UFOs and aliens beings have often been portrayed in mass media, whether it be movies or television shows. Most of these appearances were however heavily edited and calculated by the American government in order to communicate a specific attitude towards this mysterious phenomenon. What is the purpose of these efforts? This article looks at the fascinating history of government involvement in UFO-related movies and television shows.

This article originally appeared in the magazine 49th Parallel, Vol. 25 (Spring 2011) and is reproduced on Vigilant Citizen with the permission of the authors: Robbie Graham (University of Bristol)* & Matthew Alford (University of Bath)†.

* Robbie Graham is a doctoral candidate at the University of Bristol for a PhD examining Hollywood’s historical representations of UFOs and extraterrestrial visitation. He is also creator of the blog Silver Screen Saucers.

† Matthew Alford is the author of Reel Power: Hollywood Cinema and American Supremacy (Pluto Press, 2010). He received his PhD in Cinema and Politics from the University of Bath in 2008.

On 22 January 1958, the popular CBS television show Armstrong Circle Theatre presented an entire programme dedicated to the subject of unidentified flying objects entitled: “UFO: Enigma of the Skies.” Among the high-profile experts invited to speak on the show, retired US Navy Major Donald Keyhoe – director of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) – was notable for his outspoken views on government secrecy surrounding the UFO phenomenon. Arguing against UFO reality on the programme were astronomer and vehement UFO sceptic Donald Menzel and Air Force representative Col. Spencer Whedon of the Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC). Their task should have been an easy one as the show’s content had been scripted in advance by CBS in conjunction with the US Air Force, and all guests – especially Keyhoe – had been instructed to read their preapproved material from a teleprompter.

When it came time for Keyhoe to speak, in frustration he veered from his script and stated to the nation: “And now I’m going to reveal something that has never been disclosed before…” 1 The rest of his announcement went unheard by television viewers: unbeknownst to Keyhoe, his microphone had been cut by the station. Keyhoe continued:

“For the last six months, we have been working with a congressional committee investigating official secrecy about UFOs. If all the evidence we have given this committee is made public in open hearings, it will absolutely prove that the UFOs are real machines under intelligent control.”2

After the show, CBS was inundated with calls and letters from viewers demanding to know why Keyhoe’s audio had been cut: “Call it what you like,” wrote one viewer, “but it appeared to be a very shocking display of censorship; and certainly offensive to the intelligence of the American public…” 3 Nine days later, CBS admitted it had been subject to official censorship. In a letter to a disgruntled viewer dated 31 January, 1958, CBS director of editing, Herbert A. Carlborg, stated:

“This program had been carefully cleared for security reasons. Therefore, it was the responsibility of this network to insure [sic] performance in accordance with pre-determined security standards. Any indication that there would be a deviation might lead to statements that neither this network nor the individuals on the program were authorized to release.”4

As will be evidenced in this essay, the US government’s historical efforts to censor UFO-related media products extend considerably further than the Keyhoe incident and have noticeably affected the content of numerous films and TV products over a six-decade time span. Before moving to examine some of these cases, however, it is necessary to ask: why should the US government wish to exert its influence over media representations of a subject as seemingly fanciful as UFOs? The answer to this question becomes clear with even a cursory glance at the government’s early documentation on the subject, which reflects a sustained concern about UFOs (if not a consensus on their origins) at the highest levels of the US military.

Background

The US government’s interest in UFOs dates back to the summer of 1947 when America’s national security apparatus was besieged by hundreds of reports from concerned citizens and military personnel of what appeared to be metallic disk-shaped objects traversing the nation’s skies, sometimes in formation and often at impossible speeds. On 24 June private aviator and businessman Kenneth Arnold reported seeing a chain of nine unusual objects over the Cascade Mountains in Washington State. Arnold described the objects’ movement as being “like a saucer if you skip it across the water,” inspiring the press to dub the mystery objects “flying saucers.” 5 Many hundreds of saucer sightings were reported worldwide in the months to follow.

In 1948 the US Air Force produced its Top Secret and highly controversial “Estimate of the Situation,” an official report concluding flying saucers to be interplanetary in origin.6 Other factions within the Air Force, however, favoured the more palatable (though perhaps no less alarming) idea that the saucers were the product of technological innovations in the Soviet Union. Either way, secrecy regarding the issue was of paramount importance as the question of whether the objects were physically real had already been affirmatively answered in the minds of America’s military leaders. In a once secret letter to Air Force Headquarters dated 23 September 1947, General Nathan Twining, head of Air Materiel Command (AMC), stated that flying saucers were “real and not visionary or fictitious,” that they had “metallic or light reflecting surface[s],” were “circular or elliptical in shape, flat on bottom and domed on top,” and were sometimes sighted in “well-kept formation flights varying from three to nine objects.” 7 In a previously Top Secret Canadian government document dating from 1950, Wilbert Smith – head of the Canadian government’s UFO research project, Magnet, noted with regard to UFOs that “The matter is the most highly classified subject in the United States government, rating higher even than the H-bomb.” 8

Today, numerous governments worldwide maintain dedicated and costly UFO study projects – collating and often investigating what collectively amount to thousands of UFO sighting reports made annually to authorities. In South America alone, the governments of Argentina,9 Uruguay,10 Peru,11 Chile12 and Brazil13 either operate UFO investigations units or actively collect UFO sighting reports through their militaries. Other governments, including those of France,14 New Zealand,15 Denmark,16 Canada17 and Russia,18 have in recent years released to the public thousands of pages of previously classified UFO files.

The UK government also is engaging with the public on the UFO issue through an ongoing process which has seen the release of thousands of previously classified UFO files through the National Archives.19 According to the UK Ministry of Defense, UFOs (or UAPs – Unidentified Aerial Phenomena – as the MoD refers to them) “certainly exist,” but are “still barely understood.”20 In a formerly secret 400-page assessment of the UFO phenomenon released in 2006 under the Freedom of Information Act, the UK Defence Intelligence Staff acknowledged that:

“The phenomena occur on a daily, world-wide basis… That UAP exist is indisputable. Credited with the ability to hover, land, take-off, accelerate to exceptional velocities and vanish, they can reportedly alter their direction of flight suddenly and clearly can exhibit aerodynamic characteristics well beyond those of any known aircraft or missile – either manned or unmanned.”21

The report also notes that “attempts by other nations to intercept the unexplained objects, which can clearly change position faster than an aircraft, have reportedly already caused fatalities,” and warns that, with the increasing density of UAP reports in the UK air defence region, “a small possibility may exist… of a head-on encounter with a UAP.”22

There appears, then, to be a broad consensus among the governments cited above: UFOs are objectively real – albeit currently not fully understood by science – worthy, at best, of focused study and, at the very least, of sustained monitoring in the interests of aviation safety and national security. Standing outside of this consensus is the United States, which is conspicuous for its almost total silence on the UFO issue, which it has maintained since the closure in 1969 of the Air Force’s long-running UFO investigations project: Blue Book.23 Despite shunning discussion of the phenomenon today, the US government’s historical concerns regarding UFOs clearly represent a significant passage – if not an entire chapter – in the history of its early Cold War machinations. Yet academic discourse surrounding the accepted historical meta-narrative of the US national security state rarely, if ever, accommodates serious discussion of UFOs. This is owed to the fact that, as observed by political scientists Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall: “Considerable work goes into ignoring UFOs, constituting them as objects only of ridicule and scorn… to that extent one may speak of a ‘UFO taboo,’ a prohibition in the authoritative public sphere on taking UFOs seriously.” 24

In turn, details of the government’s involvement in UFO-themed entertainment products are meagre in the pages of cinema and TV history, with the only substantive work on the subject to date having been produced by historian Lawrence Suid.25 Although Suid’s work is undeniably valuable (it is referenced extensively throughout this paper), it mischaracterises UFOs as a minor PR concern for the military – when in fact they were an issue of great sensitivity that initially raised serious questions regarding national security – and fails to acknowledge several cases of film and TV productions that the authorities actively sought to manipulate for political ends in line with government UFO policy.

This essay builds on Suid’s work, filling in the gaps, bringing it up to date and elucidating further the government’s historical motivations for exerting its influence over UFO-themed film and television productions. The government’s historical engagement with such fare can most thoroughly be discussed with regard to the Department of Defense (DoD), which has worked extensively with Hollywood in exchange for the right to edit scripts for sixty years with the principal aim of encouraging recruitment and retention of personnel, as detailed by Suid in his extensive tome Guts and Glory (2002) and by journalist David Robb. However, in practice the Pentagon’s remit is more wide-ranging, as it routinely promotes its own version of US history, as with its sanitisation of the military’s public image through its removal of a key character in Black Hawk Down (2002) who in real life had been convicted of raping a twelve-year-old boy;26 when it refused to cooperate on the feature film Counter Measures (1998) on the grounds that it did not want to remind the public of the Iran-Contra scandal;27 or when it removed a joke about “losing Vietnam” in the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies (1997).28

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