Do you believe?
Or are you one of those people who will accept as "truth" anything the government tells you because "why would the government lie to me", and thus dismiss the idea of extraterrestrial visitations outright? Maybe you are an incredulous denialist who refuses to accept anything that would fly in the face of a cherished belief or worldview.
Today is World UFO Day, a day that was established to focus on efforts to "raise awareness about the undoubted existence of UFO’s and with that intelligent beings from outer space." Any open-minded investigation into the phenomenon would bring questions, such as just what are people seeing out there. It's surely true that much of it could be explained away with such things as weather balloons or "swamp gas", but occasionally those simplified explanations have to be manipulated to make them work.
This has led to a variety of ever more stronger (and stranger) efforts to discredit the idea that alien life forms are making frequent visits to our planet. One of the ones that intrigue me the most is the idea, proposed by fundamentalist Christian writers, that these "aliens" are actually a vanguard of demons under the auspices of Satan, with the goal to deceive humans. See UFOs and the Alien Agenda by Bob Larson (a guy whom I consider to be nothing more than an overrated "witch hunter". Larson got his start by demonizing rock and roll, but be that as it may. Truth be told, he kind of looks like an alien to me anyway...)
As I have previously stated else where on this blog, the July 2 date for World UFO Day was established to commemorate the famous UFO crash in Roswell, NM. That incident was the inspiration behind the 1980 film Hangar 18, as well as the focal point for one of my favorite episodes of the TV series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, both of which are appearing today on the blog.
The TV series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was the third live action iteration of the classic space series, and is probably my favorite of the franchise. (There was an animated series that appeared between the cancellation of the original series and The Next Generation series, so technically ST:DS9 would be the fourth series, historically). As far as it's staying power, it lasted 7 seasons, as did Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager. With 174 total episodes it only ranks second in number of episodes, behind ST:TNG (at 176 episodes), and was very popular during it's run. (ST:V had 172 episodes).
The main reason, BTW, that I prefer ST:DS9 over ST:TNG was the rarity of the appearance of a Betazoid on ST:DS9. I don't shy away from stating that I absolutely hated the Counselor Troi character on ST:TNG. Although not the actress... I just hated the concept of an empath race... "I sense pain...intense pain". She must've been reading MY mind.
Star Trek Deep Space Nine "Little Green Men" (airdate Nov. 4, 1995):
The episode begins as a Ferengi resident of the space station, Nog (Aron Eisenberg), the son of Rom (Max Grodénchik) and nephew of Quark (Armin Shimerman), is preparing to leave Deep Space Nine to go to Starfleet Academy. Nog and his proud father are ecstatic about the trip, but the ever grumpy and dismissive Quark has his doubts. But Quark is about to get slightly more enthusiastic when he learns that a cousin has come through with a long-awaited repayment of a debt; his very own space shuttle.
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Rom and Quark
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| Nog |
Ever the suspicious and distrusting sort, Quark has the shuttle checked out by Rom. Somewhere along the way of the series Rom, who was originally just an employee in Quark's bar, gained some extensive technical knowledge of spaceships. By this episode I guess he was fairly competent enough that Quark trusted him to give the shuttle a good going over. Rom declares the ship in perfect condition. So Quark volunteers to use the shuttle to take Nog to Starfleet Academy on Earth.
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| Hitting the road |
But Quark isn't doing this because he has a heart of gold. Rather he has decided to use the opportunity to make a little money on the side. He is smuggling a batch of illegal kemacite, which he intends to sell at a substantial profit. (See? Quark's heart is in the right place after all, as any good capitalist...)
A problem occurs when, while trying to bring the shuttle out of warp, there is a malfunction. Or sabotage, as Quark concludes, since he and his cousin are not exactly buddy-buddy in the first place. Rom figures out if they use some process involving part of their illegal contraband they can manage to pull the shuttle out of its warp. The problem is that they end up traveling through a time warp and end up in 1947... On July 2, specifically... Near Roswell, NM... (You can see where this is going, can't you?)
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| Communicating with the aliens |
The rest of the episode plays out like a comedy of errors. The 1947 military figures on hand try to figure out how to communicate with the aliens, as do our Ferengi visitors. The aliens, coming from a time when advanced technology has given them tools that are not a part of the current timeline, have what are called "universal translators", but they are malfunctioning, so neither can understand each other. But Rom is able to fix the problem.
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| Problem solving |
Side note: The universal translator as depicted in the Star Trek franchise is one of those things that come off as "it works: we don't have to explain it:.. it just works". Thus, instead of having to have the 1947 Americans have their own universal translators, the device makes whatever the Ferengi say in their own language come out as English to the Americans. Quite a bit of the technology of Star Trek was just a device "invented" to overcome a plot problem or even a TV budget problem. Such as the "invention" of the transporter. That was just implemented because the budget for the TV show wouldn't allow for frequent shuttle craft landings on planets. If you are curious about the physics of Star Trek, I recommend an excellent book: The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence M. Krauss.
Eventually these suspicious (and obviously overly wary "Red Scare" adherents) are convinced that these aliens are going to go over to the other side (a.k.a. the Russians). Of course, the clueless Quark is not helpful, by threatening to deal with the Russians if these Australians ("Americans!" "Whatever...") don't want to play ball... Which leads to the military to use tactics that are not Geneva Convention approved to get the aliens to conform to their own way of thinking.
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| Can we try waterboarding instead? |
Fortunately for the Ferengi, Odo (Rene Auberjonois) has smuggled himself onboard the Quark shuttle. See, as head of security on Deep Space Nine, Odo doesn't trust the motives of Quark. The two are not exactly good friends in other words. (Truth be told, I'm not sure Quark has any "good friends"...) So Odo hid on board the shuttle and is now in the same predicament of being stuck in the past.
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| Odo and Quark |
Odo, by the way, is a shapeshifter race of aliens, which means he can become whatever the hell he wants to be to blend in. On Earth he starts out by shifting into the form of a dog. Not sure what form he took to conceal himself on Quark's shuttle, unless he hid out as some kemacite in the ship's hold.
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| Nice Odo! Down, boy! |
With his help, and the help of a couple of sympathetic non-military humans, Professor Carlson (Conor O'Farrell) and Nurse Garland (Megan Gallagher), they are able to escape and use the now repaired ship.
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| Carlson and Garland |
Unfortunately for Quark and his greedy ambition, they have to use the remaining contraband to open another rift in time to get back to their present day. There is still another connection to the actual events in the historical Roswell incident: When one of his subordinates asks what they are going to do, the general in charge, General Denning (Charles Napier) replies "About what, Captain? All we ever found was a crashed weather balloon..."
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| General Denning |
As I have stated on numerous occasions, I really like when a serious dramatic TV show strays into comedy. Star Trek The Original Series and ST:DS9 both did this with the Tribbles episodes. The humor for this one relies on being able to accept that aliens did really crash at Roswell, but I doubt that without the efforts of Shimerman, who really was a pretty funny guy in the episodes he appeared in on DS9, that this could have been quite as funny.
Some of the other actors are pretty standard cardboard characters, however. I cringe at the interplay between O'Farrell and Gallagher, who are engaged to be married. I realize it is meant, in retrospect, as a parody of a trope that was common in the 40's and 50's movies, but it comes off a bit stale. A funnier pairing of a married couple could be found in The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, a 2001 parody of classic 50's sci-fi movies.
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| Get a room for crying out loud! |
Charles Napier, however, is a treat, no matter what kind of character he plays. Here he is also doing a parody of a standard gun-ho "America first" military man, but I like his character and his performance. And he could do comic and serious roles both with equal panache. In The Blues Brothers he was a hoot as the leader of the country western band that is one of the title characters' nemeses. And in Rambo: First Blood Part II, he was sufficiently despicable as the military big wig who sends Rambo into Vietnam to look for missing prisoners of war. This was Napier's second appearance in the Star Trek Universe. Previously he had played Adam, referred to in reviews as a "space hippie", in the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Way to Eden".
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| The "space hippie" |
There is that underlying subplot that drives the story of "Little Green Men". Quark, being the essence of an unscrupulous capitalist, sees latinum (the monetary form used in the Star Trek Universe) out the wazoo and possibly even ruling the planet because of the lack of advanced technology on 1940's Earth. (The Man Who Would Be King, anyone?) But Quark is due for a lesson in the "my country, for better or worse" mentality of the 1940's military.
As an avowed fan of Quark, who gets way too much hate from some sectors of the fan base (kind of like those people who dislike Wil Wheaton's Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation), I enjoy episodes where he is featured. And probably for the same reason that that fan base dislikes them: i.e. the Ferengi were used often for comedic relief. Admittedly I sympathize with one objection. There does seem to be a tinge of antisemitism with the portrayal of the characters. But that leads to a question... if the Ferengi characters are antisemitic caricatures, then why were most of the actors who played them Jewish? It doesn't seem to me that they would if they felt the characters were such.
As far as where "Little Green Men" ranks in lists of best episodes of the series, it is ranked fairly well, considering the number to choose from. Den of Geek is probably the most generous, ranking it #20, and Bjorn Munson ranks it #42. Most of the other lists I looked at had it at least in the top 50, so maybe there are more comic relief fans in the Star Trek Universe than there are haters.
The year of 1980 was my transition year in terms of theater experience. I turned 18 late in 1979 and, after I graduated high school in 1980, I gained an independence. No longer did I have to have my parents permission to go to the movies. I missed out on anything that came out before the summer of 1980 since I was still in high school and still under the parental thumb. But beginning in about May of 1980 I was in a theater pretty much at least once every two weeks.
Unfortunately, I was limited to only what was showing locally, since Dallas-Ft. Worth theaters were a minimum of 75 miles away.. We had only one multiplex, with only four screens, and two drive-ins, each of which had two screens. That meant at the maximum I only had 8 potential movies to choose from at any time. Of course, if it was a big draw, sometimes the multiplex had two screens dedicated to the same film. I remember specifically that The Empire Strikes Back occupied two theater screens at the multiplex during it's initial run.
The upshot was that a lot of movies never made it to the "boondocks" that I called home. Being a rabid science fiction fan at the time, I have no doubt that I would have gone to Hangar 18 if it had appeared in a theater near me, but it didn't. I don't even recall seeing a trailer for it.
I have always wanted to see it, however. Apparently it wasn't seen by a whole lot of people at that. Rotten Tomatoes ratings, for instance, are based on contemporary ratings of critics at the time. Their rating of 40% Fresh is a result of only 5 contemporary critic reviews. If so few critics even saw, how wide spead was it's distribution in the first place?
Just last month I was browsing the stacks of used DVDs at the local Half Price Books and happened upon a copy of the film, so I snagged it, thus giving me the opportunity to have it play at The Midnite Drive-In. As for whether it was worth the 45 year wait... read on.
Hangar 18 (1980):
I'll start off with a tidbit of trivia. The director of Hangar 18 was also the director of the above reviewed episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I didn't know that when I planned out this pairing, but it's a nice little bit of coincidence.
The movie was produced by Sunn Classic Pictures, the same people who gave us such classic documentaries as In Search of Noah's Ark, In Search of Historic Jesus, Beyond and Back and The Lincoln Conspiracy, all beloved films of my childhood. They were also behind the movie and subsequent TV series The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams. Mostly known for family oriented films in the 70's, it also was responsible for the production (although not the distribution) of two Stephen King movies, Cujo and The Running Man. (Just my opinion, but that transition to more adult oriented films may be what contributed to their decline. The studio only lasted for 8 years after it's first attempt at a non G-rated film, Hangar 18. By then it had been acquired by Taft Communications, which is also now defunct).
"In spite of official denials, rumors have continued to surface about what the government has been concealing from the American public at a secret Air Force hangar. But now, with the help of a few brave eyewitnesses who have stepped forward to share their knowledge of these events, the story can finally be told."
-from the opening of Hangar 18
Thus begins our story. The film is tangentially the story of the Roswell incident. There are many things that diverge from the story as it played out historically, however. Even a neophyte knows that there wasn't even a space shuttle in existence in 1947, but the movie starts out with that premise. And that's where the whole thing starts to get a little tricky (and, you might say, unbelievable...)
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| Shuttle |
What's "unbelievable", you might ask? No, I'm not referring to the whole concept of alien life forms. I am referring to an incident that happens aboard the space shuttle. The space shuttle is about to launch a satellite, but the crew on board see a strange sight. An object that should not, theoretically, be there (in other words, a UFO). But instead of aborting the launch they go ahead with it. Surely even if the space program was in bad financial straits, the logical thing would have been to abort and call the astronauts back. Even the base notices the odd "blip" in the neighborhood back at base.
The launch goes on as planned, but the satellite crashes into that UFO. And worse, one of the astronauts (listed in the credits as Judd Gates, but called by the President as "John Gates"...), who happened to be outside the shuttle trying to make sure the launch goes off as planned, gets decapitated. The reaction of the remaining shuttle crew, Steve Bancroft (Gary Collins) and Lew Price (James Hampton) is almost like "Gee! He's dead... Oh. well. Let's go home..." And, believe it or not, they just leave the body out there to float in space for eternity.
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| The third astronaut loses his head |
Despite the somewhat incredibly unlikely scenario of the opening 10 minutes, the film does manage to start getting better as it progresses. It gradually morphs into what we expect from a government conspiracy and coverup film.
The first thing is that somehow that satellite ends up causing enough damage to the UFO to make it crash land on Earth. It crash lands somewhere in Arizona. General Morrison (Philip Abbott) sends a key figure, Harry Forbes (Darren McGavin), to coordinate the efforts to check out the landed spacecraft. This whole thing spells trouble from the outset, because, coincidentally enough, there is an election coming up just around the corner. What's going to happen to the President's re-election campaign if this news gets out?
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| Harry Forbes |
That becomes more clear when the General calls White House Chief of Staff Gordon Cain (Robert Vaughn) who immediately tells the General that he doesn't want to talk about over the phone and to get his ass to Washington, pronto. Meanwhile, a civilian who saw the thing land has brought a local sheriff to the scene, but all traces of it are gone.
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| Gordon Cain |
That's because the powers that be are on the ball. They moved it to Hanger 18 on a base in Texas (yeah, I know... Area 51 is supposedly in Nevada. So basically the film is covering it's ass so they don't just disappear off the face of the Earth for exposing the "truth"...)
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| UFO |
The weasel in the cornfield, to put it bluntly, is Cain. Cain intends to do everything he can to cover up this situation. At least until after the election. Citing the bad press that another politician got when he reported seeing a UFO, he suggests keeping it quiet. But there are still the astronauts who saw the UFO. What to do about them? Why, it's simple. Make them scapegoats. The political bigwigs have the newspapers print a story that blames Bancroft and Price for the death of Gates.
Bancroft and Price have proof of the real story, however. The tapes of the launch. Uh huh, not so fast. The bigwigs have covered their butts on that too. They altered the tapes, erasing any of the conversation about the sighting and everything else.
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| Price and Bancroft |
At the base Harry brings Phillip Cameron (Tom Hallick), an expert to check out the spaceship along with a small crew of specialists. Meanwhile, Bancroft and Price head to a remote area where they hope to find real proof of what happened. In other words, they think that maybe, just maybe, because of it's remoteness the government may not have gotten around to altering their tapes of the event.
The film jumps back and forth between these two events. On board the space ship the investigators find the bodies of two aliens (who look a lot like rejects of an early incarnation of The Blue Man Group).
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| Alien |
And at the remote base, with the help of a friend, George Turner (Michael Ruud), Bannister and Price find the proof that there really was something there.
(I think "losing your job" is the least of your worries there, George...)
But they do get George to pinpoint the site of the crash and head off in that direction. Meanwhile, back in D.C. our evil government bigwig Cain learns of this. And that's not good news. At least it's not for Bannister and Price.
We are only a third of the way through this film, but now it's starting to gel into the trajectory that pretty much was part and parcel of the average conspiracy theory film. But believe me, there are some twists and turns yet to come. And not just the typical ones. You are going to drop your popcorn when you learn the past history of the aliens (if you haven't read Chariots of the Gods, at any rate...) I'm going to leave off here, because, despite how cheesy a lot of this movie is, I think that one reveal is well worth watching this movie just once. It is bound to stick with you.
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| Investigating the UFO |
OK... just one more tantalizing bit... they find a human woman on the alien space ship, in suspended animation. She is still alive. (Now you're really intrigued... right?)
The reception of this movie by the critics generally dubbed it overly melodramatic and required a gullibility on the part of the viewing public. And there is a gullibility requirement, not the least of which is the idea that the only reason to cover up the landing is it might hurt the current President's chances of re-election. (That's the ONLY reason? Not that there are bigger threats to worry about than the Russians? Not that a whole foundation of religious history would be brought into question?)
Despite a somewhat lame tendency in dialogue, despite the pretty much standard B-movie plot, despite the fact that the special effects are pretty lame even for 1980 (that spaceship looks like it belongs on a sound stage for a rock opera, not as a viable interstellar Winnebago...) , this film is not all that bad. The aforementioned Capricorn One is a better movie over all, but this one was still entertaining for one watch. Not sure if I will ever watch it again, but I was entertained for the hour and a half I spent watching it.
That's all for now. Drive safely, folks. And watch out for those strange objects coming down from the sky. Or better yet, just ignore them, otherwise some guys in black suits might come looking for you...
Quiggy
