No movie tonight, but I did begin a miniseries I've been waiting a long time to see : "Taken" (2002), which is formally billed as "Steven Spielberg Presents 'Taken' ", so you know it's not Liam Neeson you're gonna be dealing with but little Grey aliens. Spielberg is the king of alien encounter movies, and really I think they are his specialty, his greatest films all belonging to that genre : "A.I.", "Close Encounters", "War Of The Worlds". I have long suspected that he was "clued in" on the realities of the subject years ago, after he became not only a top box office director with "Jaws" but also demonstrated his technical prowess at the same time. I believe that around that time, the "top brass" decided this is our guy for "disclosure through popular entertainment", and lo and behold his next picture was "Close Encounters Of The Third Kind", a phrase nobody had ever heard before as the title for a movie with special effects nobody had ever seen before and subject matter that no filmmaker had previously explored to such depth or with such realism.
So yeah, SS is the director or producer you want at the helm of anything of this magnitude involving Alien abductions. The series runs 15 hours spread out over ten 90 minute episodes. It was originally broadcast over the Syfy Channel in 2002 (man, the years have just flown by), and I really wanted to see it then but I didn't have cable. More recently, since about 2010, I had occasionally checked the dvd price on Amazon, but it was always cost prohibitive. This past Spring, however, when I checked it the price was way down, and I didn't hesitate. Anything involving this subject matter is a must-see for me (and for you too!), but only if it has been produced by Spielberg or someone at the highest artistic level.
I am of two minds where "Alien Abduction" stories are concerned. On the one hand, 99% of them - be they revealed in books or movies or tv shows - are phoney tales spewed out by New Age nut jobs who were taken to Zeta Reticuli or wherever. I steer clear of the subject for the simple reason that everybody and their mother has been abducted by aliens, except for that they really haven't been. They just want attention.
And these kinds of stories annoy me because I really and truly have had something beyond comprehension happen to me, except that my story doesn't fit any neatly accepted cliche pattern that you hear in all the other myriad accounts. For one thing, I was never abducted by aliens.
But I did see one. We all did; those of us who were present at the Wilbur Wash and perhaps at Northridge Hospital as well. And of course the military was involved in the events of September 1989, as was the FBI and CIA. We've all had memory issues, too. But unlike the cliche tales, my story is true - hell, it's too weird to be fake, no one could make it up, not even me! - and so, to finish off my point, when it comes to books, movies or TV shows about aliens, I only watch or read the high grade ones, the ones I know will have a ring of truth. And I have always trusted Steven Spielberg to give me some truth, even if it is couched in a dramatic storyline. He did this in 2001 with "A.I.", which I think is one of the greatest and most revealing movies ever made, disclosure-wise. And now, it looks like he has done it again with "Taken", even though I am seeing it 17 years after the fact and am quite late to the party.
The first episode covers much of the same ground we just saw in "Project Blue Book" (reviewed earler this week), a thorough exploration of the Roswell events of July 1947 and other related UFO cases that took place at around the same time, including the phenomenon of the Lubbock lights. Prior to these events, there were the Foo Fighter fireballs that were seen by WW2 pilots over Germany. As an aside, I can remember my Dad telling me about these when I was 6 years old. Dad was in a radar battalion which may have tracked such things. His stories of the Foo Fighters might have been my first knowledge of anything having to do with Unidentified Flying Objects.
"Taken" introduces an interesting aspect to the familiar Roswell and Wright-Patterson legends, that of the one Grey who survived the crash and was taken to an observation cell at Wright/Pat. Some say it was Edwards, but at any rate, this little guy who became known as "J-Rod" supposedly lived for many years afterward, on the base, and it is rumored that Eisenhower knew about him. But in the show, there is another survivor. I don't wanna tell you too much about him, except to say that he is similar to "The Man Who Fell To Earth" in certain respects.
All of this really makes you wonder what happened in 1947, and how the secrecy led to the creation of our modern day National Security State. In all of these shows, "Blue Book", or "Taken" or "X-Files", a dominant theme has to do with who is generating the aircraft. Is it the Russians? Could it be the Germans? Maybe they are ours, and part of a Top Secret project.
This is what really led to all the Cold War paranoia. To be sure, both the US and the Commies were frightened of each other's unknown nuclear capability.
But the real fear was created by the UFO panic that was in the air from 1947 to 1952, because no one knew for certain what they were or where they were coming from.
That is - no civilians knew, nor did most military and politicians.
The secrets have been kept all this time by a select few, and those secrets have shaped the world as we know it. Most of the electronic technology that has swept the world since 1947 has been developed from information that has been kept secret.
UFOs crashed here on Earth and the world changed, and here were are today over 70 years later still fascinated by the subject because we don't know the whole story. Thank goodness, then for "Disclosure Emissaries" like Steven Spielberg and Chris Carter and the producers of other high quality shows like "Project Blue Book". From them, we have at least learned something over the years, and I think we have a pretty good general idea of what the truth is.
One thing is for sure : We know it wasn't a weather balloon that crashed at Roswell!
"Taken" is off to a great start. I will be trying to dole out the episodes to myself rather than binge them, which I can do because I own the dvd, so there is no library return date. So I will probably try to watch one per week, and will report back on how things are developing. ////
(this part was written this morning, Saturday July 13) : Today is my last day off until next month, and in just a few hours I will be heading out the door to go to the Paul McCartney concert at Dodger Stadium. I've never been to a concert there, only ballgames, so I am gonna leave a little early to allow for traffic and long lines. I am super stoked to see Sir Paul, and as I've mentioned my concert-going career will now have come full circle because when I was six years old, I rode in the car when my Dad drove my sisters to Dodger Stadium to see The Beatles in August of 1966.
So, no hike or any other activities today, just preparing for the concert. I did have a nice hike at Santa Susana yesterday, going up the Devil's Slide and back. I will try to check in for a brief post-concert report tonight, though I imagine it will be pretty late when I return. Stay tuned, though, and by tomorrow at the latest I will deliver a full report.
And have a wonderful day yourself. Tons of love all day long and into the night. xoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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