They say life imitates art. Do UFOs imitate cinema and TV? That is to say, when a particularly compelling image of spaceships or aliens figures in a popular movie or TV show, do people start imagining—and testifying, with every appearance of sincerity—that they’ve seen it in the sky?
There’s at least one case, incontrovertible in my opinion, of this happening. In his hypnotic regression of February 22, 1964, Barney Hill spoke of the “wraparound eyes” of the aliens who’d abducted him and his wife Betty (although it’s not clear whether he actually used that phrase). Skeptical UFOlogist Martin Kottmeyer has traced these “wraparound eyes” to an episode of “The Outer Limits” aired on TV a mere twelve days before the hypnotic session. Prior to that session, Barney never mentioned such remarkable eyes; and according to Kottmeyer, whose knowledge of S-F popular culture is stunning, prior to that “Outer Limits” show they were practically unknown.
The coincidence of dates is compelling. Although Betty was later to deny that Barney had watched the show or that she had even heard of it, he could easily have heard his coworkers talking about it and been influenced by their description. A gripping TV drama becomes part of the social atmosphere, easily absorbed.
But it’s unclear how much one can generalize from this case. We’re dealing here with memories, hypnotically retrieved. How natural it would be for Barney to confuse his memories of the actual UFO encounter nearly two and a half years earlier (whatever that may have been) with his memories of what he’d heard of “The Outer Limits.” It doesn’t follow that reasonably sane people are going to watch an outer-space movie today, and a week from now think they see in the sky what they saw on the screen.
So what are we to make of “The Stranger”?
This was a masterfully done and wildly popular TV drama aired in 1964-65 by the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC), in two series of six half-hour episodes each. The “stranger” of the title is an extraterrestrial, come to earth in a flying saucer. His story unfolds in the context of an Australian high school, with three teenage students as the bold detectives who uncover his true identity. Two years almost to the day after the series launched, on April 6, 1966, an incident involving a landed UFO erupted at the Westall High School in Melbourne, some of the students claiming with what seems complete sincerity that they’d seen the alien vehicle at close range.
Coincidence? Or was “The Stranger’s” influence somehow at work? If so—precisely how?
I’ve seen only the first two of “The Stranger’s” episodes, these being the only ones that to my knowledge have been uploaded to YouTube (here and here). I learned of them from a post on the “Westall Flying Saucer Incident” Facebook Fan Page by Shane L.J. Ryan, the investigator whose dogged researches into that important and long-neglected event are the subject of the 2010 Australian documentary “Westall ’66.” It speaks volumes for Shane’s honor and integrity that he used the Fan Page to call attention to “The Stranger,” even though he must have realized its potential to undermine his case for an extraterrestrial visitation, or some other anomalous event, at Westall High.
The stranger appears at the beginning of the first episode, at night, in a drenching rainstorm outside the house of the headmaster of “St. Michael’s School for Boys.” Inside the headmaster’s cozy home, his teenage children Bernard and Jean are entertaining their friend Peter, whom Jean has just beaten at chess. We’re made to understand that she’s a formidable young woman, a worthy partner to her two fellow-sleuths even though, as the three of them scramble across a rugged forested mountainside (in episode 2), the boys need to give Jean a helping hand. I wouldn’t expect anything different, in 1964.
Wet, bedraggled, and apparently collapsed outside the headmaster’s door (though we see he’s been faking it), the stranger is invited in. Although impeccably dressed—does any male appear in this show without a necktie?—he has a cadaverous, haunted look and speaks with a heavy foreign accent. He’s lost his memory, can’t say where he’s come from, doesn’t even know his name. He speaks French and German as well as English; this suggests to the headmaster that he must come from Switzerland. The stranger proposes that they call him “Adam Suisse,” he being a “new man” like the Biblical Adam.
The headmaster is a stocky, ruggedly built man, much resembling Westall headmaster Frank Samblebe as he appears in old photographs. He’s genial and kindly, however, in a way that Samblebe (I gather) seldom was. He requires very little persuasion to enlist the raptly eager “Adam” as a teacher at St. Michael’s—first as a temporary substitute, then as a regular member of the staff.
(Without even knowing his real name? Were Australian schools in the 1960s really so informal?)
Since the stranger is homeless, the family puts him up in a small cottage on their property.
“Adam” proves an excellent teacher, with a “hypnotic” effect on his students—the image of hypnotism is used repeatedly—who turns even the most rambunctious of them into devoted students of French. For all his supposed amnesia, he has a photographic memory. “You must learn that I speak only the truth always!” he hisses to one would-be troublemaker, with an effect both powerful and sinister. In this respect, as in others, he turns out to be a liar. When the headmaster asks how he achieves his wondrous disciplinary effects, “Adam” answers that he can’t explain. “Only this I am sure of: that I am a teacher.”
At first the teenagers (Jean, Bernard, and Peter) have no suspicions of their new lodger. But strange discoveries begin to pile up. By accident they find a radio, broadcasting in some unknown language, beneath a floorboard in the cottage that is “Adam’s” new home. It must be foreign—but what is it? Why has he hidden it? Is it somehow connected with his weekend hikes (“bushwalking”) in the wilds of the Blue Mountains?
“Adam” catches the kids snooping in his home, and is furious. But in episode 2 they make peace, and are friends once more. The kids explain that they want to help him recover his memory. “Do you think this is wise, perhaps?” he asks. They reply: “Don’t you want to remember anything about the past?” “How can I be sure? … Perhaps I was not very happy before and this is why I forget everything?”
“Since we are friends, we shall now trust one another,” “Adam” tells them. He waxes rhapsodic about the beauty of the “bush” where he does his weekend wandering. The pure water of the dew particularly entrances him. (“Perhaps you can never understand this as I do.”) But when Peter innocently asks, “I don’t suppose you saw anything of those flying saucers there over the weekend?” “Adam’s” mood sharply changes. His face clouds over. “It is nonsense, I assure you,” he tells them.
(As headmaster Samblebe was to tell the UFO-struck Westall students, far less politely, a year and a half later.)
To be continued in my next post.
by David Halperin
Learn more about David Halperin on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/davidjhalperin
Connect to Journal of a UFO Investigator on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/JournalofaUFOInvestigator
and Find David Halperin on Google+
Don’t have time to keep checking my blog? Sign up for my monthly email newsletter, with summaries and links to the past month’s posts, plus oldies-but-goodies from the archive.
