Footnotes by Chapter
04. Polls on UFO Belief
4. Scripps Poll, May 2008, online, 25 March 2010. A Yankelovitch poll of January 2000 found similar numbers: Cynthia Fox, “The Search for Extraterrestrial Life,” Life (March 2000) 56. #2. Over 50 percent in both polls believe there is intelligent life on other planets. A Roper Poll done in August 2002 found that 20 percent of Americans believed that UFO abductions had taken place. “UFOs & Extraterrestrial Life: Americans’ Beliefs and Personal Experiences,” online, 14 April 2010.
09. Futurology Studies
9. “Futurology” or “future studies” wishes to claim status as an academic field. For an interesting example, see John Peterson, Out of the Blue: How to Anticipate Wild Cards and Big Future Surprises (Arlington, Va.: Arlington Institute, 1997) and his “Arlington Institute” with its Futuredition e-newsletter, online, 14 April 2010. Futurologists hold an annual international convention under the aegis of the World Future Society.
38. John Mack and UFO Abductions
38. On John Mack see, for example, “The UFO Abduction Phenomenon: What Does it Mean for the Transformation of Human Consciousness?”; Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters (New York: Crown Publishers, 1999); and “Blowing the Western Mind”; as well as the website dedicated to his work.
24. Relationship of "Body Snatchers" to McCarthyism
24. Was it anti-McCarthy in the mode of Ionesco’s symbolic account of fascism, only instead of becoming a rhinoceros/fascist, one gave over one’s bodily form to “one of them,” much as the turncoats (like Elias Kazin) had turned on their colleagues in order to comply with the HUAC’s demands? Or was it pro-McCarthy, in that Communism was this soulless juggernaut that spread everywhere, denying individuality and insidiously infesting our communities, hence a justification of McCarthy’s paranoia? Walther Mirisch makes it clear that the creators of the movie had nothing of the kind in mind, I Thought We Were Making Movies, not History (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), 43-44.
51. Soft Millennialism of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind"
51. Note the excitement Wise felt when he first read the script (interview cited above, n. 49). Compare with Richard Dreyfus’s comments on Close Encounters, below, n. 53. These movies embrace positions that combine a liberal distaste for violence and psychologically superficial notions of how to eliminate it (see, e.g., the discussion of “cooperation and communication” in Ghiglieri, Dark Side of Man, chap. 8).* John Lennon gave a particularly popular millennial expression to this liberal Zeitgeist in his song “Imagine,” amply cited in the reviews of Day the Earth Stood Still at the film-review site Rotten Tomatoes. Bates comments on the “spiritual” dimension of the film and the analogies with the Jesus narrative that were intended by the author (Alien Intrusion, 42–43). 'Can’t we all just get along here?'
