The first Indian to deal with the UFO subject on celluloid was the late Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MGR. In 1962, he made Kalaiarasi which had many unique distinctions. It depicted UFO sightings and spoke about the existence of other earth like planets and the concept of Alien Abduction. One dialogue that takes place in the beginning of the movie is very interesting.
A villager on seeing a flying saucer in the sky, asks MGR what is it? MGR replies that, according to researchers these are flying saucers coming from other Worlds piloted by beings similar to us. This scene is a testimony to the fact that by the 1960s, this phenomenon had got the attention of the whole world, to the extent of being discussed as a matter of fact in a 1962 Tamil film.
The most memorable part is the climax scene where our hero manages to reach Earth with the heroine. On seeing them, the girl’s father asks where they’ve been. The girl replies we were taken to another world in a flying saucer. The old man laughs at them and says what a vivid imagination you have.
This movie came in 1962 when people all over the world were sighting UFOs and raising all forms of questions about them. Today 54 years later, people are still asking the same questions and are still in the dark in spite of all the evidences available to the American government. What about Hollywood? how are they dealing with UFOs?
The fact is Hollywood movies and American TV channels never attempt to deal with and explain the UFO phenomenon as it is. Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind was the only major studio film that dealt with the UFO issue realistically to some extent. Most people are not aware that in 1977 NASA wrote a 20-page letter to Spielberg not to deal with the subject. Why, one might wonder.
Hollywood projects ETs only in two ways – Aggressive like Independence Day and benevolent like Steven Spielberg’s ET – Extra Terrestrial (1980). This was the last major Hollywood studio movie that dealt with ETs as benevolent. Since then, major Hollywood movies like Independence Day 1 and 2, War of the Worlds, Edge of Tomorrow, Battlefield: LA, Oblivion, Battleship, Skyline, Cowboys and Aliens and Jupiter Ascending have been projecting them only as threat to Earth. Why?
This attitude has been repeatedly questioned by Hillary Clinton. In January 25, 1999 speaking at a gathering she said most of the movies about the future show aliens descending from outer space determined to blow up the world and somehow they always begin with Washington DC. Later that year in June 17, speaking in Paris, she explicitly questioned the rationale behind such movies, which she repeated even during the Presidential campaign in December 17, 2007.
Hollywood studios, which are owned by the same people who own mainstream American media, oil industry, and weapons industries, are systematically subconsciously, subliminally, projecting ETs as villains. After the Second World War the American media/Hollywood projected communists as villains, then Vietnamese, Cambodians, now radical Islam, to undermine the American constitution, deny civil liberties and loot trillions from the public to feed the arms industries. Tomorrow ETs may be used for this purpose, foundation is being laid today.
I have been watching UFO documentaries and programmes on Discovery, National Geographic and History channels all my life, but none of them ever bothered to mention the six scientific studies conducted on the UFO phenomenon since 1948 or the official documents and memos released by the US government under Freedom of Information Act which prove the legitimacy of UFOs. Why? I became aware of these studies only when Internet introduced me to UFO researchers like Friedman.
(The writer is the Director of INSETS: Indian Society for Extraterrestrial Studies and author of ACCIDENTAL APOCALYPSE)