By Don Jolly
“black is space
well, sometimes”
— Sun Ra
Area 51: The Alien Interview is an 86-minute “documentary,” first released on VHS tape in 1997 by a small film producer and distributor called Rocket Pictures. It starts like this:
Fade in on a New Mexico highway, stretching to the horizon across a landscape of level sand. Enter actor Steven Williams (Fox Mulder’s angry informant from the second season of The X-Files). He’s wearing a tan leather jacket, buttoned up. His expression is grave.
“Interest in U.F.O.s and Area 51 is at an all time high,” he says, to the camera. “Last year a highly rated T.V. special and best selling home video purported to show an actual autopsy of an alien being from the famous Roswell, New Mexico crash of 1947.” Williams takes a breath and paces away. The camera tracks him, framing the man against low mountains. “Many people, and even some experts, believe that autopsy footage was genuine,” he says.
“If that was indeed the body of an alien being from another world, could the footage in this program be the first hard, visual evidence of an actual living and breathing alien being? An alien being communicating in an interview with a highly covert arm of the U.S. government?”
Steven Williams
The shot moves close. Williams fills the screen. “If the footage we’re about to show you is genuine,” he says, “then this could very well be the most important video in the history of mankind.”
The tape makes you wait for half an hour before showing the actual “interview.” In the interim, it builds suspense: cutting from talking heads to military stock footage to bargain basement “reenactments” of extraterrestrial encounters.
Finally, the reveal is made — a puppet, clearly.
“Genuine” can be a complicated word.
On December 10th, 1946, a Curtiss Commando C46 took off from the El Toro marine base in San Diego, headed for Seattle’s Sand Point Naval Air Station. All in all, it held 32 men — 29 marine privates and three crew. Like the C46s used for marine transport, it was unpressurized. It flew low.
A storm kicked up. At 4:13 that afternoon, the aircraft’s pilot made radio contact with a Civil Aeronautics Administration station in Toledo, Washington. The C46’s wings were icing up, he said.
Somewhere in the vicinity of Mount Rainier, the plane went down. Snow on the mountains and rain in the valleys stymied the first round of search parties. By February 1947, the military’s effort to find their missing vessel and its men was winding down. Desperate, the families of the dead marines pooled their money into a cash reward, payable to anyone who could locate the wreck — five thousand dollars. By Summer, it was still available.
Kenneth Arnold was 32 that year. He had his own business and a private plane. The former was Great Western Fire Control Supply, the latter a Callair A-2, a twin-engine craft Popular Mechanics had dubbed “the Mountain Dodger.” On June 24th, Arnold took his A-2 out from Chehalis, Washington, headed for a job in Yakima. On the way, he spent an hour scouring the peak of Mount Rainier, searching for the vanished transport.
He didn’t find it, but he did find something. According to next day’s issue of Portland’s East Oregonian newspaper, Arnold “sighted nine saucer-like aircraft flying in formation,” while circling above the mountain. They were, continued the Oregonian, “extremely bright — as if they were nickel plated — and flying at an immense rate of speed […] about 1200 miles an hour.”
“It seemed impossible,” Arnold told the paper, “but there it is — I must believe my eyes.”
Kenneth Arnold
The pilot’s “saucer-like aircraft” were soon buffed and blunted by their tumble through the national press. By the end of the year, “flying saucers” had arrived on the American scene. Anomalous, almost supernaturally “advanced” aircraft filled the country’s skies, screens and souls. It was a phenomenon perfectly calibrated to its historical moment. Extraterrestrials and advanced aircraft had been zipping across the covers of pulp magazines and through the panels of comic strips since the 1930s, and theosophists had been receiving revelation from other planets in various forms since the 1880s. After 1947, Arnold’s “bright” saucers found their way into the center of both discourses.
According to one of its founders, the strange genius Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, modern Theosophy is a religious philosophy predicated on advancing “the Universal Brotherhood of
Humanity” through engagement with scriptures originating in a wide variety of traditions, with a special emphasis on the “Brahmanical, Buddhist and Zoroastrian.” Blavatsky, along with former seeker Henry Steel Olcott, founded their Theosophical Society in 1875, while living in New York. Together, they did much to advance knowledge of Hindu and Buddhist thinking in the West, setting the stage for the explosion of experimental religious collage that would come to characterize America’s twentieth century. In 1888, Blavatsky produced her most significant work: The Secret Doctrine, a three-volume summary of the wisdom she claimed to have received from a secret order of spiritual masters. Her teachers, she claimed, were human beings that had perfected their souls by traveling between many bodies, achieving almost divine mastery of morality, spirituality and, implicitly, the physical sciences. For the most part, Blavatsky located these elevated beings in Tibet. Several of their orders, however, were operative on the planet Venus. In 1912 Theosophist Charles Leadbetter elaborated the concept of these extraterrestrial “Lords of the Flame” by positing that the masters dwelling off-planet were, in fact, the highest ranking.
In 1953 George Adamski, the founder of a spiritual order heavily influenced by theosophy, published The Flying Saucers Have Landed, with co-author Desmond Leslie. In it, Blavatsky’s ascended masters become Adamski’s “space brothers,” a race of enlightened Venusians in command of fantastic spiritual technology. While some of these “brothers” were earthmen of remarkable religious accomplishment in the manner of Blavatsky’s “Lords,” The Flying Saucers Have Landed vastly expanded the scope of this conception. Life on Earth, argued Adamski and Leslie, began in the stars.
“Venus,” they wrote “is ‘Home of the Gods.’ From Venus in the year BC 18, 617,841 came the first vehicle out of space to alight on our planet.” At that time, human beings were little more than apes. “Evolution had gone so far but could go no farther,” they said. “And so from our nearest neighbor came the greatest of Venus, ‘the Sanat Kumara’, ‘The Lord of the Flame’, the highly perfected humans from an older branch of the planetary family.” It was this august group which elevated humankind above the animals, providing prototypes of every world mythology in the process.
As the twentieth century wore on, a great array of “U.F.O. Religions,” organized and otherwise, sprouted from the wet soil. Some, like Raëlism or George King’s Aetherius Society, were recognizably “religious,” and thus concerned with the production of canonical doctrines or the organization of church hierarchies. For the most part, however, U.F.O. religion is defined by the religion of U.F.O.s — the vast, contradictory and heterogeneous enterprise of investigating and analyzing flying saucers and their tributary phenomenon. At the core of this activity, the basic conceptions of Blavatsky and Adamski remain, filling out the interior of Arnold’s mystery aircraft as surely as he had noted their “nickel plated” skin.
In general, the alien beings at the heart of U.F.O. culture are held to be technologically superior to human beings, and often spiritually superior as well. Their hand is seen in legend and history; their spaceships have been spotted in the prophet Ezekiel’s majestic image of God’s chariot-throne and in the Hindu writings revered by Blavatsky. Often, their unearthly influence is responsible for raising humanity from the evolutionary muck. Just as often, the aliens seem terribly concerned with the human race’s yearn for suicide. That flying saucers first appeared in the immediate aftermath of the atomic bomb has seemed significant to many in the U.F.O. community.
Saucer culture, in other words, provides a space for rumination about humanity’s spiritual beginnings and its relationship with superior beings. Often, it functions as a coat of science-fictional paint, disguising the “religious” mechanisms implicit in speculation about the moral fate of humankind and its relationship to a larger cosmos. Its prophets murmur in paperback books, and chant of their abductions on late-night radio.
Occasionally, they issue videocassettes.
***
The night of May 23rd, 1997, found Art Bell in unsually high spirits.
“It is going to be a ve-r-r-ry interesting morning,” he said, addressing his listeners. For Bell, the original host of the paranormal call-in and interview show “Coast to Coast A.M.”, they numbered in the millions. That night, he said, would feature an appearance by a very special guest — a guest with no last name. “The mysterious ‘Victor.’”
Victor, Bell explained, “claims he smuggled a video — out of Area 51 — of an interrogation, of a questioning, of an actual alien.” The experience had made him paranoid. “Victor will be using a voice changer,” said Bell. “As you can imagine … he does not want his, uh, voice recognized.”
Later in the program, Victor appeared, his voice a growl of static.
Victor
“I cannot say, specifically, how I came into possession of this tape,” he said, to the A.M. airwaves. The general circumstances surrounding the acquisition, however, were institutional. “Area 51 is now defunct as an operating location for the government’s alien program,” he said. As part of relocating its resources, Area 51‘s analogue records were digitized en masse — placing highly secure files, temporarily, in less secure locations. Victor snagged the interview and then delivered it (for a fee) to a small film and television production company called Rocket Pictures. Area 51: The Alien Interview was released later that year.
On “Coast to Coast,” Victor seemed flummoxed by his dealings with Rocket. They demanded too much of him, he said. Too much time, too much disclosure. They couldn’t stick to a schedule to save their lives. He took similar exception to Bell. Their conversation was tense and argumentative.
At one point, however, the informant grew emotional. Although determined to keep his involvement (or lack of involvement) with military’s “alien program” obscure, Victor did admit to, at one point, meeting an extraterrestrial in person — although he refused to specify where and when the event occurred. “What did you feel when you were in its presence?” Bell asked. “Can you describe that at all?”
Victor paused. He took few rough breaths, almost panting, then spoke: “I suppose I felt sorrow. I felt anger. I, like everyone who has ever come into contact with these beings, felt an intense presence within me that was utterly foreign to my experience before that time.” He paused again.
“I must say that this has changed me,” he said. “It-it has had an effect that I did not choose.” Bell changed the subject.
“The video, of course, is incredible,” he said, directing his listeners to view still frame excerpts on the “Coast to Coast” website. More incredible still was the religious context Victor provided for it. The aliens, he said, were only representatively biological: their bodies, as pure mechanisms, were non-functional. To the beings themselves, the physical form was only a “vessel” — inseparable from any other external technology, and as easily exited as hatchback car. Humans were the same way, he implied: pure spirit, though largely unaware of it. They can trade their vessels, too.
The beings in government holding suffered from chronic illness, he continued. The one depicted in the Interview had recently died. “I believe that these beings cannot be harmed by us in any significant way,” Victor explained. “But at the same time I believe they are setting us with a sort of test… I don’t want to make too many religious allusions, but for some reason … my mind keeps coming back to the story of Jesus.”
The similarity, he told Bell, went farther.. “I believe […] these beings have been here before, and the program that they are performing upon the human race is as old as the human race — certainly as old as consciousness.”
Bell interjected. “What you’re saying might lead some to believe that they are, in fact, the architect of the human race,” he said. “Is that…?”
“‘Architects’ is not a term that I would use, but in the sense that you mean it I believe I would agree, yes.”
Like Adamski, Victor’s aliens are far superior to human beings both spiritually and technologically. Like Blavatsky’s masters, their spirits travel easily from body to body — their “vessels” being an historically nonspecific riff on reincarnation. Although Victor is vague on the exact year, his ascended masters are responsible for igniting the human flame in our pre-conscious ancestors.
Victor’s religious claims grow darker on the tape of The Alien Interview itself. Appearing with his face in shadow and his voice still electronically disguised, the informant discloses a world of secrecy and stupidity; of revelation disguised.
The alien, Victor explained, has been voluntarily speaking to covert elements of the military since 1989. Its degree of spiritual and scientific advancement, however, makes these interviews seem more like a judgment than a boon.
“The physicists and engineers are, frankly, frustrated,” said Victor. “Possibly concepts are getting lost because all the information has to come through a telepath, but also it may be that the bulk of their scientific knowledge is just too advanced to be translated into our primitive conceptual framework. It’s analogous to a human scientist [trying] to translate quantum mechanics into the grunts and screeches of a chimpanzee.”
The mismatch was demoralizing. “There’s a high attrition rate for scientists in the program,” he continued. “You’d think they’d be energized by the challenge, but a lot of them take the ego deflation very hard.”
The being, he said, was unable to differentiate between the spirit and technology. For it, the concepts were united. For human beings, only its “spiritual concepts” could be easily comprehended. It was a fact that brought Victor no comfort.
“You’re not going to have much luck making your dog understand calculus,” he said. “But if you pet him on the head and say ‘good dog’ aren’t you communicating spiritually? And doesn’t the animal control officer say ‘good dog’ when he comes to put some poor stray to sleep?” The aliens, Victor implied, were making some obtuse judgment of the human soul. “When you’re dealing with beings whose intellect is so far beyond your own, I don’t think it’s safe to assume they have your best interests at heart,” he said.
Further complicating matters is the government of the United States, under whose auspices the alien interviews have been conducted. “The government’s motive is control,” Victor explained. “The people at the top of this program are intellectually very average. They’re not capable of making proper use of what’s been handed to them, but they have no intention of letting anyone else ever get a chance to solve the puzzle.” The result has been, apparently, disastrous. Whatever transcendence the beings might have offered ended up shredded by human ignorance, their “vessels” dying, one-by-one, in an unlit bunker in Nevada.
In 2008, Rocket conducted a follow-up interview with Victor for the Interview’s DVD release. In it, the disguised informant expanded on his theme of human failure. “My contempt for the viewers of [this] documentary over the last eleven years knows no bounds,” he said. “They’ve been like children, mocking it or, on the other hand, credulously accepting it with no attempt to evaluate the material on its own merits or to discover any new material to support or debunk it!” Again, the revelation had fallen on deaf ears. Now, he implied, it was already too late. “The end” was coming.
The interviewer from Rocket was taken aback. “So, what you’re saying is that the biblical end times are upon us?” he asked.
“It’s rather childish to call them biblical,” said Victor, “the Bible is just a smokescreen […] a deliberate misinformation campaign started by those who first encountered the aliens and first kept that knowledge to themselves.”
By the end, he’s babbling. “My head is a beehive,” he says. “Aprés moi, le déluge, le déluge solaire.” In part, it’s a quote often attributed to Louis the XV: “After me, the deluge.”
***
The tape Victor claims to have snuck out of Area 51 is about twelve minutes long. It consists of a single, unmoving shot of a dark interrogation room containing a metal table, a shadowy man in the foreground and a scattering of electronic equipment. It has no audio. In a spotlight at the center left of frame, bobs the bulbous face of the creature. Its movements are slight at first — almost avian. As the silent interview continues, however, the being begins to wretch, spasming uncontrollably. Instantly, it’s surrounded by doctors. One of them jams a flashlight in its small jaws.
End of footage.
It’s a hoax, of course. Victor’s acting is little better than the alien’s puppetry, and Rocket’s lack of tact and production value does little to convince viewers of the Interview’s veracity. Still, there is something “genuine” about the tape — an expression of modern woe and anxiety. In The Alien Interview, paranoia suffocates Blavatsky’s hopeful esotericism, point by point. Victor’s “space brothers” are punished for their enlightenment; their wisdom wasted on stiff-necked thugs, credulous believers and unthinking bureaucrats. The spiritual achievements of Victor’s beings serve only to remind him, and his viewers, of their degradations. His apocalypse comes with no millennium attached, no promise of rebirth — just final violence, as the aliens put right the mistake they made in trusting humankind with some portion of divinity.
It’s a straight-to-video philosophy, and fitting for the final years of the twentieth century. Here, behind time-codes and distortions, is a portrait of God in 1997. Beaten and sickly, it beams its truth to uninterested Air Force personnel, whose interest extends only to engineering principles of flying saucers. All revelations classified.
***
Orson Welles’ The Life of Christ
Dark Dungeons (Dungeons & Dragons, Part II)
Deities and Demigods (Dungeons & Dragons, Part 1)
Guide to Survival (Salem Kirban, Part 1)
***
Don Jolly looks human but isn’t. His work has appeared on Boing Boing, the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Ampersand Review.