A.D. After Disclosure: When the Government Finally Reveals the Truth About Alien Contact (34 page)

There will be requests coming out of Hollywood to embed camera crews into government or private enterprise groups that are on the leading-edge of contact issues. If it turns out that there is a fast-response crash retrieval team somewhere in the breakaway civilization, networks will demand access to it for their own purposes. Imagine how addictively watchable
The Deadliest Catch
became for audiences. What if, instead of fish, aliens are invoked?

As an example of what we might expect, imagine a new show called
Above and Below
. In this series, almost anything goes, but its stock in trade is an aerial point-of-view, seeing the world below from a POV of a flying saucer. This is used as a transitional device to go into the world below, the massive underground base and tunnel system that has been created over the decades.

The series would be a vehicle to take audiences into previously classified labs. If there are any live EBEs that have been acknowledged, access to the units that manage them medically, as well as the security attached to them, will be deemed of paramount importance. The best example from today’s landscape would be a demand to go to “S-4” (just south of Area 51) with an all-access pass and see what is going on there. If it turns up empty and abandoned, expect loud cries of “foul.” However, that is non-fiction programming. In TV parlance, this means serialized documentaries, no matter how hyped or inflated they may be. The other side of the coin is so-called “reality” programming, which, as viewers mostly realize, is not especially real at all.

Reality producers will not miss a single beat to inject Disclosure into their series. Any series in production—featuring anything from survivors on an island, to competitors locked in a house, to suitors vying for spouses—will keep the cameras rolling. This will give us moments where the latest celebutantes cry and rage over their reactions to the news.

Although it may seem to trivialize the news that is breaking around us minute-by-minute AD, the truth is it will provide a service that should not be discounted. These kind of contrived shows still feature real people, or at least people who are more real than an actor on a sitcom. Audiences identify with their problems, share their anxieties and pain, rejoice in their triumphs. They will be looking to these same people, whether we like it or not, to see how they respond and, by extension, how they themselves should respond. Producers who script the scenarios for these reality shows will incorporate reactions from what they see on the news, their friends and family, and their own feelings. They will then create situations for the players, contestants, and celebrities to react to Disclosure. For example,
The Biggest Loser
may be about trying to lose weight, but the immediate post-Disclosure shows will feature players who struggle not to over-eat to calm their fears about the Others and the potential fate of the world.

Yet even as existing shows bend and twist to add Disclosure as just another “challenge” for their contestants, writers, producers, directors, and executives will be assessing what should come next and to get it on-the-air before their competition beats them to the punch. This process is going to yield some shows themed specifically around contact that are likely to be stranger than we can even predict now.

Within months, the tsunami of Disclosure will hit scripted programming. Television dramas and comedies will also work through the impact of AD in waves, just like their non-fiction and reality brothers and sisters. Existing shows will incorporate it immediately into their scripts, if at all possible. For example, an episode of the
C.S.I
. franchise may, depending on the facts that are learned, deal with human mutilations by the Others. Some shows may be constrained because of their period settings, but some, perhaps
Mad Men
, might slip in a line from a character about the police officer in Socorro, New Mexico, who thought he saw a flying saucer and its alien occupants out in the desert.

A standard three-camera sitcom, however, could insert content into the next script up, and put it on the air almost immediately. Humor will be tricky, but it won’t be long before people demand to laugh, no matter what the news about the Others turns out to be.

Oddly, writers who once specialized in ripped-from-the-headlines movies of the week, a genre now nearly extinct, will be the ones who have immediately acceptable skills.

As an example of new dramatic series in the AD world, imagine an hour-long drama,
Breakaway
, that allows viewers to experience the pre-Disclosure world of secrecy through the eyes of real characters whose life stories have been optioned for their underlying rights. If
Mad Men
can find success with characters from another time living their lives against the backdrop of a New York advertising agency, then it seems likely that viewers can similarly experience the cover-up in order to understand how we got to where we are.

Then again, in television programming, anything can happen.

The Next Generation of Movie Aliens

What will the new models of alien/human contact look like in Hollywood films? It’s a challenging question, particularly because the one thing we know for certain about this contact, based on where we are now, is that it has happened by stealth, hiding for decades in the shadows of public discourse.

Unless these Others appear with hundreds or thousands of Motherships in the skies, an entire genre of films dealing with hostile alien invasions such as
Independence Day
will probably be wiped out. A potentially more interesting template may be the kind springing from films such as
Alien Nation
and
District 9
. Less firepower, more nuance.

The world, even the world as interpreted through fantastic storytelling, will have to adjust to this new reality. Because, in the new world, fact will have caught up to fiction.

The Man Who Puts the Extra in Extra-Terrestrial

Todd Masters is a special effects creator who has offices in both Hollywood and Vancouver, B.C. For two decades, Masters has made his living designing all kinds of creature effects for film and television projects. Ask Masters how many versions of an alien gray he has helped create and he just laughs. He created the original
Dark Skies
grays, and multiple other iterations of alien life, including those from
The Day the Earth Stood Still
,
Invasion
,
The Arrival
, and even
The Last Mimzy
.

Masters knows that his life will change after Disclosure. For starters, he and his team of creature designers have always made alien beings the old-fashioned way, creating them based on experiences and living organisms that exist here on Earth now and in the past, then interpreting them “to the furthest reaches of the mind.” He says that, similar to everyone else, he will be glued to the television news coverage on Day One, but that even as he is watching, he will also be directing design teams to base a new generation of physical and digital creations on the emerging reality. Even if all he has to go on at first is a black-and-white photo of a dead alien from decades ago, that will be enough to begin.

The hitch in the work flow, however, is that the demand for his company’s services will be fundamentally changed.

Currently, his buyers want fantastic eye-popping creatures. They want to see movies that are “what-ifs,” whether they be about alien parasites or never-before-seen werewolves. After Disclosure, Masters thinks that non-fiction will eclipse fiction, at least for a while, and that audiences will
want stories based on fact. He thinks that many films that would have been dismissed as too “sci-fi” in the past will now be greenlit to production as true stories.

Filmmakers Thrust into the Future

James Cameron’s
Avatar
, a massive success today, may immediately be seen as a hopelessly naive, antique artifact of the last days of official denial. That is, his portrayal of humans as the marauding bad guys may be inverted if we learn that human culture has been subverted by an alien presence. If so, it will not end the desire to hear stories, but merely change which ones have the greatest resonance. It could potentially tarnish or damage Cameron’s career, given his heavy-handed “bad human, good alien” storytelling.

We have already discussed Steven Spielberg, but here we can add that, given the suspicions through the years that he has been part of a government plan to acclimate the public to the reality of ET, one can imagine that he will jump into the fray.

Disclosure will not end Steven Spielberg’s fascination with aliens. Rather, it will send him off on the journey of his lifetime. He may abandon whatever project he is currently working on and begin on what may be his seminal work. The man who has given so many windows into contact can hardly turn his back on the field when his dream of knowing the truth finally comes true. Nor will the movie-going public accept passivity from him. They will have seen him on television as a regular commentator in the immediate aftermath of the confirmation of contact, opining on what it all means simply because—by virtue of having tried to make sense of it through his own prism of film—he will be considered an expert. And compared to the average human being on the planet who has only given the subject passing thought, he will be one.

A Comic Book Perspective

Many have already thought about this world of AD because they have read widely in the world of comic books. After all, alien invaders, predators, and warriors have always been a staple of storytelling in these pulpy pages.

The aliens of
Marvel Comics
tend to be more spiritual, blurring the line between God and extraterrestrial. Characters such as Galacticus and the Silver Surfer possess vast cosmic abilities that make Earth’s superheroes look like insects.

In DC Comics, the concept of the alien is more about the heroes. Superman and Martian Manhunter, for example, are given great powers by virtue of coming to Earth to live.

Beau DeMayo, a self-described “comic book nerd,” has read them all. Perhaps most important about aliens in the Marvel Universe, he points out, is that they are responsible for the evolution of human life on Earth, an idea supported by many who believe in ETs. The DC Universe is also interesting, DeMayo points out, as it takes a “community approach to its aliens.” In its pages are organizations similar to the Federation in Star Trek, or intergalactic police forces comprised of many aliens.

Both the DC and Marvel universes share one common theme: To rise to their full potential, aliens must discover and embrace the essence of humanity. “Being human,” for example, is the way Superman seeks to check the potential abuse of his powers that he might otherwise indulge in. The Green Lantern is the best of the Lantern Corps, because of his human will and spirit. Even the Norse God Thor, whose Asgardian past is now being played as rooted in extraterrestrial origin, must live among humans to be humbled and grow to be a better man. Because the focus is always on the discovery of the hero’s humanity despite his or her off-world heritage, it could be seen as creating a strange prejudice against aliens.

Comic readers will also not have a problem accepting it if the reality turns out to be that there are multiple races of the Others interacting with us. Whereas films tend to see the human-alien interaction as binary—us and them—comic books see the universe as us and them, and them, and them. With hundreds of alien races in those fantasy universes, humanity is portrayed as just another race. However, we are not completely knocked off our pedestal, because all life in the universe is connected. Usually, too, all roads lead back to Earth in some fashion.

Stan Lee’s Point-of-View

Stan Lee’s name is almost synonymous with comic books. He was the man in charge of Marvel’s creative output during its heady rise to fame during the 1960s. Almost all the characters being turned into movies these days—Iron Man, Hulk, Spider-Man, Captain America, Thor, X-Men, the Avengers—were created, co-created, or re-invented by Lee during his days as the company’s patriarch. Through the years, Lee has given a great deal of thought to aliens. “I always try to go against the grain and use them as the starting point for the story and try to twist it,” says Lee. “If they’re introduced to us as being good, then they’re actually bad. If we’re told to fear them, then they’re probably here to help us.”

As for real ETs, in contrast to the comic book variety, Lee thinks they are “out there” for sure, and maybe even over here. “There must be other intelligent life in the universe—living, sentient beings,” he said. “Whether they have come here in UFOs or not, I don’t know. But I figure there must be something to them because so many people have seen them.”

Indeed, Lee had personal testimony to that effect. His “right-hand man” at Marvel was his operations director and artist Sol Brodsky. Lee describes him as being very “level-headed,” so he was shocked to hear from Brodsky about a car trip he had just made to Las Vegas. “When we were driving, I think we saw a flying saucer,” Lee quotes Brodsky as telling him. “It was fast, it didn’t have any wings, stopped right over our car, hovered, then zipped away faster than anything I’d ever seen.” Both men wondered if it was a government test of an experimental aircraft, but Brodsky believed it was more than that. In the aftermath, Lee developed his own theory that flying saucers were not from other planets but from the future.

On the subject of a panicked population, Lee has played it both ways through the years as a writer, doing what suits the story and his telling of it. Personally, he believes Disclosure would stimulate an “incredible amount” of curiosity from the public, that people would be “intensely interested” in the news. He predicts panic only if the aliens are portrayed as dangerous and hostile. Otherwise, he feels that people will accept them and continue on with their lives. In his view, the group that should feel
panic most would be the people who have kept the secret—because the rest of us are going to feel anger and annoyance regarding their decision to withhold information.