The Department of Nerdly Affairs

DNA Podcast 073- UFOs in Popular Culture

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In this episode, Don and Rob explore the place of UFOs in our popular culture with the help of Jack Ward. The trio explore the earliest UFO reports, talk about how UFOs have changed with the times, and what our ideas about aliens say about us. Along the way, Jack tells the story of his father’s UFO encounters, and they talk about their favorite alien-related movies. All this, and the 82 kinds of aliens, are waiting for you in this episode of the Department of Nerdly Affairs.

Closing Music:

Ode to Joy performed by Oliver Eckelt

Things Discussed:

UFO on Wikipedia
In Search Of Remake (It’s down near the bottom)
Twilight Zone (Night of the Meek)
Chinese UFO Cave Paintings
Ancient Egyptian UFO Sightings
Project Blue Book TV Series
Ezekiel UFOs in the Bible
UFOs in Rennaisance Art
The Gospel According to Saint Thomas
The Vedas

Six Million Dollar Man Bigfoot
Airship Scares
The Tomato Man: (I may have mixed this with this)
The Nazi Bell
The Monsters are due on Maple Street
HG Welles’ War of the Worlds Movie 1953
Watch the Skies by Curtis Peebles
Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind
US Military Has Plans for UFO Invasion
Kenneth Arnold sees Flying Saucers
Maury Island Incident
UFOS by Leslie Kean
Project Disclosure Videos
Red Planet Mars
The Three Body Problem
Silver Screen Saucers
Mysterious Universe
The X-Files
Fire in the Sky
Betty and Barney Hill
Billy Meier
Traveller RPG
Rendezvous with Rama
Edgar Michelle NASA Astronaut
I Married a Monster from Outer Space
Night of the Blood Beast
Who Goes There by John W. Campbell (The Thing)
Devilman
The Abyss
Project Serpo (it’s down a bit)
Dulce Base New Mexico
Outer Limits Episode “The Architects of Fear” 
The Five Kinds of UFO Encounters
DR and Quinch from 2000 AD
James Forrestal
Shag Harbour Incident
Phoenix Lights
Predator
District 9

The Abyss alternate end
Mars Attacks
Cloverfield

The Arrival
It Came from Outer Space
Earth vs. The Flying Saucers
The Mysterians
Plan 9 From Outer Space
U.F.O. TV Series
Terrorvision
They Live
The Girl with All the Gifts
The Powers of Matthew Starr
Mork and Mindy
The First Wave
Torchwood: Children of Earth
Dark Conspiracy RPG
The Eternals
ROM: Spaceknight
I Come in Peace (Movie)
Dark Skies
The Hidden
V: The Series

Jack’s UFO Notes:

Dr. Edgar Mitchell (who passed away in 2016) was a NASA astronaut who traveled to (and walked on) the moon as part of the Apollo 14 mission in 1971. A Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient, he once completed a record-breaking nine-hour, 24-minute EVA on the surface of the moon. In addition to his distinguished scientific career with NASA, he was a strong believer in metaphysical phenomena. He was a strong believer in the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life and claimed Earth had frequently been visited by aliens. Among the many times he made these assertions was in a 2009 interview with the Guardian:

“We are being visited,” [Mitchell] said. “It is now time to put away this embargo of truth about the alien presence. I call upon our government to open up … and become a part of this planetary community that is now trying to take our proper role as a spacefaring civilisation.”

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Leslie Kean- UFOs
Before writing UFOs, Kean co-founded the Coalition for Freedom of Information, an independent alliance advocating for greater government openness on information about UFOs. In this capacity, she was the plaintiff in a successful, five-year Freedom of Information Act federal lawsuit against NASA, which had withheld information concerning a crash of an object in Kecksburg, Pennsylvania in 1965. In 2007, Kean co-organized a landmark Washington DC international press conference on official UFO investigations, which received media coverage around the world. She was also a producer for the 2009 independent documentary I Know What I Saw directed by James Fox. She co-organized a 2013 international conference providing a platform for scientists, government officials and journalists studying UFOs to present data, and she lectured at American University in 2014.

Previously, Kean worked as a freelance writer and radio producer. In the 1990’s she was an on-air host for a daily investigative news program on KPFA radio, a Pacifica station in California. She contributed articles to dozens of publications here and abroad including the Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Providence Journal, International Herald Tribune, Globe and Mail, Sydney Morning Herald, The Nation, and Journal for Scientific Exploration.. Her stories were syndicated through Knight Ridder/Tribune, Scripps-Howard, New York Times wire service, Pacific News Service, and the National Publishers Association. While spending many years reporting on Burma, Kean coauthored Burma’s Revolution of the Spirit: The Struggle for Democratic Freedom and Dignity (Aperture, 1994). She contributed essays for a number of anthologies published between 1998 and 2009.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/201625/ufos-by-leslie-kean/9780307717085/

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American Government (Pentagon) admits
The Pentagon has officially confirmed that there was, in fact, a $22 million government program to collect and analyze “anomalous aerospace threats” — government-speak for UFOs.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/12/18/the-government-admits-it-studies-ufos-so-about-those-area-51-conspiracy-theories/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.2a60d2feba11

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Lists of Governments investigating UFO’s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_investigations_of_UFOs_by_governments

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Silver Screen Saucers- Sorting Fact from Fantasy in Hollywood’s Movies

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5 Most Credible Sightings
https://www.history.com/news/ufo-sightings-credible-modern

8 World’s Best Places to Search for ET’s
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimdobson/2018/01/28/the-worlds-8-best-places-to-hunt-for-extraterrestrials-and-search-for-ufos/#7abe67822ddb

Alien visits? UFO survey says 1,101 sightings across Canada in 2017

Alien visits? UFO survey says 1,101 sightings across Canada in 2017

Falcon Lake incident is Canada’s ‘best-documented UFO case,’ even 50 years later
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/falcon-lake-incident-book-anniversary-1.4121639

Phoenix Lights A Sleptic’s Discover That we are not alone
https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Lights-Skeptics-Discovery-Alone/dp/1571746323

Rendlesham Forest Incident
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendlesham_Forest_incident

Aliens Shutting Down Nuclear Sites
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/ufo/8026971/Aliens-have-deactivated-British-and-US-nuclear-missiles-say-US-military-pilots.html

POP Culture
Of Course Spielburg Believes in UFO’s
https://io9.gizmodo.com/of-course-steven-spielberg-believes-in-aliens-1818519987

http://mentalfloss.com/article/63198/15-things-you-may-not-know-about-close-encounters-third-kind
– Spielberg partly based his idea on the research of Dr. J. Allen Hynek, a civilian scientific advisor to Project Blue Book who eventually admitted that 11 percent of the study’s findings about unidentified flying objects could not be explained using science. Hynek has a cameo
– Hynek, who also served as a technical advisor on the movie, makes an uncredited cameo in the final scene of the movie. You can spot him pretty easily—he’s the goateed man smoking a pipe and wearing a powder blue suit who pushes through the crowd of scientists to get a better look at the aliens.
-Spielberg approached French actors like Lino Ventura, Yves Montand, and Jean-Louis Trintignant to play Claude Lacombe—who was based on famous UFO researcher Jacques Vallée—before settling on director and sometimes-actor François Truffaut.
– Close Encounters was a forerunner for ET.
Puck would help inspire E.T. after Spielberg asked himself, “What if this little guy didn’t get back on the mothership?” Rambaldi would also go on to design the character of E.T.

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The situation on U.S. Navy Flight 19, from which the airplanes that appear in the Mexican desert came, disappeared off Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in December 1945. No trace has ever been found of “the Lost Flight 19,” which left the Naval Air Station near there in 1945.

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Rumours of dropping hints

Spielberg, Close Encounters, and Conspiracy Theories

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Project Serpo—an alleged human/alien exchange program between US military personnel and a race of extraterrestrials from the Zeta Reticuli star system. The story goes that, in July of 1965, twelve astronauts were taken to the planet Serpo aboard an alien spaceship and remained there for thirteen years. In exchange, the aliens left one of their own in the custody of the US government. This story didn’t emerge until 2005 in the form of a string of anonymous emails that were sent to selected UFO researchers, including Project Camelot/Avalon’s Bill Ryan, who created a website dedicated to the “leaks.”

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Ufology

Don’t Forget UFOlogy: The Influence of UFO Lore in Pop Culture

Indeed, the first reports of flying saucers in the modern UFO era pre-date Hollywood’s first feature film about UFOs by three years. It was in 1947 that pilot Kenneth Arnold’s famous sighting gave rise to the “flying saucer” term, but it wasn’t until 1950 that Hollywood produced The Flying Saucer, a cheap attempt to cash-in on the UFO hysteria then sweeping America—a hysteria incited not by cinema, but by numerous reports nationwide of disc-shaped objects intruding upon America’s airspace.

Ever since 1950, the movie industry has been grabbing hold of UFOlogical concepts and popularizing them through the science-fiction genre: “Men in Black,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “The Fourth Kind,” “Area 51.” Hollywood didn’t create these terms, they were all part of the common language of UFOlogy decades before Hollywood lifted them. The same is true of the now-iconic image of the “Gray” alien—a form that has its roots in pre-existing UFO literature and which has since has found its way into some of the most popular science-fiction movies and TV shows of all time.

Travis Walton had described such entities as early as 1975. It wasn’t until two years later, in 1977, that Hollywood produced its first fully crystalized cinematic image of the Grays in Spielberg’s proudly UFOlogical Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The Grays in the movie were based directly on first-hand testimonies gathered by Spielberg’s production designer, Joe Alves.

Communion was adapted for Hollywood in 1989; its poster featured a full-face image of a Gray, staring hypnotically into the eyes of millions of creeped-out cinemagoers worldwide. Then followed Intruders (1992), a miniseries based directly on real-world descriptions of Grays as documented in abduction literature. More Grays would then appear in The X-Files (1993-), Babylon 5 (1994-1998), Dark Skies (1996-1997), and others. By the late-1990s, the image of the Gray had supplanted almost all other pre-existing cultural imaginings of what an alien might look like.

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Jupiter Ascending esoteric meanings
The Esoteric and Extraterrestrial Meaning of Jupiter Ascending

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11 Musicians who have seen UFO’s
https://www.bbc.co.uk/music/articles/d09fdaf6-ca65-427d-8177-25f209ad9c3b

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Top Ten Songs about UFO’s
http://ultimateclassicrock.com/songs-about-ufos/

DON NOTE: They forgot a couple:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epOigyGHPV8

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https://www.ranker.com/list/best-movies-about-ufos/ranker-film
Best Movies about UFO’s

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Best TV Shows about Aliens
https://www.ranker.com/list/best-tv-shows-about-aliens/ranker-tv

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Close Encounters
1st Kind- When a person sees a UFO within 150 metres
2nd Kind- Leaves evidence such as scorch marks
3rd Kind- Visible aliens in or out of craft
4th Kind- Taken and experimented on
5th Kind- Mutual Bilateral Communication
http://new.cseti.org/ce5initiative.html

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Dad’s experiences

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James Forrestal’s Death
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Forrestal
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NASA Friend

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UFO Themes
– Government Conspiracies
– Brother from another Planet
– Evil Aliens eat humans/ want resources
– Aliens from another universe
– Aliens are truly the Earth People
– Aliens think we’re unimportant
– Aliens are future humans
– Saviors/Heroes from the Stars
– Animal Experiments
– Alien Bases on Earth
– Breakaway Civilization
– Hybrids
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Hellyer
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Foo Fighters
Ghost Rockets

82 Aliens
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2Fsn0B3ti8&ebc=ANyPxKoJCmungN49nLp2F4I609hQQVyeUiEqhzoB1lzB4Klfj7dF21_L89TU7IgZeLgVJb6VFvxAbyhkO_bKNzu5Y3s5eDq_PA

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The Girl with All the Gifts
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4547056/