Man from
(36:36):
Planet X, but there's also Flash Gordon and Space Patrol
out that year, Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, you know, Zombies
of the Stratosphere. So there's always this sort of nonsense
factor that's going on with a Hollywood product, but every
so often there's the day the er stood still or
the thing from outer space, that kind of thing. But
the big Magilla that happens next is also happening in
(36:59):
a year that it's very important. So the first thing
I want to do is, let's talk about this movie.
We're going to do a whole episode about this in
the future, but right now, let's just land lightly on
the War of the World's from nineteen fifty three.
Speaker 2 (37:17):
Yeah. So, I mean the great thing about War of
the World's is it goes back again to our old
friend HG. Wells, who we talked about in the episode five,
who wrote the original story. And I'm trying to remember
when that was actually written. Do do you have the
date on where the World's.
Speaker 1 (37:32):
Be Yeah, the story is eighteen ninety seven, I believe,
and then and then nineteen thirty eight of course Orson
Wells No Relation radio show.
Speaker 2 (37:41):
Yeah, so think about that, like a story was written
in the late nineteenth century and then it gets kind
of immortalized into the public consciousness when Orson Wells does
a radio play of it presents it as real people
are hearing what they believe is an alien invasion in
thirty eight, before Roswell has happened and captured people's imagination,
(38:01):
before people have heard of flying saucers. He's creating aliens
landing on Earth, and it sets off a panic to
some degree, and that becomes the story that gets made
into movies all the way into the twenty first century.
Speaker 1 (38:15):
Yeah, we were going to call the episode the three
century franchise because it's in the eighteen hundreds, of nineteen hundreds,
in the two thousands. Yeah, well, okay, that nineteen thirty
eight Orson Wells broadcast, which is so famous for causing panic.
People debate that today. You can get some people saying, well,
it didn't cause that much panic and it was only
(38:35):
a few people that panicked and all that and all that.
Other people debate that. But I will tell you a
story that is so relevant to nineteen fifty two and
all the things we just talked about. In nineteen forty nine,
down in Ecuador, they did broadcast The War of the Worlds.
So this is nineteen forty nine, two years after Kenneth Arnold,
(38:55):
two years after Roswell, three years before the Washington DC
see over flights and all the other stuff we just
talked about. So they broadcast this on February twelfth, nineteen
forty nine, and just like in nineteen thirty eight in
the US, the radio broadcast had people freaking the hell
out all right, only it was worse than our experience.
(39:17):
It couldn't be all written off because this broadcast in
Ecuador led to riots. There were riots in the street
on the night of this broadcast and get this, twenty
people died.
Speaker 2 (39:29):
Oh my god.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
So you could sort of say people in the know
around that time would have had this in their minds
as they were thinking about public policy and also the
idea about whether people would panic or whether a piece
of entertainment, a film or a TV series could cause
people to panic. And all they had to do was
(39:51):
look at Ecuador and go, well, that didn't look good.
So you can kind of understand the mindset at that time,
which sort of takes this to where we want to
be right now. Because Brent, you brought up earlier the
unholy alliance, and the unholy alliance is really Hollywood and
UFOs and the government or secrecy. And what's so fascinating
(40:13):
about that is that if you try to look at
as we have been doing, is we've been doing this
research for this project we're doing. You start to look
into the history of things and you say, well, the
stuff that we just reported first in this episode was
you know, people going to the government saying, hey, can
we borrow some tanks. It's that kind of cooperation. Where
did it become a little more nefarious, that's the question,
(40:37):
And I think we actually have a date. The date
where it started to get more nefarious was January fourteenth,
nineteen fifty three.
Speaker 2 (40:47):
You're talking about the Robertson Panel.
Speaker 1 (40:48):
Yes, I am, because I think that is the original
sin of this whatever's going on right now.
Speaker 2 (40:54):
Well, I had not heard about the Robertson Panel until
we started doing research for this, and it's incredibly fascinating because,
like you said, this is the inflection point where it
feels like if there is an unholy alliance. It wasn't theoretical,
it was actually formalized through the results of this panel.
Speaker 1 (41:12):
Just to bring everybody up to speed, because I really
do think we need to like triply underline this thing.
The Robertson Panel was convened as a working group by
the CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency in January fourteenth created
a working group to look into it over a four
day period, and it was in specific response to those
(41:33):
sightings that you were talking about in Washington, DC, and
there were more sightings happening all the time anyway. Robertson,
by the way, refers to a man named Howard Percy Robertson.
He was a physicist. He was consulting for the CIA.
He was the director of the Defense Department Weapons Evaluation Group.
Don't know necessarily why that sounds like a big title.
(41:56):
And they instructed him to assemble a group of prominent
scientists to review all of the Air Force files going
back to Project Sign, Project Grudge, and then the one
that was just taking off them, Project Bluebook. And I
don't have the names in front of me, and they're
not really important right now. But the panel included a physicist,
a radar expert, rocketry expert, some other Air Force folks,
(42:19):
and an astronomer. And the group did spend four days,
taking some long lunch breaks, but in between they interspersed
some UFO reports, they watched films of anomalous objects, and
they had a lot of discussions about seeking possible explanations
for the phenomena. Here's what I find interesting about the
Robertson panel, and I've always found it interesting they sort
(42:42):
of issue a conclusion that there's really nothing to see here,
that these things that people are seeing aren't real. But
because people might make mistakes or the Russians might weaponize
our belief in flying saucers against us, they decided to
come up with some recommendations.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
An interesting absolutely.
Speaker 1 (43:02):
Dance that they're doing there, And this is the part
where we start to say, wow, this is the trailhead
for what was to come and even what happened to
you and me in the nineties. In the final recommendation,
it states that they recommend quote, a broad educational program
should be put into place to strip the unidentified flying
(43:24):
objects of the special status they have been given and
the aura of mystery they have unfortunately acquired. So they're
not looking into it. You know, they're not trying to
strip them of special status because they're real and they
got to hide it. According to these guys, it's just because,
oh it could be a problem, but we we can't
let it become a bigger problem.
Speaker 2 (43:44):
Yeah. Absolutely fascinating. And I think another thing to point
out is that the only reason that we know about
what was done in the Robertson panel is because apparently
Captain Edward Rupphelt, then head of the Project Blue Book,
revealed the existence of the secret Pan in his nineteen
fifty six book. By the way, I think it was
Rupepelt who actually changed the terminology from flying Saucers to UFOs.
Speaker 1 (44:07):
He certainly did. I always thought he should have a
plaque somewhere. It's just unfair. Well, first of all, he
ran Blue Book for a while, and it was fascinating
that the guy that ran Bluebook actually wrote a book
that I've got on my shelf back there and have
read where he lays out cases after cases after cases
that are really good and doesn't say that he's got
(44:27):
a good explanation for them. So he was in favor
of really getting into this discussion. And then on the
final version of his book, which was released years after
that nineteen fifty six version, he bought it all back,
he puts a final chapter appended on where he says, oh,
nothing's real about this, and don't worry about it. So
(44:48):
somebody got to him obviously for that.
Speaker 2 (44:50):
Obviously.
Speaker 1 (44:50):
Yeah, so this takes us into what we're going to
do in our next episode, because there's so much stuff here,
just so much stuff that we decided let's split it
into a couple of conversations into just one where we
race like crazy. And here's the part that is going
to inspire us in this next episode. They say that
(45:10):
Hollywood should be used to minimize UFOs and they recommend
starting with Disney. Yes, they're going to start with Disney.
They even thought cartoons would be a good way for
this educational campaign. So basically, while they were saying we
need to work with Hollywood to not let this thing
get out of hand, their first place to think about
(45:32):
was Disney. And all I can say, folks, is there
are some Disney stories that'll be a fast pass to
the Magic Kingdom for you in our next episode.
Speaker 2 (45:39):
Well, and I think that is a great tee up
for something that I'd like to leave everybody with, which
is as Bryce mentioned earlier, there were some campy, silly
movies made in the fifties, but one of the things
that happened post to the Robertson panel was there was
an obvious tone shift and you started to see more
movies that became even more mocking r They weren't just
(46:01):
because they had low budgets and everything looked silly. They
were deliberately making fun of aliens and UFOs to the
point where you had movies Abbott and Costello Encounter Aliens,
Catwomen of the Moon, plus the absurd Devil Girl from Mars,
Johnny Jupiter, there was a Jerry Lewis alien movie, all
(46:22):
of which, if you think about it, what was the
point of that? I think the point was pretty clearly
to change the narrative and to take genuine curiosity and
maybe even fear that the public had and turn it
into over the top sensationalism, basically creating the cultural permission structure,
if you will, to mock and stigmatize UFO reports and abductees.
(46:46):
And really that's the world that we lived in going forward, right.
This is what you always hear that people sit on
their stories and their reports and their experiences because they
didn't want to be made fun of, they didn't want
to be marginalized. And I think this was an intentional
decision made starting with the Robertson panel, to use Hollywood
(47:07):
at that time absolutely for disinformation.
Speaker 1 (47:11):
The question, though, raised by everything you just said, is
did Hollywood start making sillier movies because somebody told them
to or did they have another reason. Did Hollywood think,
for example, you know, the whole Saucer thing is played
out time for something different. We are going to spend
this next episode wrapping up the fifties, but I will
say this, at the end of the fifties there was
(47:33):
definitely a pivot. The first big Saucer movie, if you will,
of the sixties was nineteen sixty and it was a
Visit to a Small Planet with Jerry Lewis playing the alien. Well,
you make Jerry Lewis the alien, you're not going to
get people going Geysha'm I'm really interested in non human
intelligence because you're not getting it from Jerry Lewis for sure.
(47:54):
And that's where they also did Santa Claus versus the
Martians and Robinson Crusoe on Mars and things like that.
So there were a lot of them that just made
it very clear this isn't about something real, This is
about just something silly and we're just having fun with it.
Speaker 2 (48:08):
So we'll be.
Speaker 1 (48:09):
Getting into that. The other thing we're going to get
into in the next episode, just to give a highlight,
is there is an actual case of censorship that happened
in nineteen fifty eight with Donald Keho where CBS pulled
the plug on him during a live broadcast. So we'll
be talking about that, and Brent, I've even got a
personal story to talk about because it turns out that
my mentor, Bill Asher, directed one of these fifties films.
(48:32):
He was the guy that he also directed Beach Blanket, Bingo,
right and that kind of movie. But he got hired
to direct the twenty Seventh Day and it's a big
interest flying Saucer movie. Bill's last television series that he
ever worked on. He created Bewitched, things like that, and
he directed I Love Lucy, his last show ever in
(48:54):
his career. Was my first show in my career, and
I got a chance to hear from Bill about that movie.
He was part of the rat pack, you know, he
was the rat pack guy that never appeared on camera.
He was the guy off to the side. Anyway, more
on that. So we've got some insider kind of stuff.
It's a fascinating story. You can't get too much of it,
but we'll try.
Speaker 2 (49:13):
Can't wait.
Speaker 1 (49:14):
Yeah, all right, so listen, everybody, Thanks for being with
us this time. Brent, great as always, and I'll see
you for the next episode See Us in Sound, Light
and Frequency is an iHeart podcast produced by Stellar Productions.
It's executive produced by Nick Johnson and For Steller Jackie's Abel.
(49:35):
Our show's music was written by Anna Stumf and Hamilton Lighthouser,
and Your hosts and executive producers are Brice Abel, That's
Me and Brent Friedman Watch the Guys.
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