The only good alien

…is a prop alien.

Sigh, another one bites the dust.

The image left is a behind-the-scenes shot from the 1992 TV movie Intruders (based, I believe, on the genre-forming non-fiction alien abduction book by Budd Hopkins). The image was found by Mexican researcher Luis Ruiz Noguez.

The image right is from the 1998  TV documentary UFOs: Fifty Years of Denial and features on the cover of Exempt From Disclosure, an Air Force insider’s account of the UFO conspiracy, now in its third edition (more on this in my forthcoming book Mirage Men).

So a prop movie alien inspired by real-life eyewitness accounts ends up being mistaken for a genuine ET whose image, distributed in books and on the Internet, will inspire more real-life accounts, and  these one day will become another TV movie featuring a better prop alien that will, in another 15 years, be mistaken for another real ET… and so the circle remains unbroken.

Can we ask for a better demonstration of the way that myth and folklore work, and how the multiple strands of our  individual experiences, no matter how fantastical, can shape consensus reality?

via Forgetomori