The Revealing Truth of Ufos, Secret Aircraft, Cover-Ups & Conspiracies: Area 51
Although all of the above productions were meant as nothing but adventure-driven entertainment, undoubtedly, the government was irked by all of this publicity about Area 51—wholly unwanted publicity, as they saw it. How can we be so sure? The answer is simple: we only have to take a look at the strange saga of the 1996 movie Independence Day.
It was on July 2, 1996, that Independence Day was released and became a blockbuster hit with the public.
In fact, it was so successful that the movie— which cost around $75 million to make—reaped in more than $800 million. In the story, hostile aliens suddenly attack the Earth. The planetary assault is completely unforeseen. The world’s military do their utmost to fight back. For the most part, the story is told from the perspective of the United States. We see cities obliterated by the aliens—and untold numbers of people are killed. Much of the country is left in ruins, but Will Smith (Captain Steven Hiller of the U.S.
Marines) and Jeff Goldblum (David Levinson of M.I.T.) finally manage to save the day. They do so by finding the aliens’ one weak spot. The human race is saved from the brink of extinction.
Independence Day presented the U.S. military in an extremely positive light —namely, as a heroic fighting force that could even take on aliens and come out of it all victorious. In fact, when the movie was in its planning stage, an approach was made to the Pentagon by the production team to see if they could lend a hand to the story—providing aircraft and uniforms that would add notable weight to the production. The higher-ups in the military were all for it. For a while, anyway. Matters changed, though, when the government got the script, which made it clear that Area 51 was to play a large “role” in the movie. The U.S. government didn’t like that, not at all.
In the story, we find that the president of the United States, Thomas J.
Whitmore (played by actor Bill Pullman) knows nothing about Area 51. So secret is the installation that the presidential office is left out of the loop regarding not just what goes on there but even of its existence. The president ultimately learns, however, that Area 51 is a facility at which extensive research is being undertaken on the alien craft that crashed near Roswell, New Mexico, in July 1947. For decades, a small team of scientists has worked to crack the code of how the craft flies and the full nature of the extraterrestrial technology.
Outraged, the president demands to be taken to Area 51. It’s then that we see the scope of the work and we learn how and why the secrets of Roswell have been hidden at the base for so long.
None of this impressed the Pentagon—not at all—but the producer/writer of the movie, Dean Devlin, and the director, Roland Emmerich, were adamant that the Area 51 angle was an integral part of the movie. It had to stay in. The Pentagon said no: either pull out all the references to Area 51, or we pull out. The outcome was that the production company—Centropolis Entertainment— stood their ground, and the U.S. military walked away.
Of course, by 1996, Area 51 was already known to everyone. It was, after all, made seven years after Bob Lazar spilled the beans on what was going on at S-4. If, in 1996, the base was still a matter of almost complete secrecy, one could understand why the government would want any references to it kept out of Independence Day, but just about everyone had heard of the installation by the nineties and knew of its legendary reputation as a storage area for recovered UFOs and dead aliens. Ironically, when the story surfaced that the Pentagon had pulled the plug on its involvement in the movie all because of the Area 51 references, it actually gave Independence Day added, unforeseen publicity and made millions of people wonder even more about what was really going on at Area 51.
Now it’s time to take a look at the issue of aliens and Area 51 in the 1990s.
As we have seen, just about everything related to Area 51 is filled with controversy, but it doesn’t get much more controversial than the strange saga of the “interview with an alien.” Yes, you read that right. The story revolves around what is said to have been a discussion between an alien entity and an unnamed man with connections to Area 51. The tale goes that the conversation/interrogation was filmed, and the footage was then secretly smuggled out of the base and placed into the public domain. Well, yes, the footage is in the public domain: you can find it at numerous locations on the Internet just by typing in “Area 51 interview with an alien.” It scarcely needs saying that the biggest controversy surrounding the film concerns its authenticity, or, rather, its lack of authenticity. Let’s take a look at what we know about this odd affair.
We’ll begin with the source of the story. All we know of him is that he went by the name of Victor. No last name, and it has never been determined if Victor was even his real first name, which is not a good start when it comes to the matter of trying to resolve something of a highly controversial nature. It’s intriguing to note that Victor never claimed to have been a specific employee at Area 51. Rather, in noticeably couched and careful language he said that he was someone who “had reason to be present at Area 51,” and, he added, “more than once.” If that’s true, then Victor may have been a contractor or a consultant on one or more projects at Area 51, should even a modicum of truth be in the story, of course.
https://scienceandspace.com/ufos/an-alien-interview-and-independence-day-part-1/