Showtime “UFO,” the Phoenix Lights, and Fife Symington

Well.  There’s not much doubt which side of the UFO controversy J. J. Abrams is on, is there?

The first episode of the four-part documentary “UFO,” for which Abrams is executive producer (with Glen Zipper), aired last Sunday night on Showtime.  It starts with an eerie encounter of the Apollo 17 astronauts with something unknown flying over their heads, as they do their moonwalk in December 1972.  It ends with Kevin Day, radar operator on the USS Princeton (companion ship to the USS Nimitz), speaking of the mysterious aerial entities he and his crewmates witnessed in the sky off the southern coast of California in November 2004.

What does Day think these were?  Answer: most likely “aliens.”

Official trailer from Showtime of “UFO”:

https://youtu.be/tU9NhwYKCLM

In between Apollo 17 and the Nimitz, the urgent voices of of UFO witnesses are heard, one after another.  Experts weigh in on what it all means.  Bestselling UFO author Leslie Kean is the most prominently featured; after her, John Greenwald of the Black Vault.  Kean acknowledges at one point that most UFO sightings have mundane explanations, but for others, skeptical efforts to account for them are “absurd.”

And the familiar corollary.  The US government–and presumably other governments, though I don’t recall the show saying this explicitly–has systematically “squashed” all knowledge of UFO reality almost from the beginning.  “Somebody somewhere has got to be afraid of the truth coming out.”

This is the message of “UFO,” and its creators aren’t particularly squeamish about the tactics they use to get it across.  If you were scratching your head (as I was) over why you’ve never heard of the Apollo 17 UFO encounter, the answer is simple: it never happened.  Abrams, Zipper et al. fabricated it, patching together snippets of the astronauts’ voices to manufacture high and mysterious drama from an incident that, in its original context, had nothing to do with any UFO.

So we’re treated to a “documentary” that, literally from its beginning, proclaims its dishonesty.  It would be an insult to James Fox’s 2020 documentary “The Phenomenon” to even suggest a comparison of the two.  Fox’s film, for all its flaws—it’s totally one-sided, and does occasionally fudge its evidence–is essentially a good-faith effort to make the best possible case for the UFO.  To be sure, Showtime’s “UFO” doesn’t quite sink to the depth of the vile piece of trash inflicted on the TV-watching public in 1995 by the Walt Disney Company, under the name “Alien Encounters From New Tomorrowland.”  But I’d put the two in the same dustbin, of mercenary and manipulative junk.

Which is not to say that nothing can be learned from it.

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“The acronym UFO has come to be a real loaded term,” Kean says at one point.  And, later on: “That’s the problem with the term UFO.  It’s sort of been contaminated.”

I take this to mean that the core phenomenon has acquired a thick crust of cultural overlay, impeding any attempt to view it for what it is.  This is the advantage of the increasingly popular designation UAP (unidentified aerial phenomenon), which seems to have been introduced something over ten years ago and now struggles to displace UFO, as UFO displaced “flying saucer” half a century earlier.  UAP has a clean and sterile neutrality; it’s innocent of associations with such things as alien abductions, Men in Black, and “The X-Files,” and allows us to hear the signal without the noise that tends to drown it out.

For me, however, this is a disadvantage, given my conviction that the noise is the signal.  The cultural associations that UFOs have acquired, the mythology that’s grown up around them, are not fatty layers muffling and concealing the core phenomenon.  They are the core phenomenon.  They’re not to be carved away.

“UFO” provides an example of this in its treatment of the “Phoenix Lights” of March 13, 1997, to which a large chunk of the show’s time is devoted.

I don’t know what the “Phoenix Lights” were, and I won’t make any guesses.  In his entry “Phoenix Lights” in the third edition of Jerome Clark’s monumental UFO Encyclopedia, Thomas E. Bullard suggests that the sightings from early in the evening were aircraft, the later ones airborne flares, and this seems to me entirely plausible.  I’m obliged to say, though, that this aerial mystery is less interesting to me than a mystery played out here on earth, which I find at least as baffling and potentially far more instructive.

The name of the mystery is Fife Symington III, who was Arizona’s governor at the time.

In March 2007, just after the tenth anniversary of the sightings, Symington came out with the announcement that he was among the witnesses.  He appears prominently in “UFO”: grave, solemn, attesting to the mysterious and inexplicable character of the event.  I thought as I watched: how remarkable.  They’re not even going to talk about his disgusting farce of a press conference.

But I was wrong.  They did.

Near the end of the show (at about 39′), Symington is confronted with what he did on June 19, 1997.  At first he claims he doesn’t remember it; then he’s shown a perhaps-this-will-refresh-your-memory video.  Of the buffoonish stunt in which Symington first announced to the assembled journalists, with mock seriousness, that the police had apprehended one of the UFO pilots.

Enter one of Symington’s aides, dressed in a silvery alien costume, wearing a mask with the standard enormous black eyes.  “This just goes to show that you guys are entirely too serious,” declares the governor, to the titters and applause of the assemblage.

The witnesses to the Lights were furious.  Naturally.  “For many witnesses the Phoenix Lights hold special meaning,” Bullard writes.  “They were an encounter with the unknown, an experience bearing emotional and spiritual significance, a personal truth impervious to doubt or rationalization.”  And now their governor had seen fit to make a clownish joke of the Lights–and of them.

How was it possible, that a man who’d had his own immediate experience of the numinous in the sky—or the numinous in himself, projected onto misidentified aircraft—could have done something so perverse and indecent?   My mind boggles.

But what’s the alternative?  That from 2007 onward Symington was lying, that he’d never seen the Lights?  What possible motive could he have had for making this up?

Drawing on its interviews with Frances Barwood, Phoenix city councilwoman and passionate advocate for the Lights, “UFO” advances a conspiratorial resolution of the Symington dilemma.  The governor must not have been acting of his own volition at the June press conference.  He was in bad legal trouble at the time, and was in fact convicted that September on seven counts of bank fraud (though President Clinton later pardoned him).  Surely the shadowy entities willing to do anything to keep the UFO truth from coming out had used this to blackmail him, to pressure him into ridiculing the Lights.

Because, the show gives us to understand, ridicule is the silencers’ favored weapon of concealment.

But I don’t think so.  For me, far from being a device to cover up the UFO phenomenon, ridicule is itself a part of the phenomenon, and must be taken into account if we’re to understand it.

I blogged about this nine years ago, in connection with the stupid cartoons published in Paul Dellinger and Danny B. Gordon’s 1988 book Don’t Look Up! The Real Story Behind the Virginia UFO Sightings, which undermine and sabotage the very text they purport to illustrate.  And I wrote in Intimate Alien:

“The UFO doesn’t happen only, or even primarily, or even authentically in the sky.  The witness is as much a part of the sighting as the object witnessed.  So are those who hear the story, who believe it, who transmit it in speech or in writing, in the newspapers or on the internet.  Those who debunk it, who ridicule it, who make the unfortunate witness’s life a misery for daring to speak of it—they’re part of the sighting too.

“The UFO mystery is the mystery of them, or more correctly the mystery of us.”