Bring a Lawyer

Hollywood’s Cosmic Heist

The alien story that reached Hollywood first

Somewhere between Area 51 and a Bengal pond, the alien hired a lawyer. Image created with ChatGPT.

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Do I believe in UFOs? I believe that if an alien ever landed at Area 51, Steven Spielberg would have the movie rights before the Pentagon finished the paperwork. 👽

Because if you look at the declassified history of the Nevada desert, Area 51 begins to look like history’s most expensive government gaslighting campaign. Many of the “flying saucers” terrifying people in the 1950s were not interstellar craft at all; they were high-altitude U.S. spy planes catching the evening sun.

The Pentagon didn’t invent the alien rumors, but its secrecy allowed them to flourish while classified spy planes remained hidden behind the confusion.

If you’re caught flying secret reconnaissance missions over the Soviet Union, letting the public believe you’re hiding Martians is a brilliant pivot. It’s the ultimate defense mechanism: “Sir, we aren’t violating international airspace; we are just vibing with the cosmos.”

But while the U.S. military was using UFO confusion to cover up its Cold War paranoia, a legendary Indian filmmaker named Satyajit Ray was busy inventing what would later look uncannily like the plot of E.T. — and Hollywood was about to rob him blind for it.

Back in the 1960s, Western sci-fi often treated aliens as metallic nightmares arriving to vaporize humanity. Ray imagined something very different. In his story “Bankubabur Bandhu,” an alien helps a bullied schoolteacher find the courage to stand up for himself. He later developed The Alien, about a tiny, bald, telepathic extraterrestrial named Ang whose spacecraft lands in a muddy village pond in Bengal. Here was an alien who — gasp — didn’t want to conquer Earth.

By 1967, Hollywood caught wind of it. Columbia Pictures backed the project, Peter Sellers signed on, and Marlon Brando was heavily courted. Then, in a classic display of Los Angeles hospitality, Ray’s Hollywood representative — an American producer named Mike Wilson — surreptitiously registered himself as a co-writer and pocketed a $10,000 advance that Ray never saw a cent of. The project died in legal hell. Ray got fed up and went back to Kolkata.

Fast forward to 1982. Steven Spielberg releases E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and Arthur C. Clarke, the legendary science-fiction writer and a friend of Ray’s who knew The Alien, immediately notices something familiar: the bulbous head, the telepathic gestures, the power to make flowers bloom. Clarke called Ray and pointed out the parallels. Ray knew that copies of his screenplay had circulated through Hollywood for years, but, possessing far too much class — or perhaps too much respect for Spielberg — he chose not to sue. Spielberg, for his part, denied plagiarism, insisting that he had been “a kid in high school” when Ray’s script was circulating — even though by the late 1960s, he was already working in Hollywood.

So, do I believe in UFOs?

I’m highly skeptical about the glowing lights over Nevada — history tells us that many of them turn out to be classified aircraft, satellites, or ordinary technology catching the sun. But I absolutely believe Hollywood’s most iconic, beloved alien had an uncanny predecessor in West Bengal.

When we ask if people “believe” in UFOs, we’re really asking what kind of universe they want to live in. The Area 51 universe — defined by government secrets, stealth bombers, and a paranoid fear of the unknown? Or Satyajit Ray’s universe, where a visitor from the stars travels millions of light-years just to teach a lonely person how to be brave?

Personally, I choose the latter. But if the aliens ever officially land, they had better bring a damn good intellectual-property lawyer.

June 24: World UFO Day Do you believe in UFOs? Why or why not?

Thanks to Sondra Singer - Still Vital for the prompt — and to Adrienne Beaumont, who defies all known forms of gaslighting to gather our prompts every month, and to the tC editors for continuing to let the rest of us vibe with the cosmos.

[embed]June is Bustin’ Out all Over Writing prompts coming out the yin-yangmedium.com