Former U.S.
Senator Harry Reid
repeated claims in a new documentary that UFOs interfered in U.S nuclear
weapons facilities – even prohibiting the weapons’ launch altogether.
In the documentary “The Phenomenon” that released Tuesday,
By Laura Widener americanmilitarynews.com
10-6-20
Reid said, repeating claims told to him, “If they had been called upon by the
president to launch [the nukes] they couldn’t have done it.”
“The day the sun didn’t come up was so surreal. I
mean, it was literally apocalyptic. There was this orange glow in the
sky all day, the sky was orange and dark and everybody was walking
around like they were in some matrix. It was eerie and spooky and
unsettling, and it was like, let’s get the hell out of here, man, we
can’t even breathe fresh air.”
James Fox is doing the
phoner from somewhere in Arizona, where the choking ashes from
multiple conflagrations near his home in
By Billy Cox De Void
10-6-20
northern California aren’t filtering through the seams and powdering the
pillows. He and his family left the state a couple of weeks ago; with any
luck, the weather will have taken a more rational turn when they return home
in November.
This is a huge moment for the director of “The
Phenomenon,” which is premiering online today following 7½ years of
soul-searching and turmoil during its bumpy production schedule. The
documentary – Fox’s fourth on UFOs – is drawing
rave endorsements
from some of its featured subjects, including the likes of Bill Richardson,
John Podesta, Chris Mellon, Jacques Vallee (“the most credible documentary
ever made about UFOs”) and
Luis Elizondo. But, after being plagued by budget shortfalls, transient partnerships, the
collapse of a major distribution agreement that might’ve translated the film
into 50 languages and opened in nearly 200 countries, and (of course)
COVID-19, Fox sounds exhausted by the ordeal.
“I’m not trying to
sound melodramatic, but that film nearly killed me. In every way,” he says.
“Mentally, physically, psychologically, like I was in the ring with a monster
and I was literally just trying to survive to the next round.”
There’s a load to unpack in this 101-minute treatment of The Great Taboo, and
enough material in storage for an additional five-part mini-series. But maybe
the greatest source of Fox’s anxiety was the ending, which culminates with a
textbook Close Encounter of the Third Kind incident involving African
schoolkids in 1994. If UFO hardware, videos and radar tracks get clogged in
the windpipes of the American mainstream, purported interactions with the
voyagers themselves are the subculture’s gaudy emetics. When he first heard
about the faceoff, Fox’s instinct was to run the other way.
“If you’ve seen any of my work, you know I don’t do CE-3 stories, I cover CE-1
and CE-2,” he recalls. “And knowing full well that most of the high-profile
officials I interviewed for the film wanted to see the whole documentary
before they signed off on it, I knew that going there would be a slippery
slope, and incredibly challenging.”
Fox learned about the Zimbabwe playground incident in the 1990s, when he was
“naïve enough” to think he could cop an interview with Steven Spielberg.
Spielberg’s intermediary, a mutual friend, got back to Fox and told him Mr.
Hollywood wasn’t interested in chatting. However, she added, “he does want you
to know there’s an incredibly compelling landing case in Africa and you should
look into it.
“And I thought, there’s no way a UFO could land in broad daylight at a school,
where the occupants could get out and interact with children, without the
entire world knowing about it. And I thought, if I was gonna dismiss it that
quickly, the general public was gonna dismiss it even quicker.”
But after taking a look at the footage recorded in the immediate aftermath,
with the young eyewitnesses struggling to make sense of what they saw, Fox was
a fish on a hook, and with a major dilemma: How to get the most credible
authorities in his documentary to consent to participate in a film that ends
with a CE-3 kicker? “To have to cut any of them out because of this,” he says,
“would’ve been devastating.”
None bailed. In fact, off-the-record accounts of high-strangeness imparted to
Fox by some of those same folks suggested that maybe what happened in Zimbabwe
was more palatable than he initially believed: “What I learned from meetings
with some of these high-level people shocked me, in terms of the evidence
they’ve seen, and the evidence that’s not been released. I think about this
almost every day. And as (retired Senator) Harry Reid says in the movie, what
ended up on the front page of the New York Times (12/16/17) is just the tip of
the iceberg.”
Among the angles in Fox’s odyssey that will likely never see the light of day
is how he managed to nail down the Zimbabwe story. He promised never to air
that part of the journey, but the way it happened reinforces Ralph Waldo
Emerson’s famous truism, “There is no limit to what can be accomplished if it
doesn’t matter who gets the credit.” Because with one stroke of generosity
that will not appear in the credits, “The Phenomenon” was allowed to become
something more than just another UFO tale.
“Now that I’m a dad,” says Fox, who has a 6-year-old son, “I look at children
differently. I care about their future. There’s a very powerful environmental
message in this film. I didn’t create it, I just highlighted it.
“We need congressional hearings. This is not a pie-in-the-sky idea, this is
something that’s realistically possible, based on some of the meetings I’ve
been in. And the only way we’re gonna get any traction with elected officials
is to rattle their cages. They need their constituents to rattle their cages.
That’s it.”
Released on Tuesday, James Fox's new documentary The
Phenomenon, offers a historical inquiry into UFOs. Or what the U.S.
Military refers to as "Unidentified Aerial Phenomena."
[...]
By Tom Rogan www.washingtonexaminer.com 10-5-20
Centering on more credible witnesses, such as military observers, Fox documents
how UFOs are not something new. He examines the so-called "Foo Fighter" wave of
UFOs that were seen by American pilots over Europe and the Asia-Pacific during
World War II. Fox also studies the heavy occurrence of UFOs in and around
nuclear sites. The correlation of UFO reports and the development of the atomic
bomb is seen by some analysts as a critical point of note. Again, Fox breaks
news here, getting former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on the record as
saying that UFOs have, on occasion, even interfered with U.S. nuclear weapons
systems (note that the U.S. Navy's aircraft carriers are nuclear-powered). This
nuclear interference has been previously — and extensively — reported by Robert
Hastings. However, to have Reid, who was instrumental in the forming of the
Pentagon's 2009-2017 UFO program, corroborate that reporting is important for
its political salience. On that point, we should note that Sen. Marco Rubio,
current Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is now demanding a new
Pentagon report on UFOs.
Twenty-four minutes into the
long-awaited documentary
“The Phenomenon,” director James Fox foreshadows its final act with a
look back at what happened outside Australia’s Westall School in 1966.
That’s when several hundred students came swarming out of their
classrooms upon hearing about a disc-shaped UFO stunting in broad
daylight over the power lines near the athletic field. They watched it
descend below the treeline, rise again, turn on its broad side, and zip
away at a crazy velocity.
By Billy Cox De Void
9-29-20
Fifty years later, a handful of those eyewitnesses reconvene to share not only
their sighting experience, but how they watched local and federal authorities
cordon off the landing area to conduct an investigation. They were also warned
by the administration during a subsequent school assembly that they hadn’t seen
what they said they saw. Even today, a faculty member who watched that event
unfold agreed to go on camera only after being assured of anonymity. For anyone
who’s followed the mystery for any length of time, stories like these are
generically familiar. Indeed, much of the setup follows a conventional arc with
names (from Gen. Roger Ramey to John Podesta), places (Roswell, Bentwaters,
Malmstrom AFB) and events (from Kenneth Arnold’s “flying saucer” sighting in
1947 to the 2004 Tic Tac incident off California) that are staples of the UFO
timeline. But Fox is targeting a much larger audience, and establishing baseline
frames of reference for the uninitiated is absolutely critical for the emotional
wallop “The Phenomenon” packs at the end.
With American democracy on
the ropes and institutional norms degenerating into banana-republic spittle,
convincing audiences to divert their attention, if only momentarily, to what has
long been libeled as freak-show culture is a big ask.
It’s always been
a big ask. However, the fringe is also deteriorating, and things are happening
quickly now. Whether it’s the formation of the Pentagon UAP Task Force or the
anticipated release of the military intelligence report on UFOs to the Senate,
the landscape on the other side of the election is already evolving into
something for which we are unprepared. And “The Phenomenon” forces us to go even
deeper, to maybe even reassess the longstanding status quo on UFOs, as maybe a
crime against nature – human nature.
To be sure, Fox delivers twists that may take some cognoscenti by surprise.
Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Chris Mellon, for
instance, recalls how Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper broached the UFO subject
with President Clinton during a Cabinet meeting. Dispatched by SecDef William
Cohen to learn more, Mellon remembers hitting the wall when a USAF colonel told
him the pertinent records had been “cleaned up or thrown out to save space.”
Mellon goes on to recount how “somebody bent the rules” to get the
celebrated F-18 UFO chase videos to him in the parking lot of the Pentagon. He also professes how
“extraordinarily disappointed” he was in the NY Times groundbreaking story of
12/16/17, which showcased the videos and exposed the existence of the $22
million Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.
Instead of focusing on AATIP, Mellon says, “the real story, in my mind at least,
should’ve been, these things are real, they’re here, this is happening now.”
“The Phenomenon” also takes us behind the scenes and gives us tantalizingly
brief glimpses into the research underway right now on purported UFO debris
collected “as far back as 1947.” French physicist/computer scientist/pioneer
UFOlogist Jacques Vallee says colleagues are investigating material that is
manufactured, not natural, by employing technology that allows researchers to
peer into atomic structure so deeply it is “impossible to fake.” Stanford Med
School microbiology professor Garry Nolan displays the “multiparameter ion beam
imager,” and discusses how it determined that the samples’ isotopic compositions
are unique to any metals known on Earth.
“If you’re talking about an advanced material from an advanced civilization,
you’re talking about something that I’ll just call an ultramaterial, right,”
Nolan tells Fox. “It’s something which has properties where somebody is putting
it together at the atomic scale. So we’re building our world with 80 elements,
somebody else is building the world with 253 different isotopes.”
But beyond isotopic ratios, a discussion of threats to the superpowers’ nuclear
arsenals, and the bureaucratic intrigues, “The Phenomenon” poses an even more
fundamental question: More than 70 years into the “modern” UFO era, where have
the morals or ethics of denial and obfuscation left us? In a more recent version
of what happened at the Westall School in Australia, Fox leads us to the Ariel
School in Zimbabwe, and into the life-altering mass encounter that went down in
1994.
Using a remarkable anthology of contemporaneous BBC video testimony from dozens
of schoolkids discussing what they saw 26 years ago, Fox reunites a handful of
those students for interviews as adults. All have had decades to contemplate
that moment, an experience which diverged sharply from your average
lights-in-the-sky fare. They reported seeing small beings outside the vehicle,
the apparent occupants, with large heads and huge, hypnotic black eyes. Many
received telepathic messages, largely dystopian, about the fate of the Earth and
technology’s role in its sickness.
Most poignant are the interviews conducted by the late Harvard psychiatrist John
Mack, whose onsite empathy and compassion in 1994 clearly moved some of those
kids to extraordinary reflection. To her credit, unlike in Australia, at least
one Ariel School official encouraged the children to “say exactly what you want
to say” as cameras assembled for interviews. Decades later, however, at least
one of the alums admitted to having misgivings about sharing her experience so
freely, “being so young and not even being allowed time to able to comprehend
what we had seen.” She added, “Our teacher certainly didn’t believe us, so that
was a big deal because we had to continue going to school there.”
By time Fox’s production team arrived in rural Ruwa, former Ariel teacher and
current headmistress Judy Bates had her own on-camera confession to make all
these years later: “I wanted to apologize, I should’ve taken more notice, but I
didn’t. I was more concerned about me and not them, and what was going on in my
own personal experience.” Her verdict: “Aliens visited us – and that’s about
it.”
Fox knows the Zimbabwe material is dynamite, and he’s smart
enough to back off and let the images breathe. It’s not so much what the kids
said back then as how they said it. They struggled to articulate what was going
on behind their eyes, and they expressed themselves with a halting uncertainty
that seemed to wobble between wonder and trauma. The adults failed them then,
just as they failed the Aussie kids in 1966, as well as countless others who’ve
been ostracized and doubting their sanity since whenever this all started.
Bottom line, “The Phenomenon” is a call to action. Fox puts an urgent human face
on the current momentum towards transparency, and he leaves us with a small
window into the price we pay for doing nothing. Someday, if and when the veil
parts, we may regret having peeked. But the consequences of being shielded from
the view are self-evident. And time is running out.
James Fox's feature exploring 70 years of history behind proving UFOs
exist will now have a digital release on Oct. 6.
UFO documentary The Phenomenon, which takes
an expansive look across 70 years' worth of history behind proving the
existence of UFOs, right up to the latest discoveries, has a new trailer
and release date.
By Alex Ritman The Hollywood Reporter
9-15-20
The feature — from director James Fox — was originally slated for a wide North
American theatrical release via 1091 Pictures this fall, but due to the COVID-19
pandemic will now premiere worldwide on all digital platforms on Oct. 6.
If aliens exist, eventually we’ll know about it. How will we find out? What will they want? These are the kinds of questions that spark our imaginations every single day. Could the revelation possibly come in the form of a documentary? If the
By Germain Lussier
Gizmodo
2-2-20
language being used to promote The Phenomenon is right, maybe it will.
Directed by James Fox and narrated by Peter Coyote, The Phenomenon is a new documentary that covers over 70 years of UFO history.
The film includes interviews with former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Clinton chief of staff John Podesta.
1091 Media has acquired North American and digital rights to the UFO documentary The Phenomenon, with a nationwide theatrical release set for June of next year, followed by a digital release in September.
By Mia Galuppo
www.hollywoodreporter.com
11-13-19
The film takes an expansive looks at 70 years' worth of history behind proving the existence of UFOs, right up to the latest discoveries.
Motion pictures of an Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) off Santa Catalina are being investigated by a local scientific group.
By San Diego Union
8-27-1974
J.F. Herr, a research psychologist and spokesman for the group, said the film is apparently the best UFO movie ever taken and may be an invaluable aid toward determining the true nature of such objects.
-click and or right click on image(s) above to enlarge-
After analysis performed by Dr. Robert Nathan of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California; he conluded that the object in the film was in fact an airplane.
Director Lasse Hallstrom and producer Laura Bickford are teaming to make a movie based on investigative reporter Leslie Kean’s bestselling book UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record. Kean is one of three reporters who broke the widely-
KINGWOOD — Regional actors of all ages seeking roles are invited to audition on May 7 at the Preston Community Arts Center in Kingwood for a part in a forthcoming feature film based on the historical incident of a supposed UFO crash-landing in Pennsylvania.
With a new “Alien” movie about to open,
Scott warns that real ETs “are a lot smarter than we are.”
In 1979, Ridley Scott presented “Alien,” the first of six films in a series that would continue into 2017. This science-fiction horror franchise has produced nearly 40 years of sequels and prequels, numerous books, toys and video games.
On May 19, the second prequel, “Alien: Covenant,” debuts under Scott’s direction, and not only is he promoting the film, he’s also ― very cleverly ― letting it be known that he thinks aliens really exist and we should fear them.
A new underwater sonar-imaging investigation into Loch Ness has uncovered the remains of a monster.
Led by Kongsberg Maritime and supported by The Loch Ness Project and VisitScotland, the mission using Munin, a state-of-the-art intelligent marine robot, has revealed new information about the elusive 230 metres deep loch, uncovering areas underwater that have never been reached before.
By www.strathspey-herald.co.uk
4-13-16
Within the findings, 180m down on the loch bed, Operation Groundtruth has uncovered a recognisable creature. However, although it is the shape of Nessie – it is not the remains of the monster that has mystified the world for 80 years but more one that has inhabited the loch for over half that time and is a star of the silver screen.
The finding is in fact that of a 30-foot Loch Ness Monster model from the 1970 film, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, directed by Billy Wilder and starring Robert Stephens and Christopher Lee. [...]
Editor's note: Latest X-Files Trailer does not disappoint; beginning with a Roswell-esque UFO crash to visiting the infamous smoking man and everything in between–FW
Variety reports this week that a classic true-life alien abduction story is to receive the full Hollywood treatment in Captured. Gotham/Principal, producers of Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials, will team up with Bryce Zabel and Jackie Zabel of Stellar Productions to tackle what is arguably the most famous case of its kind on record.
Captured will be based on the story of Betty and Barney Hill, an interracial couple from New Hampshire, who claimed to have been taken aboard a UFO and medically examined by its humanoid occupants in September 1961.
This is not the first time Hollywood has engaged with the Hill abduction story. It was notably adapted for television in 1975 as The UFO Incident, a feature-length movie starring Estelle Pasrons and James Earl Jones as Betty and Barney. Bryce Zabel is also no stranger to the story, having already incorporated it as a sub-plot in his Dark Skies series….
Captured will no doubt differ substantially from its 1975 TV treatment, with the producers planning to “make the film in a context of both Cold War paranoia and the country’s struggle over race relations.”
Stellar CEO Jackie Zabel remarked of the Hills:
“They were an interracial couple in a country that still had segregation laws, and they lived in a city that was next door to a bomber base bristling with nuclear weapons. What they knew and why they were targeted will make for a phenomenal film.”
Co-producer Eric Robinson said of the project: “Captured is a true story that explores the birth of modern UFO lore through the eyes of the first Americans to report that they were kidnapped by aliens,” adding, “This is an exciting story that is as intriguing, timely and ripe for adaptation today as it was 54 years ago when this incident occurred.”
Bryce Zabel, who has had a professional fascination with the UFO mystery since the 1980s, wrote Syfy’s first original film – the UFO conspiracy story Official Denial (1993), and, after Dark Skies, worked on the development team for Steven Spielberg’s epic abduction miniseries, Taken. He has since written a number of books exploring UFOs and politics, including Surrounded by Enemies: What if Kennedy Survived Dallas?which won the 2013 Sidewise Award for Alternate History.
Gotham/Principal, producers of “Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials,” will team up with Bryce Zabel and Jackie Zabel via their Stellar Prods. to produce alien-abduction story “Captured.”
The project is based on the story of Betty and Barney Hill, an interracial couple from Portsmouth, N.H., who said they were captured by a UFO on Sept. 19, 1961. The Hills — a black postal clerk and a white social worker — claimed they had been studied by extraterrestrials and then returned to Earth with missing memories that were later retrieved under hypnosis.
Bryce Zabel, creator of the NBC/Sony alien-themed series “Dark Skies,” will write the script. The story is based on the 2007 non-fiction book “Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience: The True Story of the World’s First Documented Alien Abduction” by nuclear physicist Stanton Friedman and Betty Hill’s niece Kathleen Marden. [...]
Gareth Smart, a part-time acting coach in Cache Creek, provided a big treat — and potential spoiler — to X-Files fans around the world on Wednesday when he shared photos of an alien crash site on Facebook.
While a Vancouver crew for the upcoming X-Files miniseries has been busy shooting street scenes involving actors David Duchovny (Fox Mulder) and Gillian Anderson (Dana Scully), another crew has apparently been shooting night scenes in Ashcroft, an hour west of Kamloops.
The set features a flying saucer embedded in the ground. Ashcroft, with its semi-desert terrain, may be standing in for Roswell, New Mexico . . ..
If you ever want to dissuade the uninitiated from going near The Great Taboo, show them “Mirage Men,” the 2013 documentary based on Mark Pilkington’s eponymous book. Guaranteed to make an honest broker erupt in hives at the mere thought of parting the veil around the UFO mystery, “Mirage Men’s” anatomy of a government disinformation program is brilliant propaganda, and delivered with the sort of polished confidence that could easily make the “Frontline” rotation.
Directed by British crop-circle debunker John Lundberg, “Mirage Men” focuses largely on the activities of Richard Doty, the now-retired USAF Office of Special Investigations agent who screwed several UFO researchers with phony conspiracy yarns and created enough paranoia to put one of them in a psychiatric ward.
Like the book,“Mirage Men”operates on the premise that UFOs are hokum, and inflated by a counterintelligence network determined to conceal its black projects behind a smokescreen of imaginary space aliens. As Pilkington asserts in the documentary, “The UFO mythology develops of its own accord, and the mirage men will just drop a new piece of data, a new meme, some new fake documents into the mix as and when it is expedient for them to do so. And there’s no real need for a sustained UFO deception campaign because the folklore is just perfectly capable of sustaining itself.”
Embroidering its narrative with snippets of ancient Hollywood flying saucer flicks, the doc does a clever job of presenting UFOs as an exclusively pop-cultural phenomenon, circa 1952. No mention, of course, of the scientists and Air Force officials who established the independent reality of UFOs in 1948’s Project Sign because that would've complicated Pilkington's premise. But no matter. The real value of “Mirage Men” is watching a hack like Doty justify his mission on camera.
Doty, who has the bland countenance of Kevin Spacey’s office manager in “Glengarry Glen Ross,” was working OSI at Kirtland AFB in New Mexico in the late 1970s when he was assigned to neutralize an electronics entrepreneur named Paul Bennewitz. Bennewitz, described as a flag-waving WWII veteran, recorded strange lights, and other things, near Kirtland and alerted military authorities to what he claimed were UFOs. The "Mirage" storyline is that Bennewitz was unwittingly monitoring classified earthly technology, and that somewhere in the chain of command, it was decided the best way to work this thing was to encourage Bennewitz to believe he’d actually stumbled onto ET. Spoonfeeding him loads of steaming crap, the ruse went on for years and provoked Bennewitz into sharing his increasingly fantastic “discoveries” with politicians and news media, which wrote him off as a kook. Bennewitz eventually lost his business and submitted to psychiatric evaluation before his death in 2003.
Listening to Doty’s spin, years later, is to behold the very portrait of epic gall: “I actually sat down with Paul and said to Paul, ‘Listen Paul, I think you oughtta stop doing this. I think you’ve gone as far as you can go, and this is a friend, this is Richard Doty, a friend,’ it wasn’t Richard Doty, a special agent with OSI talking to him. I said ‘This is a friend talking to you, Paul,’ because I became a friend with him because he was a very wonderful person, and I didn’t want to see him harmed, and I said ‘Paul, stop it, listen to your son, listen to your wife, end it.’”
A friend? Holy *@!#, this guy Doty is a reptile. But at that point in the psyops campaign, nothing Doty could do or say could derail Bennewitz from his sacred destiny to find the space aliens. But Doty didn't stop there; his BS would go on to burn researchers Bill Moore and Linda Howe, whose stories are well documented. What lingers now are the echoes of this blithe functionary’s twisted reasons for cooperating with the documentary in the first place. Doty, the admitted liar, now insists 20 percent of the UFO coverup stuff he was putting out there — he never gets specific — is actually true. So open wide, kids, here's another meaningless mouthful:
“There are so many people, so many people within government, who have come forth with information saying it did happen, it’s real. The reason I’m doing it is because I asked the government a long time ago, hey, what am I supposed to say? And they’re gonna say you stick to the fact that it’s not real. But when the government tried to discredit me on something, then I went to them and said ‘Listen, you’re telling everybody that it’s not real and I know it’s real. And you know it’s real, and all these other people know it’s real. So I’m gonna tell the public what I know about it and the government said basically, ‘Do what you’ve gotta do.’”
Doty is a radioactive specimen you wouldn’t trust if he pointed out that your own hair was on fire. “You’re looking at Richard Doty,” concludes another researcher, “and by looking at him, you’re taking a glimpse into a whole machine that now has a life of its own.” Maybe that's true. And if Doty's self-serving confessional is what passes for contrition these days, shoot me your email and I'll forward you a Nigerian cash transfer proposition you're gonna love. Yep, "Mirage Men" wants you to walk away from this whole UFO scene in disgust. To that end, it's an incredibly effective piece of work.
.jpg "Robbie Graham")
operates on the premise that UFOs are hokum, and inflated by a counterintelligence network determined to conceal its black projects behind a smokescreen of imaginary space aliens. As Pilkington asserts in the documentary, “The UFO mythology develops of its own accord, and the mirage men will just drop a new piece of data, a new meme, some new fake documents into the mix as and when it is expedient for them to do so. And there’s no real need for a sustained UFO deception campaign because the folklore is just perfectly capable of sustaining itself.”