00:00:00
Speaker 1: Are aliens here on Earth? Hollywood sure thinks so, and so did John Harrington. But there are other voices echoing the same idea, a veritable chorus in fact of leaders in the disclosure movement. Let's start with David Grush, the former US Air Force officer and intelligence official who testified to Congress, has recently stated publicly that the government holds records on several distinct kinds of non human biological life. Then there's doctor hal Putoff, a theoretical physicist and the co founder of the Stargate Remote viewing Project, who claimed that the US government has recovered bodies from at least four separate extraterrestrial species. Lastly, doctor Eric Davis, a renowned astrophysicist who has worked extensively for the government and defense industry. But he goes one step further. He outlined four distinct extraterrestrial biological life forms associated with recovered UFO wreckage, Gray's, Nordic's, and Reptilians insectoids. So the question has quickly evolved from are we alone? To how many aliens are living amongst us? And if they are here, what form are they taking? Now? Beyond the four already mentioned we've also heard stories of little grays and large grays, tall whites and Nordics or are those the same things? Reptilians and insectoids but also mantoids or are those insectoids. It's all a little confusing, and just to take it even one step further, David Grush even recently throughout the idea that we could also be looking at sentient plasmoids, whatever that means. For today, though we're primarily interested in aliens disguised as humans stranded here on Earth, living amongst us, trying to assimilate and survive.
00:01:46
Speaker 2: For this episode, we thought we'd try something where we're really just talking about the solo stranded on Earth, in other words, just one alien physically present on Earth at a time. And we got this inspiration, folks, because we did an episode a few back called The Men Who Fell to Earth, which was literally about a franchise, The Man Who Fell to Earth. That was a book and it was a movie, and it was as a pilot and it was everything, but it was about David Bowie, in most people's recognition, being stranded here on Earth. So we thought, let's take a look at this whole stranded mentality because the thing is the stranded alien thing is sci Fi's clean moral experiment. There's no agenda most times other than the alien is here and can't get back. But there's just one of them, so they are really alienated. And then the question is always going to be reflected in the movies or TVs. How are we going to deal with them? And how are they going to deal with us? Because now it's one on one. And of course the greatest storyline about that everybody remembers is Et, but we're not going to start there. I was just thinking as we were doing this, Brent, there's a whole lot more to the stranded on alien than just Et. Although he's the one on everybody remembers. Yes, I'll give you one and then I'll let you run. The most popular alien stranded on Earth has got to be kel El. Superman, Oh right, right. He's a crash victim. Now he doesn't have any idea of his home planet really when he gets here, so it's not like he's feeling like, oh I miss it so much, but he's still alienated. And one of the things about Superman has always been he's at his core, he's an alien, a stranger he's a strange visitor, but he's not the only guy either. There's been a lot of product out there in Hollywood generated on the concept of aliens being here one at a time, and the earliest one I could find I'm talking not books or anything, I'm talking about film, and it's The Man from Planet X. That's nineteen fifty one, where an alien lands on a Scottish island and he's this vulnerable visitor and he bonds with the human signe and I won't go into it because no one's going to watch this, okay, But they were talking about in fifty one. And then a personal favorite from nineteen fifty four is Devil Girl from Mars, which is she shows up, she's the sole Martian, she needs helf repairing her ship. The Cosmic Man in nineteen fifty nine, another one single alien arrives in a sphere and the military immediately surrounds it. But another one that we'll be talking about maybe in a future episode. But Jerry Lewis in nineteen sixty in the film Visit to a Small Planet, is the guy who shows up here and he's all alone. And then I'm just going to lay this out there because it's the one that everybody grew up on, and it's my favorite Martian.
00:04:44
Speaker 1: I remember thinking he was such a persnickety alien, but I love the actor who was It was Ray Walston. Ray Walston, Yeah, so I loved him and other things and I bill, yes, it was the human. Yes. I remember thinking when Mark came out with Robin Williams Yes, that this was probably inspired by my favorite Martian.
00:05:07
Speaker 2: They're both sort of the alien observer who has been into human life if you will, who listen. I don't know what it says for alien intelligence that for season after season they're still surprised by humanity because they've been there for a while. My favorite Martian, though, is interesting because the Martian who's here is an anthropologist, right. But again the Crash references in these things. He crash lands near Los Angeles. This reporter Tim O'Hare played by Bixby, shelters him and invents this whole Uncle Martin identity. Listen. It doesn't hold up well. Most sitcoms from the sixties are pretty silly. Mork and Mindy at least as Robin Williams who you watch Mark and MINDI and you just go did they have scripts? For this or did they just have improvisational things for Rod.
00:05:57
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's with everything he did. Actually, one of the funny things about more coan Miindi, someone pointed out to me recently was at the beginning of the show and the title sequence he crash lands in an egg.
00:06:07
Speaker 2: Yes, so a lot of crash land.
00:06:10
Speaker 1: And I remember when I saw that, I'm like, what, so he's not an alien because that's not a UFO. What's going on here? It was so confusing.
00:06:17
Speaker 2: Shout out to Boulder, Colorado where that takes place, and just one other and then we can move on because we could literally and will if the podcast continues, we'll be talking about all of these things in greater detail. But in nineteen seventy eight, the one that is the closest to et and sort of form and structure is the cat from outer space. And it is so bizarre. There's a cat. It's not actually a cat. It's an alien that looks like a cat, an Abyssinian cat. Now I'm not a cat person.
00:06:50
Speaker 1: My brother had an Abyssinian okay, yours, well, beautiful like they look like Egyptian cats. If that's a thing.
00:06:55
Speaker 2: You were harboring, your brother was harboring an alien apparently and not being straight with you about that. So anyway, this one emergency lands, contacts its distant mothership, receives a deadline it's going to be coming for you, recruits a human, tries to retrieve and repair the spacecraft that's not ET material. But there is a lot of that though, of repairing spacecraft. Listen, I'm throwing aside about ten pages of research here right now, because the truth is, there's just so many of these things. And this episode, we're going to start with the Granddaddy. After this break here, we're gonna trot out ET.
00:07:36
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:07:37
Speaker 2: I love ET, by the way, because I watched it again last night, and I have to say it was so much fun. It's just fun. And it's forty four years old right now.
00:07:50
Speaker 1: So yeah, and it still holds up. It's one of those movies that I feel will be an enduring classic for generations. I'm Brent Friedman. Years ago, a family friend who became a cabinet member in the Reagan administration disclosed to me that aliens are real. They're here, and he'd seen them.
00:08:25
Speaker 2: I'm Bryce's Abel. Later, when we were producing Dark Skies, an NBCTV series about an alien invasion. We were approached by men who said they were from the Office of Naval Intelligence and they wanted to give us inside information in exchange for access to our show.
00:08:41
Speaker 1: We didn't take that deal, but we have never stopped thinking about it.
00:08:45
Speaker 2: That's why we do this podcast. We're working out ideas in real time about how Hollywood is portrayed aliens and why every.
00:08:54
Speaker 1: Episode is different because there are so many questions.
00:08:58
Speaker 2: We're looking for answers. It's an act of investigation. Let's do this together, all right, folks, let's talk ET. We all have our memories, which we like to do on this show. Brent, where were you? What was so interesting to me, though, is in nineteen eighty two when ET came out and there's this whole backstory, and I know you've got some good stuff to lay on us. But in nineteen eighty two, I didn't know much about it, but I was reviewing films at PBS. It wasn't my full time gig. I wasn't a film reviewer, but if anybody reviewed films there, I would review the films. Okay, there was a screening of ET the Extraterrestrial That was interesting because you knew at least it was about an extraterrestrial and you knew Steven Spielberg had made it. So I went and saw this thing blind. I took my wife, Jackie, she wasn't we weren't married yet, but we went out on a date into Beverly Hills and watched it. And so I really got that wonderful experience where a film. I love to do this even today, where you let a film you know is going to be okay, it's pretty good, you've heard about it, but you don't know the details, you haven't asked about the details, and it washes over you.
00:10:28
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:10:28
Speaker 2: Man, that was just great. And as I understand it, we came very close not to having the wonderful ET version that we all remember.
00:10:41
Speaker 1: It's true, there's a really interesting backstory to ET. But let me frame this with something to remind our listeners and viewers that, in our opinion, there is some evidence that Steven Spielberg took the same deal that we were offered by JC, that was intelligence for influence. Now we've already examined close encounters, we've examined disclosure Day through that optic, but now here we are with ET. Now, according to our source Toby Hooper again another episode we I think it was episode number two. We talked about this, just like Close Encounters. He said that Stephen was given information and that ET was based on a true story. Now, if you do some digging, you're going to find out there's some truth in that statement on ET. You have to understand that after Close Encounters, the studio was very interested in doing a sequel, of course, and what Spielberg pitch was a violent home invasion film, and the idea was by doing that under the Close Encounters banner, it would keep the title alive at the studio. The plot was inspired by the infamous nineteen fifty five Kelly Hopskinville Goblin encounter in Kentucky, where basically a rural family claimed that they were besieged by small, aggressive, gremlin like creatures. Now this is interesting because it'll come back later in our show. Spielberg hired screenwriter John sALS to pen a script featuring five distinct alien visitors. There was a vicious leader named Scar with a light emitting finger, and a gentle, curious outcast named Buddy, and Buddy ends up befriending the family's autistic son, who gets left behind, and then Buddy gets left behind on Earth when his hostile crew departs. So just to put a bow on this, legendary makeup artist Rick Baker was hired to design the terrifying creatures, and Toby Hooper was actually in line to direct it, so obviously none of that happened. Spielberg had a change of heart. He didn't want to make something scary. He was very caught up in the emotional concept of the single alien connecting with the lonely child. He scrapped the whole project and hired Melissa Matheson to write the script because in fact John Sales had turned it down, and then all of the abandoned horror elements, both from the Family Horror and The Alien Horror, got diverted into other movies that Spielberg was associated with, particularly Poltergeist and Gremlins.
00:13:15
Speaker 2: First of all, just a couple of things that sparked. Whilet's say you're talking about that was first I had always heard that Spielberg, at least this is what he said on the extras on the that I watched last night. He said he always wanted to tell the story about children of divorce because that's what he was, and so he was going to make a movie about children of divorce, and he was going to make the ET version that you described, and then he decided let's put them both together, in which case that also gave you a lighter, brighter Et than the one that was originally described. And just for perspective, we haven't described actually what the story of ET is, because, let's face it, most of the people listening to this already know that it's Elliott who befriends Et. And what's interesting, though, is to see Elliott and Et merge, not just mentally but physically. By the end of the film, they are symbiotically connected and almost die together, which is partly why I think people like it. Some majefrities weeping, Oh my god, Elliott can't die, He can't die. That was a very popular movie, though, let's just put this in perspective about what it did. It touched people so much that it surpassed Star Wars as the highest grossing film of its time.
00:14:31
Speaker 1: That's amazing.
00:14:31
Speaker 2: That's truly amazing. It received nine Academy Award nominations and I think it won four of them. It got entered into the National Film registry, but I think ninety four. So over a decade later, it turned phone home into a universal phrase. Parents have been telling kids now, phone home for ages now. And it got me addicted to Reese's pieces. And I bet the M and M people to this day regret not fighting stronger to get that. And it also made Ello It's moon crossing bicycle one of cinema's most recognizable images, and our friend of the show, Ernie Klein, has stated that it is his favorite scene in film. So I just have one question for you, because we all know what we're talking about. At the very end, they're being pursued by the government, which again is one of the standards of these stranded on Earth things. Quite often, the government is the bad guy. The human that the alien has bonded with is trying to help them, but the government's trying to capture them. Blah blah blah. And at the end of ET and by the way, they shot that out near my house, I look at ET and I'm like, wow, that looks like my neighborhood there. But at the end of it, they're being pursued relentlessly, and suddenly these five kids on bicycles are airborne and honestly, today, Brent, if they shot, if they did a remake, none of those kids would be on real bicycles. They would all be a gang of those fat tire electrical bikes, which has the city council while to live up in arms because they drive around like gangs. Here's my question for you, though. Yep, these five kids, one of them has et in the basket and they're flying through the sky. Why are they pedaling their bicycles?
00:16:17
Speaker 1: That's an existential question. I guess it's muscle memory.
00:16:20
Speaker 2: I never thought about it at all, and yet there they are and they're pedaling. Yet they're flying through the air. Do they think that pedaling will is making them go fast? Well, I don't know.
00:16:32
Speaker 1: If I jump into my ten year old brain riding a bike, if I started to get altitude, I would keep pedaling. I think it would just be wrote instinct out of fear that if I stop, I'm going to actually go down and crash. But I don't know. It's a very funny.
00:16:48
Speaker 2: Question, and that whole ending does very much make one thing very clear, and that's what Spielberg said. Out to do children see a person and they see the alien, they see this person not like them, but a person adults initially see that same creature entity NHI as a specimen or a security problem. And that's where a lot of the conflict and some of these things has come about. And I just want to get to the wrap on ET because we had so many other things to talk about. But I told you I saw it and reviewed it. Or was the film reviewer for this PBS station here in la Kset. So I went back and I was going to review it, and they didn't let me review ET. They said it was not serious. It was we were a news group, news beat is what it's called, and so they didn't see this as newsy enough. Now imagine today a film like ET came out, people would all be wanting to review it because we're getting tranches of government documents and all that stuff. But back then, I just remember my news director looking at me as I'm standing in his office, saying, it's great and we could really talk about this, we could do that, and he just looked at me and said, we are not going to review that film. Go back to your office, get some work done. So times have changed a little bit. We're a little more open to that kind of thing a little more.
00:18:15
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, my last thought on et is just from a cinematic standpoint, something that always stuck with me was how Steven Spielberg introduced the government bad guy played by Peter Coyote. It's just his keys that shangled, and the idea being is that the alien entity the et is so has hyper senses, and so he associates that sound of the jangling keys with being hunted, and it's just such an interesting thing. It makes him very childlike right off the bat. And I never forgot that. I never forgot from a cinematic standpoint how economical that was.
00:18:52
Speaker 2: With the exception of the Mother Mary, no adults are portrayed except for Keys Laid in the film. You're seeing from sort of ground level, from a kid's level, and when you finally see him, it's Peter Coyote, who, by the way, if I'm not mistaken, is the voice of most of Ken Burns things and most of James Fox's UFO documentaries. Oh that's right, including the Phenomenon. So there's connections everywhere. What I particularly liked, though, is that Keys Peter Coyote, when he's finally revealed he's a decent guy. He's there to get a job done, but he also understands how painful this is for Elliott and how once they think that Et is dead, it's hey, let's give the kid a moment alone with his grief. And so he's a decent guy. And then, frankly, like a lot of these movies, at the end, there's a big goodbye scene. Et gets to say goodbye to Elliott and Gerty the little girl gets to kiss him goodbye. And let's face it, Keys who is there in the scene. He could run up and grab Et in his own arms and run in the other direction, but he doesn't. He lets him go, which is something that's going to happen in another film we want to talk about. Starman. Okay, flash forward just two years, folks, just two years, and there's a pair of aliens alone stranded on Earth movies and they're released the same year, nineteen eighty four, and they are Starman starring Jeff Bridges and Karen Allen, and also The Brother from Another Planet starring Joe Morton, directed by John Sales who actually plays one of the maybe men in black or whatever in the thing. And they both are very different tellings of a story about an alien who is left here on the planet, and the one that's by far closest to ET is Starman.
00:20:49
Speaker 1: Yeah. Absolutely, And I think both of those movies do something that made them very relatable and gave them an emotional center. So with Et, et is coming to a family that doesn't have a father, and not to say that he is a father figure, but he brings the family together. He provides that paternal protective center. In Starman, we meet a woman named I believe Jenny played by Karen Allen, and she has lost her husband. And what does Starman do. He comes to her in the guise of her dead husband, not on purpose, though not on purpose, He just sees a piece of hair and he goes DNA like, Yes, he comes out of an orb.
00:21:31
Speaker 2: Frankly, he's an orb. Yes.
00:21:34
Speaker 1: Yes. And so both of those stories then lend themselves to being more about how the alien character helps repair the humans and bring them together, bring them closure, or whatever the case may be, and that makes it very relatable on a human level.
00:21:54
Speaker 2: I have a personal connection. I think that both of one is emotional and the others. In Brother from Another Planet, Joe Morton plays the brother and I worked and wrote for Joe Morton on a show called Equal Justice in ABC series, and Joe is a great guy. This is like seven years after the movie where his career was really starting. I don't think his career took off because a Brother, which a lot of people did not see. It was just a smaller indie film where a Starman was a mega hit. A couple of things about Starman. It begins with the Voyager spacecraft's gold record. Folks, remember that we sent out a couple of voyager craft with a gold record album on it that basically is an invitation to come visit Earth. Yes, and that's why Jeff Bridges in orb form is coming to Earth. He's been invited, Yes, So he doesn't get treated very well as an invite, and it's the same thing he gets there. They always put a clock on it, so the clock is okay, in three days, you have to be I think Arizona in order for the craft to come pick you up, which, of course the craft has to pick up Et and all that. Couple of funny things that I thought. My other connection though to Starman is Karen Allen plays Jenny. Four years later, I had my first TV series on CBS. It was called k O'Brien, and we were casting the lead actress who would play a female surgeon in New York City, and the one that Bill Asher, who was my executive producer on it, and I both wanted, was Karen Allen. Okay, and I think we were close to getting her, and the network veto did. And you know why they veto did. Why she wasn't sexy enough.
00:23:43
Speaker 1: Oh my goodness.
00:23:45
Speaker 2: They didn't think that she was attractive enough or something, and Bill and I were just like, yeah's, first of all, I disagree. She's got some love scenes with Jeff Bridges and Starman that are pretty convincing and all that, but what a stupid thing. And I also think I might still be at least an asterisk in the history of television had we actually cast Karen Allen, because she would have carried that film a couple of interesting things. Though I said that they had sexual contact, Okay, the whole picture is like, they can't really have sexual contact because he looks like her husband and that would be wrong and blah blah blah. However, the whole thing is a chase thing. It's got all those interesting things. It's a road chase, they're in a trucker haven, they're being chased, blah blah blah blah blah, all that stuff, and they end up as people on the run do inside a train car, all right, And in the middle of the night, that's when they decide to knock one out. So Jeff Bridges, the alien who looks like her dead husband, and Jenny played by Karen Allen have some hot sex in a moving train car. Now that's not why I'm telling you this. It's not prairie folks. I'm analyzing this s shoe. You know what he says after having sex with her. I was so stunned by this I had to write it down.
00:25:06
Speaker 1: Brent.
00:25:07
Speaker 2: His line is, quote, I think I'm becoming a Planet Earth person, which I don't know if that's the I'm not even going to touch that one. So that's a great quote that doesn't get enough attention. Here's the quote from Starman that gets all the attention, and I wish it was more true than it sounds reading it today. His quote about people about what he's learned when he gets to the end is you are at your very best when things are worst, and there is something to be said about that example of humanity's bad behavior is freaking everywhere. We know that, we're aware those of you who are listening and watching us know that. And yet there are moments when humanity really pulls its act together. People are in trouble and we want to help him and all that, and he seems to have recognized that he isn't a spoiler to say what gift he gives her at the end.
00:26:12
Speaker 1: I think we have to talk about that gift because it explains why they made a TV gift on I want to go back to two interesting things for me anyway. One was we talk about the similarities between Starman and Et. To be clear, from our stranded point of view, Et was left behind by his crew of scientists who were about to get exposed or caught, and Et couldn't make it back to the ship in time, and the ship left without him, right right, it's really stranded. He's really stranded.
00:26:45
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's stranded.
00:26:46
Speaker 1: Yeah, And so that's why he's trying to phone home to try and get a ride back. He's calling a zuber. But Starman, actually, as you said, was invited here and then he was It's not just that he was not well received. He was shot down, yes, by the US government, So what a welcoming party. And then additionally, I think, with regards to that fresh perspective, some of the movies we're going to talk about now more so than Et, it's the stranger from a strange land, the outsider who comes with a fresh perspective and is able to look at humans and see the best and the worst. And so a lot of these movies, really they seem like they're about the alien on earth, but they're really about us. They're really about having someone who comes and adds commentary to us and sees how we do things and reminds us that, as you just said, there is an idealized version of humanity in which we are greater than the some of our parts, and we do extraordinary things, and that is true in some cases. And I think that having an alien come down who is painted as a higher intelligence actually find anything admirable about us is comforting and that makes it a feel good movie.
00:27:58
Speaker 2: And also so one of the things that does seem to pop up, It certainly pops up in Et. The kids want to help him, and even Keys ends up helping him. Same thing happens in Starman, in that there's this I don't know why they always put SETI guys on the recovery team, because the SETI guys, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence guys are always the ones waiting for messages from space and don't believe in crashes and recoveries and aliens there on Earth. But he does, and he ends up helping Starman get away. Yes, and by the way, if anybody in the real government cover up behaved as people in movies do, this thing would be solved ages ago, Brent, there'd have been so many leaks and all that. Charles Martin Smith, the actor in this thing, would clearly have been put away in prison forever app for what he did. But in the movie, it's a good thing. Okay, So here's the spoiler, so cover your ears if you don't want to know. But we get to the end and there is a goodbye sequence, and I'm trying to remember what my spoiler was going to be that oh, yes, the prize he gives her is he's impregnated her. She's going to have the child that she never could have with Jeff Bridges, the original Father. But guess what, since he's made of the same DNA she's going to get that kid. Oh and by the way, she also gets two little silver balls or something.
00:29:25
Speaker 1: That, yes, that the child will know what to do with.
00:29:28
Speaker 2: The child will know what to do beautiful, Yes, I hope you does so.
00:29:32
Speaker 1: And so that that sets up then what ultimately the TV series became. Yeah, because the series then continues with the idea that Starman. At the end of the movie spoiler alert, he escapes, he gets his ride back home, but then in the TV series he comes back to Earth to essentially help raise and guide his teenage son, and they're searching for Jenny and staying ahead of the government who is looking for him again. And it takes idea of a stranded alien and turns it into more of this fugitive family drama that felt a lot to mean more like Highway to Heaven or Touch My Angel, where the characters are moving from place to place and imparting some sort of moral lesson. And it wasn't my cup of tea, but it did keep the basic germ of the series alive, but it completely took away at what made it interesting for me.
00:30:22
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'd rather watch my favorite Martian, to be honest, with you than the Starman TV series. I don't want to march forward until we pay some homage to the Brother from another Planet, which is if the Yen is Starman, the yang is Brother from another Planet. Because Joe Morton, in case you didn't know, as an African American man, and so the Brother okay, and the Brother from another Planet is almost like a slave narrative as well as a story about immigration and race and class. You can see John Sales was like, Hey, I am not interested in your cute little alien thing. I've got things on my mind I want to talk about. And so the only way that you can actually tell that this brother is an alien is he has three toes. Yes, I've agrees, but otherwise he looks like a black man. And so what happens is that's what makes people enjoy the film. First, it's it looks very low budget. They shot it in four weeks or something and whatever. But it's the idea that here is an bonafide extraterrestrial on Earth, but nobody sees him as that at all. In them now, they see him not as that et they see him as a black guy. And people that are also black respond. One way to him people that aren't respond another way, and I enjoyed seeing it again, although it does feel a little slow and a little off putting a little bit. So my vote goes to Starman as the film that's really got the staying power. It's not a perfect film by any means, but I enjoyed it so much because Brent again history. I covered Voyager one for CNN, I covered Voyager two for PBS, and I always wondered if I was first covering these things? Is the sort of the Stephen Hawking thing that we were talking about in a recent episode. It's like, is this good for us to be telling if the universe is teeming with life? Okay, so maybe some good people will hear this record, But what if some of the people aren't so good? There's a map to Earth on it for crying out loud, So yeah, yeah, all right, moving on, moving on, There's still a couple of movies that we want to talk about.
00:32:35
Speaker 1: Do you have a preference about what you want to dive into next?
00:32:38
Speaker 2: Oh, I got some TV series I want to talk about, So I'm going to let you run into the movie world there.
00:32:45
Speaker 1: While we're on the topic of more benevolent feel good stranded stories. Let's talk about k Pax.
00:32:52
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah.
00:32:54
Speaker 1: K Pax is a movie starring Kevin Spacey, and basically it's the very kind of ambiguous version of the stranded alien story. He is in I Believe a mental institution.
00:33:07
Speaker 2: New York Psychiatric Hospiglees exactly, and he calls himself.
00:33:12
Speaker 1: Prot PRT, and he claims to be from the planet k Pax, and he frankly displays impossible knowledge and unusual abilities and tells all of the patients there that he can take one of them with him when he leaves back to his home planet. The nice thing about the movie is, though, is it keeps it very mysterious and open ended about is he really crazy like everyone else seems to be there, or is he actually an extraterrestrial with all of these incredible abilities.
00:33:43
Speaker 2: It's a really good film. And I say that even knowing that Kevin Spacey is a controversial guy and all that, But when it came out, he wasn't. It was a great performance by him. It was Kevin Spacey at his crazy best. And the only reason K PAX probably gets honorable mention in this category. Is he in an alien? Yeah, he's really a disturbed human being who has created all this because of the terrible things that have happened to him. So yeah, but he sure comes across as an alien. He does. And there's a sea where he eats an entire banana with the skin on that still gives me nightmares. So yeah, what's funny.
00:34:29
Speaker 1: Is I went online and was searching, and there's still a whole There's a decent percentage of the audience that still is convinced, no, he was an alien. There's just enough ambiguity in it that I think you and I look at it and say, no, it was sorry, so damaged human.
00:34:44
Speaker 2: So it is interesting because whether he is or whether he isn't, the premise of the thing is interesting, which is, how would we deal with someone who thinks he's an alien. We probably lock him up in or we'd cut his brain open, or in this case, he's just considered detritus and he's thrown into the psychiatric institute. I have a TV series that I'm watching right now, Brent, that's the opposite of Kpax. Okay, all right, And I don't know if you've been watching it or not. And I'm kind of torn about this about the whole spoiler policy. It's hard to do something that analyzes these films and TV series and say, but we're never going to tell you what they're really about. Yeah, so I want to talk about Sugar on Apple TV plus. What's your take? Can I talk about it?
00:35:33
Speaker 1: I think you can. I think this is a great place for anyone who's listening that is saying, oh, no, I've heard about Sugar, I want to watch it. Don't spoil it. Okay, Well pause right here and we'll wave you.
00:35:45
Speaker 2: Okay, So here I go. Here's Sugar and Spice. I started watching Sugar, which is a TV series stalling starring Colin Ferrell. I like Colin Ferrell, and I found his performance on this thing to be quite interesting. He is a private investigator and only he's very refined. He's fair and decent and calm, and he watches a lot of TV or a lot of movies, a lot of old movies, which is another thing, by the way. Quite often individual ets that are stranded and often watch our TV or films or whatever to learn about Yeah, and in fact, that's not particularly wrong. If you were an American who moved to Germany to take a job, you should start watching German TV. Learned the language, learn the customs. So it's a really interesting movie. He is a private investigator. He's involved in some kind of missing person's case. And I'm cruising along with this going it's kind of moody. There's a lot of voice over. He's driving a hot convertible around Los Angeles. I enjoy watching it. There's just a lot to like about it for me. Not everyone's going to like it, but for me, I really enjoyed it. So I'm watching this. I get six episodes. At the end of the sixth episode, he goes into the bathroom and he injects himself with something and he turns into a blue skinned alien, and I'm like, what now? Why is this an individual alien stuck on Earth? Story? First of all, it's just fascinating that happened, because the next episode, maybe that was the end of episode seven, I don't remember right now, But the next episode, it turns out there's a group of these aliens, yes, that basically go from planet to planet. The species is interested in other intelligent life, which actually fits with something I've been saying four years, which is all intelligent life is probably interesting to all other intelligent life. And so maybe that's why I like the series so much, that their expectation is that they can come to Earth and investigate. But it turns out that what the big bad powers that be are hunting them down, and so they just we have to go home. This is the season one and he decides to stay. Yeah, so he becomes the solo alien left on Earth. And there is a season two out and I ain't going to say anything about season two. So if you think I've spoiled everything, you can go straight to season two because it's a whole new storyline. But what I find so interesting about Sugar and so compelling is not that I think that's probably happening, but it might be. It might be. We hear about shape shifters, and one of the greatest problems of all these things brand is trying to figure out how does an alien make itself look like a human? Yes, there's always a different plan in obviously, in the Manufeld Earth he puts some kind of covering on him.
00:38:48
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like a costumer.
00:38:50
Speaker 2: And in Starman he uses the DNA and recreates it. In this one, it's there's not an outfit or anything on him. By injecting himself, he gives his body time to not have to project the human sphere. And I'm not going to say anything other than he's got the same freaking problem that Jeff Bridges has in Starman, which is there's a hot woman that his humanity tells him he wants to go to bed with, but his alienness says, no, we don't interfere. So I'm not going to comment on how that's resolved in season two. But I do find Sugar to be a great show. Have you seen any part of it? Or I have seen the first season on your recommendation? Actually, thanks, yes, And it was interesting because you didn't tell me why.
00:39:44
Speaker 1: I should watch it. You just said it was a great show. And I'd heard that from a few other people. So at some point, when I hear it from enough people whose opinions I respect and trust, I say, Okay, I have to watch this. So I did not know the twist, but I knew there were certain things in the story telling before you get to the big reveal that made me think there was something going on with him. Yeah, that because he had such an extraordinary set of morals and ethics, right, He's a private detective that does not like violence. He does not want to hurt people, and like you said, he was very gentlemanly around women, and he just there was a sense about him that made him feel bigger and better than humans. He was somehow above everyone else in the movie. So when the big reveal came that he was an alien, I thought, oh, okay, that makes sense of everything.
00:40:36
Speaker 2: Now.
00:40:36
Speaker 1: I thought it was a little surprising, but I thought, okay, actually that's the best kind of surprise where I am a little startled in the moment, but everything makes sense because the storytelling it was set up really well.
00:40:48
Speaker 2: Now we're trying to be disciplined this time and actually bring in one of these shows in under an hour, so I'm actually going to bolt a head into something. There's a pair of projects that I find fascinating because they're both about something similar. One of them is a television series that's out now, I think it's finished its run, but it's very contemporaneous, that is Resident Alien. And the other is a favorite film of mine that I've seen multiple times because I find it so odd and interesting and compelling, and that's under the skin. Yes, Now, I don't know you've probably seen a little bit of each other. You've probably seen Under the Skin.
00:41:27
Speaker 1: Yes, I have seen Under the Skin. I have not watched all of Resident Alien, but I will prepare myself for any spoilers.
00:41:34
Speaker 2: Why not you do a little bit on Under the Skin then, and I will tell you why. I think Resident Alien and Under the Skin are both two sides of the same coin when it comes to alienness on Earth.
00:41:46
Speaker 1: Interesting. And it's nice that we're pivoting from Sugar into Under the Skin because another complete one eighty flip where we just said the thing you admire about Sugar is his moral and his ethics. His morals and his ethics in Under the Skin, throw out all of that, at least initially for the first part of the movie. What we have there is a story of a predatory alien in the form of Scarlett Johansson, who is basically moving through Scotland in human form, and she's luring lonely men into this very surreal harvesting process. Ultimately, the harvesting process is I understood it to ultimately consume men, or to consume humans. That's why she was sent to her race to go bring back human food essentially, so it's a fairly dark story. However, just like Sugar, she comes to develop a compassion for humanity and ultimately decides she doesn't want this mission anymore. And now when she tries to get away and to stop permission, she becomes hunted by her own handler. The movie ultimately ends in a fairly ironic way in that she is subjected to the same brutal thing fate that she subjected many of her captures to, when a human logger does to her what she's done to again her captives. So I think the interesting thing about the movie is that even a terrifying predatory alien who is coming here to eat humans, still, if you spend enough time with us, you can learn compassion and empathy, and you can change your ways, and it may get you killed. The last thing I did want to point out I think it's interesting about that empathy angle is that that is the message of the movie, is that empathy is dangerous because it makes us vulnerable, and yet that is the exact opposite message of Disclosure Day. Empathy in that case is seen as a superpower that will elevate humans to a higher level of consciousness.
00:43:57
Speaker 2: You've used the word compassion that she develops compassion. I'm not necessarily challenging the word, but I am questioning it. I always thought she was developing curiosity more than compassion, that she has not quite come to the compassionate take on things, but she's beginning to understand that there are different kinds of humans and certain things are awakening within her, that she's like, what is going on here? One thing, I just wanted to really point out that I did not realize what's so great about doing these shows. You start doing this research and pattern recognition kicks in. You just said under the Skin, she's a young woman driving a white van around Scotland. Okay, guess what. At the beginning of this I talked about the man from Planet X who lands on an isolated Scottish island nineteen fifty one, and I talked about Devil Girl from Mars nineteen fifty four, where she has a damaged saucer and comes down near a remote Scottish inn. Wow, what's up with these people from Scotland and these aliens walking among them?
00:45:04
Speaker 1: I don't know.
00:45:05
Speaker 2: I don't know anyway. I love Under the Skin. I couldn't get my wife to watch it with me to save my life. She would not watch it. It's creepy, it's dark, it's creepy. It is. But part of what's interesting is Scarlett Johansen is awesome.
00:45:21
Speaker 1: Yes, she's amazing.
00:45:22
Speaker 2: Awesome in this thing. She does such a great performance. I think the director has done a great job with it himself, and it just feels authentic. The same problem though, where she starts to she has one mission when she gets there, but she has to hang out with these humans and it starts to change her. That's more what I would say, She's just changing a little bit. Okay, it's another rave for me for a TV series, and it's Resident Alien, which, like I said, four seasons in I think, just so you know what this one's about. The concept is there's a badass alien, okay, who does get marooned in Colorado and his solution to being marooned. In the pilot, I believe the first episode is Toper. He murders a small town doctor. He murders them and does what Jeff Ridges does in Starman. He uses his DNA to recreate himself as that doctor. Okay, So in the he is on a journey. He shows up in this town. He has his whole. I'm not going to get into all the details, but he's there for bad intent, that's it. And when he's got this marooning going on, he needs to find a way to go underground, so he takes this guy's identity. And the thing is, if he was like Scarlett Johansson in a big city, then she's a tiny cog in a big city and she's invisible. She's this dark force out there. But he can't do that. He's in this small Colorado town and everybody knows him. He's the doctor. He's smart enough to try to fake it, but he has contempt for humans at the beginning, and over these four seasons he makes actual friends with certain humans. And I guess that isn't that the solution to everything? Isn't that why we've tried over the years to have We used to have exchange programs. Americans would go to Russia during the Cold War and Russians would come to America, And we did that with China. When if you can trade with another country, maybe you don't want to destroy it. So that theory writ large is now writ small and resident alien, where people who are quirky and weird, as he is become his friends and he starts to change. Now, if that was all that this Resident Alien is, Brent, I would probably not be saying and you should watch it. But it does something that's near and dear to our hearts, because we certainly have tried to do it in Dark Sky, where we try to say, what do we know about the state of ufology, Let's cram the shit out of it into our TV series. Let's let it all hang out. That's what they do. This is such an inventory of UFO lore and Resident Alien. Now, I want to make clear to everybody it's a comedy. This isn't a drama. It's a comedy. But it's got abduction, it's got missing time. There are implants, there are grays, there are hybrids, there's men in black, there's experiences, there's government secrecy, interspecies, agendas, multiple species. It's got it all in there. So I've enjoyed watching it because I go, these guys know who the creative team behind it knows as much about UFO law as I do. And I feel like in some respects they're speaking directly to me with these things. And the only thing that I would say matches it in the same sort of way. Is that movie Paul, yes, seth Rogen plays Yes, Oh, but it is.
00:49:03
Speaker 1: This is my question to you, is, as we're ending getting closer to the end of the episode, should we do a whole episode on comedic aliens? Because I feel like Paul deserves a lot of time. It's a really fun movie.
00:49:19
Speaker 2: Let's put a pen in Paul. The only thing I should say about him is he's the original Roswell Alien, pretty much as it's Yes Who's gotten out. I think we should do an episode about comedy where we can go into more detail on Resident Alien and Paul and a number of other things. And I've already spoken to some folks about possibly guesting on that and getting through it. We even have a title that we fooled around it with, which is an ET walks into a bar that was the started like a joke. Okay, concluding remarks here, yeah, okay, what have we learned? What should we learn here?
00:49:54
Speaker 1: I think I come back to something I said at the beginning, which is that Hollywood loves these stories of streng aliens for all the reasons that we've talked about, and there can be a range of the stories, but even in the most the darkest version of the story, like Under the Skin, the alien comes around and, as you said, if not gains full compassion, becomes curious and at least a little open minded to humans. So I think they're comforting. They are telling us about ourselves. Whether it's brother from another planet offering social satire, whether it's a relationship story like Starman, or whether it's the repair of a dysfunctional family. All of these things feel like the alien is bringing benefit and making the world a better place in some way. What I want to talk about, and just because when you talk about pattern recognition, the thing that jumped out to me is I noticed that in several of these movies, specifically Et, Starman and k Pax, the main characters are Messiah figures. So they're a being with a higher intelligence and a higher for compassion and love, and they find themselves trapped on our crazy planet, which at times must feel like hell to them. I want to bring up a quote because I think this takes us into an area that is super relevant right now. Billy Graham, the famous evangelist known as America's pastor, had an interesting quote once. He said, UFOs are astonishingly angel like in some of their appearances, and if you look at what people have reported, that's actually quite true and structurally, a lot of the films we're talking about could be seen through that lens of fallen angel stories, where these divine beings who find themselves stranded on earth at the mercy of humans, with their usually supreme morality tested in some cases and even tempted. I guess my question is this, when you look at these type of movies, are they shaping or reinforcing that the religious belief system? And if so, it's no wonder that many people today believe that aliens are fallen angels and even demons, And in fact, many leaders have been teaching for some time that fallen angels want to pull people away from God. They argue that teaching people to believe in aliens is a trick to make humanity trust advanced science instead of faith. Now, for many reasons, scholars religious scholars view extraterrestrials as physical beings from outer space, but they do not view them as physical beings from outer space, but as spiritual beings acting as ministers of deception in a hidden cosmic war. So I think when we talk about disclosure. We have to remember that disclosure is coming to very different groups of people are whose different belief systems are going to be challenged in different ways. And all of this leads me to one practical question which I've heard you voice and I love this question, which is, if that's true, why would angels or demons need UFOs? Why would they need material physical crafts to enter our realm? And circling back to something we talked about in an episode called All about the Wu. You can't really answer that question without sounding derisive or cynical, but it goes back to something I think that Jacques Valet's idea of whatever the aliens are, they seem to take the form of whatever our current culture can understand, meaning these aliens are shaped and made manifest by our collective consciousness a bell that I continued to ring. And so therefore aliens really have They couldn't have popped into pop culture, so to speak, really before the nineteenth century when flight was discovered. The Wright Brothers in nineteen oh three made us realize we could fly, and then once we could fly on Earth, we could fly into space. And then suddenly the whole concept of aliens starts to emerge because why our imagination has been expanded about what's possible. Now, I'm going to conclude this with something that may be controversial. It's what I believe. I'm not scared to God on a limb here. I believe that science and spirituality are seen as separate, even oppositional, in our society, and is that by design? Is that to keep the populace divided. That's a conspiracy theory that we're not going to go down in today. But underlying all of this is this idea that if quantum mechanics proves anything, there is no separation on any level. We are connected and quantumly entangled, and what affects one of us to some degree affects all of us. Likewise, the core tenants of science and spirituality are not separate. They are both inherently trying to answer the same questions about our existence, one through evidence and one's through faith. So, in my version of disclosure, if it ever comes, I believe that what we're going to learn is that aliens and angels and demons are all manifestations of our collective consciousness, co created with an intelligent universe informed by our individual beliefs and imaginations, which then tends to start explaining the wide range and varying details you find when examining stories about aliens on Earth, whether they are benevolent, malicious, or something in between.
00:55:09
Speaker 2: First, I'm not smart enough to debate that with you, and second, I don't have the time to debate it with you, So that is going to be in another episode. My concluding statement about what we've talked about today is I don't believe really we should be thinking about angels and demons. And a lot of people are, and I think it's to explain the UFO issue, and a lot of them are in the Pentagon, and I think that's not helpful because I think it is more like what you said. It's like it's chicken in the egg. Whatever it is, it's the phenomenon. Now, some people see the phenomenon has this explanation for religion and vice versa, and I'm not going to get into that right now, but I will say this, if you look at all the movies and TV series we've talked about, I do not believe that is the core experience of the phenomenon. It revealed to us as I enjoy these movies. I think there's a lot of one offs out there. I don't think there's a lot of individual ets or from some other place that are stranded on Earth. I think there might have been a few over time. This Vargina case from Brazil possibly was an alien stranded on Earth. Maybe some of the crash wreckage like Roswell had a living alien or whatever. But in general, I think the explanation for what we're seeing is more species oriented. That there's a group a species, somebody is interested in us as a species, and it isn't one of them running around. It's multiples. It's more like sugar at the beginning. I just think there's a lot more to explore, and of course that's what we're going to be doing. We need to say goodbye, so I'm going to say everybody, thank you for watching. We appreciate that you will subscribe and comment and do all the things that help us. If you like what you're seeing, watch the Skies. Sound, Light and Frequency is an iHeart podcast produced by Stellar Productions. It's executive produced by Nick Johnson and for Stellar Jackie's Abel. Our show's music was written by Anna Stumpf and Hamilton Lighthouser, and your hosts and executive producers are Bryce Abel That's me and Brent Friedman. Watch the Skies
00:58:08
Speaker 1: T
Speaker 1: Are aliens here on Earth? Hollywood sure thinks so, and so did John Harrington. But there are other voices echoing the same idea, a veritable chorus in fact of leaders in the disclosure movement. Let's start with David Grush, the former US Air Force officer and intelligence official who testified to Congress, has recently stated publicly that the government holds records on several distinct kinds of non human biological life. Then there's doctor hal Putoff, a theoretical physicist and the co founder of the Stargate Remote viewing Project, who claimed that the US government has recovered bodies from at least four separate extraterrestrial species. Lastly, doctor Eric Davis, a renowned astrophysicist who has worked extensively for the government and defense industry. But he goes one step further. He outlined four distinct extraterrestrial biological life forms associated with recovered UFO wreckage, Gray's, Nordic's, and Reptilians insectoids. So the question has quickly evolved from are we alone? To how many aliens are living amongst us? And if they are here, what form are they taking? Now? Beyond the four already mentioned we've also heard stories of little grays and large grays, tall whites and Nordics or are those the same things? Reptilians and insectoids but also mantoids or are those insectoids. It's all a little confusing, and just to take it even one step further, David Grush even recently throughout the idea that we could also be looking at sentient plasmoids, whatever that means. For today, though we're primarily interested in aliens disguised as humans stranded here on Earth, living amongst us, trying to assimilate and survive.
00:01:46
Speaker 2: For this episode, we thought we'd try something where we're really just talking about the solo stranded on Earth, in other words, just one alien physically present on Earth at a time. And we got this inspiration, folks, because we did an episode a few back called The Men Who Fell to Earth, which was literally about a franchise, The Man Who Fell to Earth. That was a book and it was a movie, and it was as a pilot and it was everything, but it was about David Bowie, in most people's recognition, being stranded here on Earth. So we thought, let's take a look at this whole stranded mentality because the thing is the stranded alien thing is sci Fi's clean moral experiment. There's no agenda most times other than the alien is here and can't get back. But there's just one of them, so they are really alienated. And then the question is always going to be reflected in the movies or TVs. How are we going to deal with them? And how are they going to deal with us? Because now it's one on one. And of course the greatest storyline about that everybody remembers is Et, but we're not going to start there. I was just thinking as we were doing this, Brent, there's a whole lot more to the stranded on alien than just Et. Although he's the one on everybody remembers. Yes, I'll give you one and then I'll let you run. The most popular alien stranded on Earth has got to be kel El. Superman, Oh right, right. He's a crash victim. Now he doesn't have any idea of his home planet really when he gets here, so it's not like he's feeling like, oh I miss it so much, but he's still alienated. And one of the things about Superman has always been he's at his core, he's an alien, a stranger he's a strange visitor, but he's not the only guy either. There's been a lot of product out there in Hollywood generated on the concept of aliens being here one at a time, and the earliest one I could find I'm talking not books or anything, I'm talking about film, and it's The Man from Planet X. That's nineteen fifty one, where an alien lands on a Scottish island and he's this vulnerable visitor and he bonds with the human signe and I won't go into it because no one's going to watch this, okay, But they were talking about in fifty one. And then a personal favorite from nineteen fifty four is Devil Girl from Mars, which is she shows up, she's the sole Martian, she needs helf repairing her ship. The Cosmic Man in nineteen fifty nine, another one single alien arrives in a sphere and the military immediately surrounds it. But another one that we'll be talking about maybe in a future episode. But Jerry Lewis in nineteen sixty in the film Visit to a Small Planet, is the guy who shows up here and he's all alone. And then I'm just going to lay this out there because it's the one that everybody grew up on, and it's my favorite Martian.
00:04:44
Speaker 1: I remember thinking he was such a persnickety alien, but I love the actor who was It was Ray Walston. Ray Walston, Yeah, so I loved him and other things and I bill, yes, it was the human. Yes. I remember thinking when Mark came out with Robin Williams Yes, that this was probably inspired by my favorite Martian.
00:05:07
Speaker 2: They're both sort of the alien observer who has been into human life if you will, who listen. I don't know what it says for alien intelligence that for season after season they're still surprised by humanity because they've been there for a while. My favorite Martian, though, is interesting because the Martian who's here is an anthropologist, right. But again the Crash references in these things. He crash lands near Los Angeles. This reporter Tim O'Hare played by Bixby, shelters him and invents this whole Uncle Martin identity. Listen. It doesn't hold up well. Most sitcoms from the sixties are pretty silly. Mork and Mindy at least as Robin Williams who you watch Mark and MINDI and you just go did they have scripts? For this or did they just have improvisational things for Rod.
00:05:57
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's with everything he did. Actually, one of the funny things about more coan Miindi, someone pointed out to me recently was at the beginning of the show and the title sequence he crash lands in an egg.
00:06:07
Speaker 2: Yes, so a lot of crash land.
00:06:10
Speaker 1: And I remember when I saw that, I'm like, what, so he's not an alien because that's not a UFO. What's going on here? It was so confusing.
00:06:17
Speaker 2: Shout out to Boulder, Colorado where that takes place, and just one other and then we can move on because we could literally and will if the podcast continues, we'll be talking about all of these things in greater detail. But in nineteen seventy eight, the one that is the closest to et and sort of form and structure is the cat from outer space. And it is so bizarre. There's a cat. It's not actually a cat. It's an alien that looks like a cat, an Abyssinian cat. Now I'm not a cat person.
00:06:50
Speaker 1: My brother had an Abyssinian okay, yours, well, beautiful like they look like Egyptian cats. If that's a thing.
00:06:55
Speaker 2: You were harboring, your brother was harboring an alien apparently and not being straight with you about that. So anyway, this one emergency lands, contacts its distant mothership, receives a deadline it's going to be coming for you, recruits a human, tries to retrieve and repair the spacecraft that's not ET material. But there is a lot of that though, of repairing spacecraft. Listen, I'm throwing aside about ten pages of research here right now, because the truth is, there's just so many of these things. And this episode, we're going to start with the Granddaddy. After this break here, we're gonna trot out ET.
00:07:36
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:07:37
Speaker 2: I love ET, by the way, because I watched it again last night, and I have to say it was so much fun. It's just fun. And it's forty four years old right now.
00:07:50
Speaker 1: So yeah, and it still holds up. It's one of those movies that I feel will be an enduring classic for generations. I'm Brent Friedman. Years ago, a family friend who became a cabinet member in the Reagan administration disclosed to me that aliens are real. They're here, and he'd seen them.
00:08:25
Speaker 2: I'm Bryce's Abel. Later, when we were producing Dark Skies, an NBCTV series about an alien invasion. We were approached by men who said they were from the Office of Naval Intelligence and they wanted to give us inside information in exchange for access to our show.
00:08:41
Speaker 1: We didn't take that deal, but we have never stopped thinking about it.
00:08:45
Speaker 2: That's why we do this podcast. We're working out ideas in real time about how Hollywood is portrayed aliens and why every.
00:08:54
Speaker 1: Episode is different because there are so many questions.
00:08:58
Speaker 2: We're looking for answers. It's an act of investigation. Let's do this together, all right, folks, let's talk ET. We all have our memories, which we like to do on this show. Brent, where were you? What was so interesting to me, though, is in nineteen eighty two when ET came out and there's this whole backstory, and I know you've got some good stuff to lay on us. But in nineteen eighty two, I didn't know much about it, but I was reviewing films at PBS. It wasn't my full time gig. I wasn't a film reviewer, but if anybody reviewed films there, I would review the films. Okay, there was a screening of ET the Extraterrestrial That was interesting because you knew at least it was about an extraterrestrial and you knew Steven Spielberg had made it. So I went and saw this thing blind. I took my wife, Jackie, she wasn't we weren't married yet, but we went out on a date into Beverly Hills and watched it. And so I really got that wonderful experience where a film. I love to do this even today, where you let a film you know is going to be okay, it's pretty good, you've heard about it, but you don't know the details, you haven't asked about the details, and it washes over you.
00:10:28
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:10:28
Speaker 2: Man, that was just great. And as I understand it, we came very close not to having the wonderful ET version that we all remember.
00:10:41
Speaker 1: It's true, there's a really interesting backstory to ET. But let me frame this with something to remind our listeners and viewers that, in our opinion, there is some evidence that Steven Spielberg took the same deal that we were offered by JC, that was intelligence for influence. Now we've already examined close encounters, we've examined disclosure Day through that optic, but now here we are with ET. Now, according to our source Toby Hooper again another episode we I think it was episode number two. We talked about this, just like Close Encounters. He said that Stephen was given information and that ET was based on a true story. Now, if you do some digging, you're going to find out there's some truth in that statement on ET. You have to understand that after Close Encounters, the studio was very interested in doing a sequel, of course, and what Spielberg pitch was a violent home invasion film, and the idea was by doing that under the Close Encounters banner, it would keep the title alive at the studio. The plot was inspired by the infamous nineteen fifty five Kelly Hopskinville Goblin encounter in Kentucky, where basically a rural family claimed that they were besieged by small, aggressive, gremlin like creatures. Now this is interesting because it'll come back later in our show. Spielberg hired screenwriter John sALS to pen a script featuring five distinct alien visitors. There was a vicious leader named Scar with a light emitting finger, and a gentle, curious outcast named Buddy, and Buddy ends up befriending the family's autistic son, who gets left behind, and then Buddy gets left behind on Earth when his hostile crew departs. So just to put a bow on this, legendary makeup artist Rick Baker was hired to design the terrifying creatures, and Toby Hooper was actually in line to direct it, so obviously none of that happened. Spielberg had a change of heart. He didn't want to make something scary. He was very caught up in the emotional concept of the single alien connecting with the lonely child. He scrapped the whole project and hired Melissa Matheson to write the script because in fact John Sales had turned it down, and then all of the abandoned horror elements, both from the Family Horror and The Alien Horror, got diverted into other movies that Spielberg was associated with, particularly Poltergeist and Gremlins.
00:13:15
Speaker 2: First of all, just a couple of things that sparked. Whilet's say you're talking about that was first I had always heard that Spielberg, at least this is what he said on the extras on the that I watched last night. He said he always wanted to tell the story about children of divorce because that's what he was, and so he was going to make a movie about children of divorce, and he was going to make the ET version that you described, and then he decided let's put them both together, in which case that also gave you a lighter, brighter Et than the one that was originally described. And just for perspective, we haven't described actually what the story of ET is, because, let's face it, most of the people listening to this already know that it's Elliott who befriends Et. And what's interesting, though, is to see Elliott and Et merge, not just mentally but physically. By the end of the film, they are symbiotically connected and almost die together, which is partly why I think people like it. Some majefrities weeping, Oh my god, Elliott can't die, He can't die. That was a very popular movie, though, let's just put this in perspective about what it did. It touched people so much that it surpassed Star Wars as the highest grossing film of its time.
00:14:31
Speaker 1: That's amazing.
00:14:31
Speaker 2: That's truly amazing. It received nine Academy Award nominations and I think it won four of them. It got entered into the National Film registry, but I think ninety four. So over a decade later, it turned phone home into a universal phrase. Parents have been telling kids now, phone home for ages now. And it got me addicted to Reese's pieces. And I bet the M and M people to this day regret not fighting stronger to get that. And it also made Ello It's moon crossing bicycle one of cinema's most recognizable images, and our friend of the show, Ernie Klein, has stated that it is his favorite scene in film. So I just have one question for you, because we all know what we're talking about. At the very end, they're being pursued by the government, which again is one of the standards of these stranded on Earth things. Quite often, the government is the bad guy. The human that the alien has bonded with is trying to help them, but the government's trying to capture them. Blah blah blah. And at the end of ET and by the way, they shot that out near my house, I look at ET and I'm like, wow, that looks like my neighborhood there. But at the end of it, they're being pursued relentlessly, and suddenly these five kids on bicycles are airborne and honestly, today, Brent, if they shot, if they did a remake, none of those kids would be on real bicycles. They would all be a gang of those fat tire electrical bikes, which has the city council while to live up in arms because they drive around like gangs. Here's my question for you, though. Yep, these five kids, one of them has et in the basket and they're flying through the sky. Why are they pedaling their bicycles?
00:16:17
Speaker 1: That's an existential question. I guess it's muscle memory.
00:16:20
Speaker 2: I never thought about it at all, and yet there they are and they're pedaling. Yet they're flying through the air. Do they think that pedaling will is making them go fast? Well, I don't know.
00:16:32
Speaker 1: If I jump into my ten year old brain riding a bike, if I started to get altitude, I would keep pedaling. I think it would just be wrote instinct out of fear that if I stop, I'm going to actually go down and crash. But I don't know. It's a very funny.
00:16:48
Speaker 2: Question, and that whole ending does very much make one thing very clear, and that's what Spielberg said. Out to do children see a person and they see the alien, they see this person not like them, but a person adults initially see that same creature entity NHI as a specimen or a security problem. And that's where a lot of the conflict and some of these things has come about. And I just want to get to the wrap on ET because we had so many other things to talk about. But I told you I saw it and reviewed it. Or was the film reviewer for this PBS station here in la Kset. So I went back and I was going to review it, and they didn't let me review ET. They said it was not serious. It was we were a news group, news beat is what it's called, and so they didn't see this as newsy enough. Now imagine today a film like ET came out, people would all be wanting to review it because we're getting tranches of government documents and all that stuff. But back then, I just remember my news director looking at me as I'm standing in his office, saying, it's great and we could really talk about this, we could do that, and he just looked at me and said, we are not going to review that film. Go back to your office, get some work done. So times have changed a little bit. We're a little more open to that kind of thing a little more.
00:18:15
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, my last thought on et is just from a cinematic standpoint, something that always stuck with me was how Steven Spielberg introduced the government bad guy played by Peter Coyote. It's just his keys that shangled, and the idea being is that the alien entity the et is so has hyper senses, and so he associates that sound of the jangling keys with being hunted, and it's just such an interesting thing. It makes him very childlike right off the bat. And I never forgot that. I never forgot from a cinematic standpoint how economical that was.
00:18:52
Speaker 2: With the exception of the Mother Mary, no adults are portrayed except for Keys Laid in the film. You're seeing from sort of ground level, from a kid's level, and when you finally see him, it's Peter Coyote, who, by the way, if I'm not mistaken, is the voice of most of Ken Burns things and most of James Fox's UFO documentaries. Oh that's right, including the Phenomenon. So there's connections everywhere. What I particularly liked, though, is that Keys Peter Coyote, when he's finally revealed he's a decent guy. He's there to get a job done, but he also understands how painful this is for Elliott and how once they think that Et is dead, it's hey, let's give the kid a moment alone with his grief. And so he's a decent guy. And then, frankly, like a lot of these movies, at the end, there's a big goodbye scene. Et gets to say goodbye to Elliott and Gerty the little girl gets to kiss him goodbye. And let's face it, Keys who is there in the scene. He could run up and grab Et in his own arms and run in the other direction, but he doesn't. He lets him go, which is something that's going to happen in another film we want to talk about. Starman. Okay, flash forward just two years, folks, just two years, and there's a pair of aliens alone stranded on Earth movies and they're released the same year, nineteen eighty four, and they are Starman starring Jeff Bridges and Karen Allen, and also The Brother from Another Planet starring Joe Morton, directed by John Sales who actually plays one of the maybe men in black or whatever in the thing. And they both are very different tellings of a story about an alien who is left here on the planet, and the one that's by far closest to ET is Starman.
00:20:49
Speaker 1: Yeah. Absolutely, And I think both of those movies do something that made them very relatable and gave them an emotional center. So with Et, et is coming to a family that doesn't have a father, and not to say that he is a father figure, but he brings the family together. He provides that paternal protective center. In Starman, we meet a woman named I believe Jenny played by Karen Allen, and she has lost her husband. And what does Starman do. He comes to her in the guise of her dead husband, not on purpose, though not on purpose, He just sees a piece of hair and he goes DNA like, Yes, he comes out of an orb.
00:21:31
Speaker 2: Frankly, he's an orb. Yes.
00:21:34
Speaker 1: Yes. And so both of those stories then lend themselves to being more about how the alien character helps repair the humans and bring them together, bring them closure, or whatever the case may be, and that makes it very relatable on a human level.
00:21:54
Speaker 2: I have a personal connection. I think that both of one is emotional and the others. In Brother from Another Planet, Joe Morton plays the brother and I worked and wrote for Joe Morton on a show called Equal Justice in ABC series, and Joe is a great guy. This is like seven years after the movie where his career was really starting. I don't think his career took off because a Brother, which a lot of people did not see. It was just a smaller indie film where a Starman was a mega hit. A couple of things about Starman. It begins with the Voyager spacecraft's gold record. Folks, remember that we sent out a couple of voyager craft with a gold record album on it that basically is an invitation to come visit Earth. Yes, and that's why Jeff Bridges in orb form is coming to Earth. He's been invited, Yes, So he doesn't get treated very well as an invite, and it's the same thing he gets there. They always put a clock on it, so the clock is okay, in three days, you have to be I think Arizona in order for the craft to come pick you up, which, of course the craft has to pick up Et and all that. Couple of funny things that I thought. My other connection though to Starman is Karen Allen plays Jenny. Four years later, I had my first TV series on CBS. It was called k O'Brien, and we were casting the lead actress who would play a female surgeon in New York City, and the one that Bill Asher, who was my executive producer on it, and I both wanted, was Karen Allen. Okay, and I think we were close to getting her, and the network veto did. And you know why they veto did. Why she wasn't sexy enough.
00:23:43
Speaker 1: Oh my goodness.
00:23:45
Speaker 2: They didn't think that she was attractive enough or something, and Bill and I were just like, yeah's, first of all, I disagree. She's got some love scenes with Jeff Bridges and Starman that are pretty convincing and all that, but what a stupid thing. And I also think I might still be at least an asterisk in the history of television had we actually cast Karen Allen, because she would have carried that film a couple of interesting things. Though I said that they had sexual contact, Okay, the whole picture is like, they can't really have sexual contact because he looks like her husband and that would be wrong and blah blah blah. However, the whole thing is a chase thing. It's got all those interesting things. It's a road chase, they're in a trucker haven, they're being chased, blah blah blah blah blah, all that stuff, and they end up as people on the run do inside a train car, all right, And in the middle of the night, that's when they decide to knock one out. So Jeff Bridges, the alien who looks like her dead husband, and Jenny played by Karen Allen have some hot sex in a moving train car. Now that's not why I'm telling you this. It's not prairie folks. I'm analyzing this s shoe. You know what he says after having sex with her. I was so stunned by this I had to write it down.
00:25:06
Speaker 1: Brent.
00:25:07
Speaker 2: His line is, quote, I think I'm becoming a Planet Earth person, which I don't know if that's the I'm not even going to touch that one. So that's a great quote that doesn't get enough attention. Here's the quote from Starman that gets all the attention, and I wish it was more true than it sounds reading it today. His quote about people about what he's learned when he gets to the end is you are at your very best when things are worst, and there is something to be said about that example of humanity's bad behavior is freaking everywhere. We know that, we're aware those of you who are listening and watching us know that. And yet there are moments when humanity really pulls its act together. People are in trouble and we want to help him and all that, and he seems to have recognized that he isn't a spoiler to say what gift he gives her at the end.
00:26:12
Speaker 1: I think we have to talk about that gift because it explains why they made a TV gift on I want to go back to two interesting things for me anyway. One was we talk about the similarities between Starman and Et. To be clear, from our stranded point of view, Et was left behind by his crew of scientists who were about to get exposed or caught, and Et couldn't make it back to the ship in time, and the ship left without him, right right, it's really stranded. He's really stranded.
00:26:45
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's stranded.
00:26:46
Speaker 1: Yeah, And so that's why he's trying to phone home to try and get a ride back. He's calling a zuber. But Starman, actually, as you said, was invited here and then he was It's not just that he was not well received. He was shot down, yes, by the US government, So what a welcoming party. And then additionally, I think, with regards to that fresh perspective, some of the movies we're going to talk about now more so than Et, it's the stranger from a strange land, the outsider who comes with a fresh perspective and is able to look at humans and see the best and the worst. And so a lot of these movies, really they seem like they're about the alien on earth, but they're really about us. They're really about having someone who comes and adds commentary to us and sees how we do things and reminds us that, as you just said, there is an idealized version of humanity in which we are greater than the some of our parts, and we do extraordinary things, and that is true in some cases. And I think that having an alien come down who is painted as a higher intelligence actually find anything admirable about us is comforting and that makes it a feel good movie.
00:27:58
Speaker 2: And also so one of the things that does seem to pop up, It certainly pops up in Et. The kids want to help him, and even Keys ends up helping him. Same thing happens in Starman, in that there's this I don't know why they always put SETI guys on the recovery team, because the SETI guys, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence guys are always the ones waiting for messages from space and don't believe in crashes and recoveries and aliens there on Earth. But he does, and he ends up helping Starman get away. Yes, and by the way, if anybody in the real government cover up behaved as people in movies do, this thing would be solved ages ago, Brent, there'd have been so many leaks and all that. Charles Martin Smith, the actor in this thing, would clearly have been put away in prison forever app for what he did. But in the movie, it's a good thing. Okay, So here's the spoiler, so cover your ears if you don't want to know. But we get to the end and there is a goodbye sequence, and I'm trying to remember what my spoiler was going to be that oh, yes, the prize he gives her is he's impregnated her. She's going to have the child that she never could have with Jeff Bridges, the original Father. But guess what, since he's made of the same DNA she's going to get that kid. Oh and by the way, she also gets two little silver balls or something.
00:29:25
Speaker 1: That, yes, that the child will know what to do with.
00:29:28
Speaker 2: The child will know what to do beautiful, Yes, I hope you does so.
00:29:32
Speaker 1: And so that that sets up then what ultimately the TV series became. Yeah, because the series then continues with the idea that Starman. At the end of the movie spoiler alert, he escapes, he gets his ride back home, but then in the TV series he comes back to Earth to essentially help raise and guide his teenage son, and they're searching for Jenny and staying ahead of the government who is looking for him again. And it takes idea of a stranded alien and turns it into more of this fugitive family drama that felt a lot to mean more like Highway to Heaven or Touch My Angel, where the characters are moving from place to place and imparting some sort of moral lesson. And it wasn't my cup of tea, but it did keep the basic germ of the series alive, but it completely took away at what made it interesting for me.
00:30:22
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'd rather watch my favorite Martian, to be honest, with you than the Starman TV series. I don't want to march forward until we pay some homage to the Brother from another Planet, which is if the Yen is Starman, the yang is Brother from another Planet. Because Joe Morton, in case you didn't know, as an African American man, and so the Brother okay, and the Brother from another Planet is almost like a slave narrative as well as a story about immigration and race and class. You can see John Sales was like, Hey, I am not interested in your cute little alien thing. I've got things on my mind I want to talk about. And so the only way that you can actually tell that this brother is an alien is he has three toes. Yes, I've agrees, but otherwise he looks like a black man. And so what happens is that's what makes people enjoy the film. First, it's it looks very low budget. They shot it in four weeks or something and whatever. But it's the idea that here is an bonafide extraterrestrial on Earth, but nobody sees him as that at all. In them now, they see him not as that et they see him as a black guy. And people that are also black respond. One way to him people that aren't respond another way, and I enjoyed seeing it again, although it does feel a little slow and a little off putting a little bit. So my vote goes to Starman as the film that's really got the staying power. It's not a perfect film by any means, but I enjoyed it so much because Brent again history. I covered Voyager one for CNN, I covered Voyager two for PBS, and I always wondered if I was first covering these things? Is the sort of the Stephen Hawking thing that we were talking about in a recent episode. It's like, is this good for us to be telling if the universe is teeming with life? Okay, so maybe some good people will hear this record, But what if some of the people aren't so good? There's a map to Earth on it for crying out loud, So yeah, yeah, all right, moving on, moving on, There's still a couple of movies that we want to talk about.
00:32:35
Speaker 1: Do you have a preference about what you want to dive into next?
00:32:38
Speaker 2: Oh, I got some TV series I want to talk about, So I'm going to let you run into the movie world there.
00:32:45
Speaker 1: While we're on the topic of more benevolent feel good stranded stories. Let's talk about k Pax.
00:32:52
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah.
00:32:54
Speaker 1: K Pax is a movie starring Kevin Spacey, and basically it's the very kind of ambiguous version of the stranded alien story. He is in I Believe a mental institution.
00:33:07
Speaker 2: New York Psychiatric Hospiglees exactly, and he calls himself.
00:33:12
Speaker 1: Prot PRT, and he claims to be from the planet k Pax, and he frankly displays impossible knowledge and unusual abilities and tells all of the patients there that he can take one of them with him when he leaves back to his home planet. The nice thing about the movie is, though, is it keeps it very mysterious and open ended about is he really crazy like everyone else seems to be there, or is he actually an extraterrestrial with all of these incredible abilities.
00:33:43
Speaker 2: It's a really good film. And I say that even knowing that Kevin Spacey is a controversial guy and all that, But when it came out, he wasn't. It was a great performance by him. It was Kevin Spacey at his crazy best. And the only reason K PAX probably gets honorable mention in this category. Is he in an alien? Yeah, he's really a disturbed human being who has created all this because of the terrible things that have happened to him. So yeah, but he sure comes across as an alien. He does. And there's a sea where he eats an entire banana with the skin on that still gives me nightmares. So yeah, what's funny.
00:34:29
Speaker 1: Is I went online and was searching, and there's still a whole There's a decent percentage of the audience that still is convinced, no, he was an alien. There's just enough ambiguity in it that I think you and I look at it and say, no, it was sorry, so damaged human.
00:34:44
Speaker 2: So it is interesting because whether he is or whether he isn't, the premise of the thing is interesting, which is, how would we deal with someone who thinks he's an alien. We probably lock him up in or we'd cut his brain open, or in this case, he's just considered detritus and he's thrown into the psychiatric institute. I have a TV series that I'm watching right now, Brent, that's the opposite of Kpax. Okay, all right, And I don't know if you've been watching it or not. And I'm kind of torn about this about the whole spoiler policy. It's hard to do something that analyzes these films and TV series and say, but we're never going to tell you what they're really about. Yeah, so I want to talk about Sugar on Apple TV plus. What's your take? Can I talk about it?
00:35:33
Speaker 1: I think you can. I think this is a great place for anyone who's listening that is saying, oh, no, I've heard about Sugar, I want to watch it. Don't spoil it. Okay, Well pause right here and we'll wave you.
00:35:45
Speaker 2: Okay, So here I go. Here's Sugar and Spice. I started watching Sugar, which is a TV series stalling starring Colin Ferrell. I like Colin Ferrell, and I found his performance on this thing to be quite interesting. He is a private investigator and only he's very refined. He's fair and decent and calm, and he watches a lot of TV or a lot of movies, a lot of old movies, which is another thing, by the way. Quite often individual ets that are stranded and often watch our TV or films or whatever to learn about Yeah, and in fact, that's not particularly wrong. If you were an American who moved to Germany to take a job, you should start watching German TV. Learned the language, learn the customs. So it's a really interesting movie. He is a private investigator. He's involved in some kind of missing person's case. And I'm cruising along with this going it's kind of moody. There's a lot of voice over. He's driving a hot convertible around Los Angeles. I enjoy watching it. There's just a lot to like about it for me. Not everyone's going to like it, but for me, I really enjoyed it. So I'm watching this. I get six episodes. At the end of the sixth episode, he goes into the bathroom and he injects himself with something and he turns into a blue skinned alien, and I'm like, what now? Why is this an individual alien stuck on Earth? Story? First of all, it's just fascinating that happened, because the next episode, maybe that was the end of episode seven, I don't remember right now, But the next episode, it turns out there's a group of these aliens, yes, that basically go from planet to planet. The species is interested in other intelligent life, which actually fits with something I've been saying four years, which is all intelligent life is probably interesting to all other intelligent life. And so maybe that's why I like the series so much, that their expectation is that they can come to Earth and investigate. But it turns out that what the big bad powers that be are hunting them down, and so they just we have to go home. This is the season one and he decides to stay. Yeah, so he becomes the solo alien left on Earth. And there is a season two out and I ain't going to say anything about season two. So if you think I've spoiled everything, you can go straight to season two because it's a whole new storyline. But what I find so interesting about Sugar and so compelling is not that I think that's probably happening, but it might be. It might be. We hear about shape shifters, and one of the greatest problems of all these things brand is trying to figure out how does an alien make itself look like a human? Yes, there's always a different plan in obviously, in the Manufeld Earth he puts some kind of covering on him.
00:38:48
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like a costumer.
00:38:50
Speaker 2: And in Starman he uses the DNA and recreates it. In this one, it's there's not an outfit or anything on him. By injecting himself, he gives his body time to not have to project the human sphere. And I'm not going to say anything other than he's got the same freaking problem that Jeff Bridges has in Starman, which is there's a hot woman that his humanity tells him he wants to go to bed with, but his alienness says, no, we don't interfere. So I'm not going to comment on how that's resolved in season two. But I do find Sugar to be a great show. Have you seen any part of it? Or I have seen the first season on your recommendation? Actually, thanks, yes, And it was interesting because you didn't tell me why.
00:39:44
Speaker 1: I should watch it. You just said it was a great show. And I'd heard that from a few other people. So at some point, when I hear it from enough people whose opinions I respect and trust, I say, Okay, I have to watch this. So I did not know the twist, but I knew there were certain things in the story telling before you get to the big reveal that made me think there was something going on with him. Yeah, that because he had such an extraordinary set of morals and ethics, right, He's a private detective that does not like violence. He does not want to hurt people, and like you said, he was very gentlemanly around women, and he just there was a sense about him that made him feel bigger and better than humans. He was somehow above everyone else in the movie. So when the big reveal came that he was an alien, I thought, oh, okay, that makes sense of everything.
00:40:36
Speaker 2: Now.
00:40:36
Speaker 1: I thought it was a little surprising, but I thought, okay, actually that's the best kind of surprise where I am a little startled in the moment, but everything makes sense because the storytelling it was set up really well.
00:40:48
Speaker 2: Now we're trying to be disciplined this time and actually bring in one of these shows in under an hour, so I'm actually going to bolt a head into something. There's a pair of projects that I find fascinating because they're both about something similar. One of them is a television series that's out now, I think it's finished its run, but it's very contemporaneous, that is Resident Alien. And the other is a favorite film of mine that I've seen multiple times because I find it so odd and interesting and compelling, and that's under the skin. Yes, Now, I don't know you've probably seen a little bit of each other. You've probably seen Under the Skin.
00:41:27
Speaker 1: Yes, I have seen Under the Skin. I have not watched all of Resident Alien, but I will prepare myself for any spoilers.
00:41:34
Speaker 2: Why not you do a little bit on Under the Skin then, and I will tell you why. I think Resident Alien and Under the Skin are both two sides of the same coin when it comes to alienness on Earth.
00:41:46
Speaker 1: Interesting. And it's nice that we're pivoting from Sugar into Under the Skin because another complete one eighty flip where we just said the thing you admire about Sugar is his moral and his ethics. His morals and his ethics in Under the Skin, throw out all of that, at least initially for the first part of the movie. What we have there is a story of a predatory alien in the form of Scarlett Johansson, who is basically moving through Scotland in human form, and she's luring lonely men into this very surreal harvesting process. Ultimately, the harvesting process is I understood it to ultimately consume men, or to consume humans. That's why she was sent to her race to go bring back human food essentially, so it's a fairly dark story. However, just like Sugar, she comes to develop a compassion for humanity and ultimately decides she doesn't want this mission anymore. And now when she tries to get away and to stop permission, she becomes hunted by her own handler. The movie ultimately ends in a fairly ironic way in that she is subjected to the same brutal thing fate that she subjected many of her captures to, when a human logger does to her what she's done to again her captives. So I think the interesting thing about the movie is that even a terrifying predatory alien who is coming here to eat humans, still, if you spend enough time with us, you can learn compassion and empathy, and you can change your ways, and it may get you killed. The last thing I did want to point out I think it's interesting about that empathy angle is that that is the message of the movie, is that empathy is dangerous because it makes us vulnerable, and yet that is the exact opposite message of Disclosure Day. Empathy in that case is seen as a superpower that will elevate humans to a higher level of consciousness.
00:43:57
Speaker 2: You've used the word compassion that she develops compassion. I'm not necessarily challenging the word, but I am questioning it. I always thought she was developing curiosity more than compassion, that she has not quite come to the compassionate take on things, but she's beginning to understand that there are different kinds of humans and certain things are awakening within her, that she's like, what is going on here? One thing, I just wanted to really point out that I did not realize what's so great about doing these shows. You start doing this research and pattern recognition kicks in. You just said under the Skin, she's a young woman driving a white van around Scotland. Okay, guess what. At the beginning of this I talked about the man from Planet X who lands on an isolated Scottish island nineteen fifty one, and I talked about Devil Girl from Mars nineteen fifty four, where she has a damaged saucer and comes down near a remote Scottish inn. Wow, what's up with these people from Scotland and these aliens walking among them?
00:45:04
Speaker 1: I don't know.
00:45:05
Speaker 2: I don't know anyway. I love Under the Skin. I couldn't get my wife to watch it with me to save my life. She would not watch it. It's creepy, it's dark, it's creepy. It is. But part of what's interesting is Scarlett Johansen is awesome.
00:45:21
Speaker 1: Yes, she's amazing.
00:45:22
Speaker 2: Awesome in this thing. She does such a great performance. I think the director has done a great job with it himself, and it just feels authentic. The same problem though, where she starts to she has one mission when she gets there, but she has to hang out with these humans and it starts to change her. That's more what I would say, She's just changing a little bit. Okay, it's another rave for me for a TV series, and it's Resident Alien, which, like I said, four seasons in I think, just so you know what this one's about. The concept is there's a badass alien, okay, who does get marooned in Colorado and his solution to being marooned. In the pilot, I believe the first episode is Toper. He murders a small town doctor. He murders them and does what Jeff Ridges does in Starman. He uses his DNA to recreate himself as that doctor. Okay, So in the he is on a journey. He shows up in this town. He has his whole. I'm not going to get into all the details, but he's there for bad intent, that's it. And when he's got this marooning going on, he needs to find a way to go underground, so he takes this guy's identity. And the thing is, if he was like Scarlett Johansson in a big city, then she's a tiny cog in a big city and she's invisible. She's this dark force out there. But he can't do that. He's in this small Colorado town and everybody knows him. He's the doctor. He's smart enough to try to fake it, but he has contempt for humans at the beginning, and over these four seasons he makes actual friends with certain humans. And I guess that isn't that the solution to everything? Isn't that why we've tried over the years to have We used to have exchange programs. Americans would go to Russia during the Cold War and Russians would come to America, And we did that with China. When if you can trade with another country, maybe you don't want to destroy it. So that theory writ large is now writ small and resident alien, where people who are quirky and weird, as he is become his friends and he starts to change. Now, if that was all that this Resident Alien is, Brent, I would probably not be saying and you should watch it. But it does something that's near and dear to our hearts, because we certainly have tried to do it in Dark Sky, where we try to say, what do we know about the state of ufology, Let's cram the shit out of it into our TV series. Let's let it all hang out. That's what they do. This is such an inventory of UFO lore and Resident Alien. Now, I want to make clear to everybody it's a comedy. This isn't a drama. It's a comedy. But it's got abduction, it's got missing time. There are implants, there are grays, there are hybrids, there's men in black, there's experiences, there's government secrecy, interspecies, agendas, multiple species. It's got it all in there. So I've enjoyed watching it because I go, these guys know who the creative team behind it knows as much about UFO law as I do. And I feel like in some respects they're speaking directly to me with these things. And the only thing that I would say matches it in the same sort of way. Is that movie Paul, yes, seth Rogen plays Yes, Oh, but it is.
00:49:03
Speaker 1: This is my question to you, is, as we're ending getting closer to the end of the episode, should we do a whole episode on comedic aliens? Because I feel like Paul deserves a lot of time. It's a really fun movie.
00:49:19
Speaker 2: Let's put a pen in Paul. The only thing I should say about him is he's the original Roswell Alien, pretty much as it's Yes Who's gotten out. I think we should do an episode about comedy where we can go into more detail on Resident Alien and Paul and a number of other things. And I've already spoken to some folks about possibly guesting on that and getting through it. We even have a title that we fooled around it with, which is an ET walks into a bar that was the started like a joke. Okay, concluding remarks here, yeah, okay, what have we learned? What should we learn here?
00:49:54
Speaker 1: I think I come back to something I said at the beginning, which is that Hollywood loves these stories of streng aliens for all the reasons that we've talked about, and there can be a range of the stories, but even in the most the darkest version of the story, like Under the Skin, the alien comes around and, as you said, if not gains full compassion, becomes curious and at least a little open minded to humans. So I think they're comforting. They are telling us about ourselves. Whether it's brother from another planet offering social satire, whether it's a relationship story like Starman, or whether it's the repair of a dysfunctional family. All of these things feel like the alien is bringing benefit and making the world a better place in some way. What I want to talk about, and just because when you talk about pattern recognition, the thing that jumped out to me is I noticed that in several of these movies, specifically Et, Starman and k Pax, the main characters are Messiah figures. So they're a being with a higher intelligence and a higher for compassion and love, and they find themselves trapped on our crazy planet, which at times must feel like hell to them. I want to bring up a quote because I think this takes us into an area that is super relevant right now. Billy Graham, the famous evangelist known as America's pastor, had an interesting quote once. He said, UFOs are astonishingly angel like in some of their appearances, and if you look at what people have reported, that's actually quite true and structurally, a lot of the films we're talking about could be seen through that lens of fallen angel stories, where these divine beings who find themselves stranded on earth at the mercy of humans, with their usually supreme morality tested in some cases and even tempted. I guess my question is this, when you look at these type of movies, are they shaping or reinforcing that the religious belief system? And if so, it's no wonder that many people today believe that aliens are fallen angels and even demons, And in fact, many leaders have been teaching for some time that fallen angels want to pull people away from God. They argue that teaching people to believe in aliens is a trick to make humanity trust advanced science instead of faith. Now, for many reasons, scholars religious scholars view extraterrestrials as physical beings from outer space, but they do not view them as physical beings from outer space, but as spiritual beings acting as ministers of deception in a hidden cosmic war. So I think when we talk about disclosure. We have to remember that disclosure is coming to very different groups of people are whose different belief systems are going to be challenged in different ways. And all of this leads me to one practical question which I've heard you voice and I love this question, which is, if that's true, why would angels or demons need UFOs? Why would they need material physical crafts to enter our realm? And circling back to something we talked about in an episode called All about the Wu. You can't really answer that question without sounding derisive or cynical, but it goes back to something I think that Jacques Valet's idea of whatever the aliens are, they seem to take the form of whatever our current culture can understand, meaning these aliens are shaped and made manifest by our collective consciousness a bell that I continued to ring. And so therefore aliens really have They couldn't have popped into pop culture, so to speak, really before the nineteenth century when flight was discovered. The Wright Brothers in nineteen oh three made us realize we could fly, and then once we could fly on Earth, we could fly into space. And then suddenly the whole concept of aliens starts to emerge because why our imagination has been expanded about what's possible. Now, I'm going to conclude this with something that may be controversial. It's what I believe. I'm not scared to God on a limb here. I believe that science and spirituality are seen as separate, even oppositional, in our society, and is that by design? Is that to keep the populace divided. That's a conspiracy theory that we're not going to go down in today. But underlying all of this is this idea that if quantum mechanics proves anything, there is no separation on any level. We are connected and quantumly entangled, and what affects one of us to some degree affects all of us. Likewise, the core tenants of science and spirituality are not separate. They are both inherently trying to answer the same questions about our existence, one through evidence and one's through faith. So, in my version of disclosure, if it ever comes, I believe that what we're going to learn is that aliens and angels and demons are all manifestations of our collective consciousness, co created with an intelligent universe informed by our individual beliefs and imaginations, which then tends to start explaining the wide range and varying details you find when examining stories about aliens on Earth, whether they are benevolent, malicious, or something in between.
00:55:09
Speaker 2: First, I'm not smart enough to debate that with you, and second, I don't have the time to debate it with you, So that is going to be in another episode. My concluding statement about what we've talked about today is I don't believe really we should be thinking about angels and demons. And a lot of people are, and I think it's to explain the UFO issue, and a lot of them are in the Pentagon, and I think that's not helpful because I think it is more like what you said. It's like it's chicken in the egg. Whatever it is, it's the phenomenon. Now, some people see the phenomenon has this explanation for religion and vice versa, and I'm not going to get into that right now, but I will say this, if you look at all the movies and TV series we've talked about, I do not believe that is the core experience of the phenomenon. It revealed to us as I enjoy these movies. I think there's a lot of one offs out there. I don't think there's a lot of individual ets or from some other place that are stranded on Earth. I think there might have been a few over time. This Vargina case from Brazil possibly was an alien stranded on Earth. Maybe some of the crash wreckage like Roswell had a living alien or whatever. But in general, I think the explanation for what we're seeing is more species oriented. That there's a group a species, somebody is interested in us as a species, and it isn't one of them running around. It's multiples. It's more like sugar at the beginning. I just think there's a lot more to explore, and of course that's what we're going to be doing. We need to say goodbye, so I'm going to say everybody, thank you for watching. We appreciate that you will subscribe and comment and do all the things that help us. If you like what you're seeing, watch the Skies. Sound, Light and Frequency is an iHeart podcast produced by Stellar Productions. It's executive produced by Nick Johnson and for Stellar Jackie's Abel. Our show's music was written by Anna Stumpf and Hamilton Lighthouser, and your hosts and executive producers are Bryce Abel That's me and Brent Friedman. Watch the Skies
00:58:08
Speaker 1: T
