The blockbuster Crop Circles/Bad-ET/Alien-Invasion flick
Signs was released on VHS and DVD on January 7th, 2003, and that's how
I saw the film for the first time on the small screen, as the tiny farm
town where I live has only one theater, a single-screener at that, and
rarely is that one screen filled with anything even marginally suitable
for the post-puberty crowd. My family resides in a farmhouse surrounded
in the summers by crackling fields of towering green corn, not too unlike
the family's set-up in the movie. Having long held the (unfulfilled)
wish that genuine crop circles would one day appear in our own neighboring
fields, I felt predisposed toward liking Signs, and purchased the tape
outright, rather than previewing it with a rental or satellite pay-per-view.
But, while I thoroughly enjoyed the striking visual beauty
of the Bucks County, Pennsylvania landscape where the film was shot, I
have to admit that, on initial viewing, I was less than impressed with
Signs as an "ET Film." The aliens seemed none too bright to me, schlepping
their water-soluble bodies halfway across the galaxy to invade a planet
75% of whose surface is covered by the wet stuff... Then, when they
get here, having navigated gazillions of miles of interstellar void, they
suddenly require crop-circle "land maps" in order to find their way around?
Give me a break!
While Signs is decidedly fun and at times downright spine-tingling
to watch, it did not, to my mind, on that initial viewing, anyway, shed
one meaningful photon of light on the real unfolding Human/ET contact drama,
or offer a single grain of insight into our real-world crop circle mystery.
Based on that single video viewing, my initial reaction would almost certainly
have been to shrug off the $15 I'd paid for the tape, and file it away
forever in its proper alphabetical place in my personal collection of UFO
books, movies and memorabilia.
But a good friend, upon hearing my review, demanded emphatically
that I give Signs a second chance. She loved Signs, had viewed it at least
10 times, and, while openly admitting that some of the surface silliness
was "distracting," she saw layers within layers of meaning in the overlap-ping
swirl of its labyrinthine frames, whispers of an important message just
waiting to be decoded upon subsequent, more focused viewings... She
insisted that I grant the tape a final appeal before consigning it to permanent
storage.
I genuinely respect this particular friend's intelligence
and value her opinion highly, so out came the tape. And she was right!
On second viewing, I caught something profound in Signs that had evaded
my conscious mind completely the first time around.
Probably the very best thing about Signs, which I acknowledged
the first time I saw it, is that the writer/director does a terrific job
of portraying how a near-future first contact scenario might go down in
real life. At first, his adult characters react with denial, with
an abject, cynical refusal to believe. "They're trying to sell soda!"
announces one angry shop-keeper. Merril, the uncle in the family
at the heart of Signs, pronounces the worldwide outbreak of crop circles
to be a hoax perpetrated by "... a bunch of 30 year old nerds who can't
get girlfriends..." But when mysterious lights begin appearing over
major cities all over the world, the family slowly accepts the reality
of the situation, sitting mesmerized before their television sets, staring
at those twinkling orbs in the night sky, staying awake into the wee hours
of the morning, asking themselves and each other life's Big Questions
What's it all about? Is God real, and if so, how does He/She/It
fit into this unfolding scenario? Where is God now? What does
it mean to be irrefutably "Not Alone" in the universe? Are we alone
in our struggle to answer these questions?
Morgan, the oldest child of the family, informs us that
because of the lights, "Everything they wrote in science books changes
today..." No question about that! And when seen through the
eyes of Mel Gibson, Morgan's father in the movie an ex-Christian-reverend
who has lost his faith, and who largely personifies the 21st Century feeling-person's
loss of certainty in the assurances of traditional religions I can't
imagine that, in the light of any real world, openly acknowledged first-contact
paralleling the one in Signs, the Bibles, Korans and Upanishads of the
world would long escape the editor's blue pencil, either.
Undeniable proof of the existence of extrater-restrial
life changes it all. Everything we think we know about ourselves
and the universe our sense of importance in the Grand Scheme of Things,
our presumed mastery of Nature, our scientific and military prowess, our
uniqueness in the universe and to its so-very-humanly-imagined Creator,
maybe even our coveted position at the top of Nature's food chain
every egocentric scientific, religious or cultural anthro-pomorphism we
have ever projected onto the universe goes out the window the day We Are
Not Alone becomes experiential fact through real first contact. We
start from scratch as a species, existentially humbled, open to relearning
every-thing, and ready for a miracle.
In Signs, the characters, very realistically I thought,
lived out this exact emotional and psychological response. But what
I failed to notice the first time around is that, in the film, this profound
redirection of human belief systems, this complete paradigm shift, occurs
before anyone in the film knew a lick for sure about the visiting ETs'
agenda on Earth. Could be bad, could be good. At the point
in the film where, psych-ologically, scientifically, morally and spiritually,
everything changes, all anyone knew for sure was that "They" were real.
They were here.
Yes, in the movie, "They" turn out to be cardboard cut-out
evil killer alien monsters straight out of any 1950s Hollywood stock-character
prop-closet, but at the point in the movie where the old paradigm shatters,
in the impactful moment that all our comfortable, self-aggrandizing pseudo-answers
to life's mystery get flattened again into swirling question marks emblazoning
the fields of our hearts and minds, no one knew that. The mere existence
of real, live ETs was enough to turn our world upside down, to open our
collective consciousness to miracul-ous new possibilities. Good,
bad or indifferent, the mere existence of real, live ETs shifts the paradigm.
We Are Not Alone. Everything changes.
There's been a lot of talk in the "conspiracy sector"
of the Internet UFO community about the possibility that the American government
(or some larger, global "secret government" that clandestinely controls
Washington) plans to stage a faked ET invasion as part of a black-budget,
shadow-government rollout of global fascism and planetary Martial Law.
"We can protect you from the alien menace," it is rumored the powers that
be will proclaim that day, "
in exchange, of course, for all your civil
liberties and personal freedoms..."
Some very big, quite respectable voices in UFOlogy have
heralded this possibility, including Dr. Steven Greer, head of the Disclosure
Project, whose essay D.D.T - (Decoy, Distract and Trash) makes an eloquent
and convincing case in favor of the faked-invasion's impending reality.
Greer quotes luminary Dr. Carol Rosin, who said:
For schemers wishing to unite the world in militarism and control through fear (as opposed to our common humanity and peace...) what better way to attain this goal than to roll out serious UFO evidence and link it to a body of hoaxed faux-alien encounters...? People are easily herded and controlled through fear, and can there be anything more scary than evil 'aliens' floating poor, innocent humans onto UFOs to torture and sexually abuse them? Right.
Wrong. It'll never happen. One core message
of the movie Signs is that once the Pandora's Box of acknowledged ET contact
is opened, once "serious UFO evidence" is revealed in such a way that no
one can deny it whether the revelation comes from the ETs themselves,
from world governments, or anybody else for that matter the lid can never
again be closed. The cat climbs out of the bag, the paradigm shifts,
and everything changes, including all the old rules that previously empowered
the very "powers that be" who supposedly expect to benefit from such a
Grand Deception.
Under siege by evil aliens, will Joe Average go to work
as usual? Will the wheels of industry keep turning? Will the
neighborhood kids still go to school? Will their middle class soccer-moms
still drive them to practice, oblivious to spooky lights in the sky, hungry
aliens waiting to jump out of every shadow, and armed soldiers smoking
nervously on every street corner?
Not likely. Real people facing an ET invasion threat,
ersatz or real, would do exactly what the family did in Signs board up
the windows, lock themselves in the basement, cling to their loved ones,
and take up weapons to defend themselves. I pity the poor shadow-government
rube who gets caught wearing a rubber alien suit in the cornfields of rural
Missouri (or most anyplace else in America), where the guns are loaded
and folks take property rights v-e-r-y seriously... A couple of dead
"faux-aliens" would be a near certainty in the first days of such a scenario,
which would expose the hoaxed nature of the "invasion" overnight, further
undermining any human hopes for claiming global power.
And in the meantime, the engines of society grind to
a halt. Nobody works. Nobody shops. The economy crashes.
Traditional political, social, scientific and religious power structures
quickly crumble into chaos, robbing the powers that be of their envisioned
victory.
The "powers that be," the very human people who run this
planet, are not stupid. The guardians of the present Earthly political,
social, religious and scientific status quo have a whole lot more to lose
by even pretending to crack the seal on Pandora's Box than they stand to
gain. I suspect they know that. We can all stop worry-ing,
and that's a relief but it is not the end of this essay!
Perhaps the most intriguing and uplifting insight I gained
from that second viewing of Signs is the realization that, once the dust
settles on any openly acknowledge first ET contact scenario, whether it
takes the form of a faked invasion, the welcoming of genuine and friendly,
peaceful visitors, a tentative, neutral, diplomatic hand-shake, or even
a meaningful radio signal received from the depths of interstellar space,
the paradigm will still shift, our fundamental relationship to reality
will still change, because it is not really our world that first contact
will have changed either way, but, rather, our beliefs about that world
and our place in it.
Our belief systems about ourselves and reality do not
exist in the nuts and bolts world of governments and armies and invading
alien spacecraft. They exist in our hearts, in our minds, they shape our
experience of who and what we are, and define how we view the world and
what is possible within it.
Should the day ever come that any extrater-restrial presence
is openly acknowledged on our planet whether that presence is genuine
or faked, good, bad or indifferent everything changes, because we will
change, just like the characters did in Signs. The ETs' reason for
visit-ing Earth is irrelevant. Only their existence, or our sincere
belief in their existence, matters.
It's fairly easy for our egoistic, isolated species to
maintain the illusion that life is a fluke, a miracle that has occurred
on one and only one planet in the all the universe. It makes us feel
special, important and safe. But if life ever proves not to be a uniquely
earthbound phenomenon, then the only logical alternative assumption would
be that life is everywhere. Nothing else makes sense.
Any contact with beings from beyond Earth proves there are at least two
planets supporting intelligent life in the universe, and two implies millions,
billions, trillions, uncount-able islands of life evolving in every direction
around us, a teeming Cosmic Community of beings and civilizations, filling
the sky to infinity. Once granted such a profoundly experiential
glimpse of ourselves as a single frail species inhabiting a tiny dustmote
floating in a vast ocean of inhabited worlds, how could we fail to be forever
changed?
Even if those first "aliens" turn out not to be real,
just shadow-government rubes filled with buckshot in a cornfield, we will
still have experienced ourselves differently, in a very deep way.
Our imaginations will still have been stirred, our passions fired, our
sense of ourselves and our place in the cosmos forever revised, irretrievably
expanded, our expectations of ourselves, of our governments, of religions
and science permanently altered, irrevocably and overnight.
We will still have asked ourselves life's Big Questions, and grown hungry
for more satisfying answers than those provided by our present status quo.
Our egos will still have been existentially humbled, if only for a moment,
and we will still go forward open to relearning every-thing, and ready
for a miracle.
Pandora's Box stays open. The science and religion
books will still get rewritten. We will live from that day forward in an
expanded universe, where nothing will ever be the same.
For folks like you and me, who long for the advancement
of Human evolution and the pos-itive transformation of our world, there
is no such thing as "Bad Contact." Any contact shifts the paradigm.
The powers that be know this. There will be no faked invasion. If
the governments of the world are truly advancing any serious, secret ET
contact programs, good, bad or indifferent, it seems unlikely to me that
they will ever share the results of that work with us. They have
too much to lose.
So, we are on our own, as we have always been.
But we are not alone. We have each other, we have our shared vision
of positive Human/ET contact, we have the vast creativity, intelligence,
sensitivity and evolutionary potential of the Human species available every
moment to each of us.
And we have Them, the real ETs out there who, like us,
are not waiting for Earth's governments to get their acts together on our
behalf. Everyone in the UFO community is well aware of the evidence
for the existence of extraterrestrials and their presence among us. Whether
our governments choose to acknowledge the reality and implica-tions of
that evidence is, in the end, wholly irrelevant.
We must, ourselves, become the individual and small group
ambassadors of Earth to the stars. We must, each of us, follow the
"signs," courageously reach out, and make first contact a personal reality,
for ourselves and for the future of Humanity.