The Missing Film

Courtesy of 2.bp.blogspot.com

How much of a movie is real? You have the actors, the location, the props, which by all accounts are thoroughly scripted into the film. Nothing is out of place, or shouldn’t be. You have that random car driving across the mountain in the blockbuster film Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Rings as if it were a UFO…not part of the reality of the film, but there nonetheless. Bravo to the people who discovered it-it almost takes extra-sensory perception to notice something so miniscule. Still, it is there. Just like there is a slight glimpse of a real UFO in one of the 1950s movies (1953 may be exact) about a prehistoric monster who comes alive because of an atomic experiment. Like what happens in Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.

Can you spot the car?

The producer, who was given the alias “Frank Miller” by Moseley, asked his friend Skippy to shoot sixteen millimeters worth of film in Alaska for the anonymous film (for obvious reasons). After shooting the film, he decided to reshoot some footage because the weather had improved. During the surf scene, he noticed something bright in his viewfinder, so he looked up, and hovering above was a real UFO that looked like two dinner plates stuck together with a dome at the top and round windows.  

“I think you may have the most sensational sequence of film ever released by a Hollywood studio. And you won’t have to use any special effects after all,” wrote Skippy in a letter to Miller. Even today it would be nearly impossible to spot a real UFO in a film when we have incredible CGI. Heavens, you can insert a UFO into a youtube video with photoshop! But then some people are extra observant.

Of course, no one would make a real hoopla about a car appearing in a film except for the producer, perhaps. That’s not the case with UFOs. The military tries their best to hide the fact that we have UFOs in airspace. They even have a successful disinformation campaign waged against the reality of UFOs and aliens visiting our planet. So when Miller boasted about having genuine footage of a UFO in his movie throughout the media (columnists and trade press), he received some unexpected attention from the military.

“An Air Force major in a natty uniform showed up,” explains Miller, “and said he would like to know more about the film. “

After easily drifting off into a conversation about their time in the military served in the same region in Japan, they left his office for a bar and talked some more over alcoholic beverages.

The Air Force major told him that, “Many saucer sightings  were dreamed up by crackpots and many of the cases involved misinterpretation of various natural phenomena. The Air Force was greatly concerned about the reports, however, and actually had a special division set up to investigate many of the sightings.”

Seems to me that the Air Force has an avid interest in civilians’ activities, from what the major said. The catcher is, when he asked the major what he thought about aliens personally, he admitted he believed there was something to the phenomena. And that we’re being monitored by an advanced civilization from Mars.

But he also asked for the film, because he wanted to test it for authenticity. Miller, who believed that UFOs were nothing more than top secret military craft, was happy to hand it over. Except, three weeks later, the Air Force still had the film in their possession, despite the fact that the major promised to return the film expeditiously. Miller later received only 15 feet of film back from the Air Force and all that remained of the UFO was a speck that hovered for 30 seconds before it took off. Miller was even suspicious that it wasn’t the UFO that Skippy had filmed. Still, it had footage of a UFO, albeit an unconvincing one. And though it may seem that the Air Force did him a disserve by seizing the footage, perhaps leaving 30 seconds of anything was strangely generous of them.  They are notorious for forbidding anything reminiscent of UFOs and aliens from being published in the public domain, let alone in a major film. Still, the producer had rewritten the script in order for the focus to shift to the UFO, which put a wrench in that plan.

Miller was understandably angry and disappointed…as anyone would be. Perhaps the military should have let him use the original footage of the UFO, or flying saucer as it was called in those days, because no one would have really been convinced that it was the real thing anyway. And the audience that watched the version that inevitably came out, didn’t care that the film had a real UFO in it (of course, during the 1950s sci-fi wasn’t as popular as it is today). This was reflected by the fact that it caused no stir and received little patronage. However, Miller did receive academy awards for later projects.

Courtesy of presidentialufo.com

Speaking of missing film, Moseley experienced a disappearance of his own at the Crash Retrieval Conference in Las Vegas in 2009. According to Grant Cameron, Moseley wanted to do an expose on the conference. Something that would have the readership on the edge of their seats and the military curling their toes. That was the military’s nightmare so they sent a purported MJ-12 agent to steal his film.  

So, who was that elusive, duplicitous agent who stole our idol’s film? No one really knows, all that is known is the sequence of events that took place. Nick Redfern had been taking photos of Moseley with Lisa Davis when he ran out of film, and handed the camera back to Moseley so he could fill it again. Moseley went to put a new role of film in the camera, put the camera down for a minute, then opened it. The film was gone except for a single 10 inch strip. 

                                                   Courtesy of presidentialufo.com

                      

In fact, perhaps it was a cooperative effort because everyone in the room was laughing as he went around interrogating them. Which must have been awkward, perplexing, and infuriating to Moseley. I mean, these were probably people he respected, but he couldn’t trust any of them. And they probably didn’t trust him either because his was a liminal trickster who had connections in Project Blue Book.