What will be left for these disciplines are their foundations, which are based on some of the deepest reflections that human beings have ever made about themselves and the universe. When confronting the reality of another species that may pose a substantial threat to one’s ego, if not one’s very existence, what humanity will need is inspiration. People will need strengthening of the spirit. They will need the example of the best that our species has offered, and this is readily available through the great books of our civilization.
We will rediscover the power, solace, inspiration, and spur to greatness bequeathed to us by such writers as Tolstoy, Goethe, Shakespeare, Milton, Yeats, Marcus Aurelius, and countless others. The same holds for the tradition of fine arts and music, including such geniuses as Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, or within the great tradition of jazz, or the exquisite traditions of music from the Indian subcontinent, of China, of the Near East and Africa. Then there is the human artistic tradition, too overwhelming to summarize. Our species has been nothing if not continually inventive in the fine arts, finding new ways of expressing who we are, what we are, and where we are in the cosmos.
Do the Others have philosophy? Literature? If they do, what are these like? What do they think of our contributions? It is mind-expanding simply to consider the topic.
Our past writers, philosophers, musicians, and artists have given us perhaps the greatest gift for life A.D. They are reminders of who we are. And of the inherent greatness and divinity that resides within the human being. Thus, the great souls of the past will be rediscovered. They will be needed to support and inspire those of us living in the most demanding period imaginable.
Those thinkers and artists will also inspire the greatest outpouring of deep reflection and profundity of the human condition yet achieved. On the shoulder of giants will stand those, After Disclosure, who will see farther, clearer.
Popular Culture
Some people do not read Shakespeare or listen to Mozart. They swim in the waters of popular culture, a milieu encompassing movie stars in drug rehab, artists organizing charity concerts, and every new film, song, and artist arriving on the scene. All of that will be affected, changed, and re-formed by Disclosure in ways about which we can only speculate, because pop culture always arises from the moment in unpredictable manifestations.
After Disclosure, humanity will experience a cultural explosion that will rival or surpass the Renaissance. The revelation that we are not alone will supercharge the Zeitgeist. Artists the world over will need to express themselves on this subject, to interpret it for their audiences. Painters will turn to their canvasses, writers will struggle to tell the story in new ways, and even comedians will find fresh new jokes.
From Twitter to Facebook to YouTube, the Internet will be ablaze. The numbers of Websites spawned by Disclosure will dwarf anything before. People will need to communicate their feelings and discuss their fears, and therefore the social networks will vibrate with activity.
Reliably, if it happens within the next decade, Bruce Springsteen will have a new song about it, and it will be the most downloaded song on iTunes. Old protest songs may be dusted off, given new lyrics, and find a second life.
Almost certainly, too, there will be a revival in the use of hallucinogenic drugs. After Disclosure, users of such drugs will try to “break on through to the other side,” in this case, the other side being a place where they will claim to find the other entities inhabiting our world. Whether the drugs are psychedelic standbys such as LSD, or mescaline or emerging ones like Salvia Divinorum, Ayahuasca, Dimethyltryptamine (DMT), or something newly developed in a laboratory, one or more will be embraced for the counter-culture’s new vision-quest. The idea of the party drug scene will shrink back, and the idea of seeking enlightenment through drugs will be in favor again.
Meanwhile, the media will never be as happy as it will be AD. Even seemingly distant relatives of the news, such as Entertainment Tonight, will find their own spin. Everything that affects the world, like 9/11 or the Arab Spring, also affects celebrities. News will want to cover how the rich and famous are handling Disclosure, because the celebrities will act as surrogates for the audience. If they admit to being scared, the audience will know that “it’s okay” for them to feel the same way. This will translate to red-carpet interviews where celebrities wear gray ribbons and talk earnestly about reaching out in peace to the Others.
An entirely new form of celebrity will be created. From among those who have had some form of abduction or contact experience with the Others, a few of them will be famous or modestly famous for one reason or another after Disclosure. We may see an entire group of B- and C-level celebrities who are vaulted forward into the public’s awareness, simply because they will be able to talk openly about their experiences.
But the biggest emerging celebrity will be someone in the lineage of Carl Sagan and Neil Degrasse Tyson, a scientist who has a tremendous ability to connect with an audience. Unlike Sagan and Tyson, however, this sci-lebrity will fully and completely embrace the technological wonder that allowed the Others to come from their home to ours. On the other hand, for every newly minted celebrity who speaks in a careful, measured manner about how the world is changing, there will be new versions of Nancy Grace, Keith Olbermann, or Glenn Beck.
This Revolution Will Be Televised
Adapting to change is what television does best. As a relentless purveyor of culture, it mercilessly tosses aside what is not working and casts about for something else that will work. Then it produces that form of programming for as long as people will watch it, eventually tossing aside the genre, star, or series until it needs to be called into duty again, albeit with a “new” twist.
As our digital age continues to transform itself, people have gained many new options for watching their news and entertainment. Even so, television—namely, serialized episodes of news, non-fiction, reality, drama, and comedy—will still exist in some form after Disclosure, and it will adapt. Indeed, ratings will probably be exceptional.
There has never been a twist as new, invigorating, potent, and compelling as Disclosure. So long as the Others do not detonate magnetic pulse weapons worldwide, depriving us of our technology and knocking us back to the Stone Age, television will love this brave new world.
For decades television shows have been attempting to prove or debunk UFOs. Most of those will become instantly obsolete and will never air again, at least in their original form. New programming will be needed. Veteran Hollywood producer Rob Kirk predicts that networks will scramble immediately to re-purpose those old episodes. They will still have plenty of excellent interviews and eyewitness reports that can be salvaged. The narration will be re-written to remove the tone of skepticism and incredulity that these shows have often had as their point of view. A few new interviews, a couple of all-nighters re-writing all the voice-overs, and new programming that looks tailor-made for AD will be on the air, almost immediately.
However, that is patch-work compared to what will come. Depending on the type of Disclosure that comes to us on Day One, there may be photos, videos, lab reports, secret warehouses, and unclassified documents. It may very well be a treasure trove of raw material. As the news divisions scramble, no one will be better prepared to turn this around quickly than a Hollywood reality producer. Deals between production companies and networks will be struck so fast in the days immediately AD that there will be no time for Business Affairs lawyers even to write a deal memo. These will be virtual “handshake” deals, struck and consummated over text messages, e-mails, and cell phone calls. Entire shows will be delivered and aired in these early days before the paperwork catches up. This will be a boon to the existing companies, as networks will want instantly to call and hire teams they have worked with before.
There will be requests coming out of Hollywood to embed camera crews into government or private enterprise groups that are on the leading-edge of contact issues. If it turns out that there is a fast-response crash ret
rieval team somewhere in the breakaway civilization, networks will demand access to it for their own purposes. Imagine how addictively watchable The Deadliest Catch became for audiences. What if, instead of fish, aliens are invoked?
As an example of what we might expect, imagine a new show called Above and Below. In this series, almost anything goes, but its stock in trade is an aerial point-of-view, seeing the world below from a POV of a flying saucer. This is used as a transitional device to go into the world below, the massive underground base and tunnel system that has been created over the decades.
The series would be a vehicle to take audiences into previously classified labs. If there are any live EBEs that have been acknowledged, access to the units that manage them medically, as well as the security attached to them, will be deemed of paramount importance. The best example from today’s landscape would be a demand to go to “S-4” (just south of Area 51) with an all-access pass and see what is going on there. If it turns up empty and abandoned, expect loud cries of “foul.” However, that is non-fiction programming. In TV parlance, this means serialized documentaries, no matter how hyped or inflated they may be. The other side of the coin is so-called “reality” programming, which, as viewers mostly realize, is not especially real at all.
Reality producers will not miss a single beat to inject Disclosure into their series. Any series in production—featuring anything from survivors on an island, to competitors locked in a house, to suitors vying for spouses—will keep the cameras rolling. This will give us moments where the latest celebutantes cry and rage over their reactions to the news.
Although it may seem to trivialize the news that is breaking around us minute-by-minute AD, the truth is it will provide a service that should not be discounted. These kind of contrived shows still feature real people, or at least people who are more real than an actor on a sitcom. Audiences identify with their problems, share their anxieties and pain, rejoice in their triumphs. They will be looking to these same people, whether we like it or not, to see how they respond and, by extension, how they themselves should respond. Producers who script the scenarios for these reality shows will incorporate reactions from what they see on the news, their friends and family, and their own feelings. They will then create situations for the players, contestants, and celebrities to react to Disclosure. For example, The Biggest Loser may be about trying to lose weight, but the immediate post-Disclosure shows will feature players who struggle not to over-eat to calm their fears about the Others and the potential fate of the world.
Yet even as existing shows bend and twist to add Disclosure as just another “challenge” for their contestants, writers, producers, directors, and executives will be assessing what should come next and to get it on-the-air before their competition beats them to the punch. This process is going to yield some shows themed specifically around contact that are likely to be stranger than we can even predict now.
Within months, the tsunami of Disclosure will hit scripted programming. Television dramas and comedies will also work through the impact of AD in waves, just like their non-fiction and reality brothers and sisters. Existing shows will incorporate it immediately into their scripts, if at all possible. For example, an episode of the C.S.I. franchise may, depending on the facts that are learned, deal with human mutilations by the Others. Some shows may be constrained because of their period settings, but some, perhaps Mad Men, might slip in a line from a character about the police officer in Socorro, New Mexico, who thought he saw a flying saucer and its alien occupants out in the desert.
A standard three-camera sitcom, however, could insert content into the next script up, and put it on the air almost immediately. Humor will be tricky, but it won’t be long before people demand to laugh, no matter what the news about the Others turns out to be.
Oddly, writers who once specialized in ripped-from-the-headlines movies of the week, a genre now nearly extinct, will be the ones who have immediately acceptable skills.
As an example of new dramatic series in the AD world, imagine an hour-long drama, Breakaway, that allows viewers to experience the pre-Disclosure world of secrecy through the eyes of real characters whose life stories have been optioned for their underlying rights. If Mad Men can find success with characters from another time living their lives against the backdrop of a New York advertising agency, then it seems likely that viewers can similarly experience the cover-up in order to understand how we got to where we are.
Then again, in television programming, anything can happen.
The Next Generation of Movie Aliens
What will the new models of alien/human contact look like in Hollywood films? It’s a challenging question, particularly because the one thing we know for certain about this contact, based on where we are now, is that it has happened by stealth, hiding for decades in the shadows of public discourse.
Unless these Others appear with hundreds or thousands of Motherships in the skies, an entire genre of films dealing with hostile alien invasions such as Independence Day will probably be wiped out. A potentially more interesting template may be the kind springing from films such as Alien Nation and District 9. Less firepower, more nuance.
The world, even the world as interpreted through fantastic storytelling, will have to adjust to this new reality. Because, in the new world, fact will have caught up to fiction.
The Man Who Puts the Extra in Extra-Terrestrial
Todd Masters is a special effects creator who has offices in both Hollywood and Vancouver, B.C. For two decades, Masters has made his living designing all kinds of creature effects for film and television projects. Ask Masters how many versions of an alien gray he has helped create and he just laughs. He created the original Dark Skies grays, and multiple other iterations of alien life, including those from The Day the Earth Stood Still, Invasion, The Arrival, and even The Last Mimzy.
Masters knows that his life will change after Disclosure. For starters, he and his team of creature designers have always made alien beings the old-fashioned way, creating them based on experiences and living organisms that exist here on Earth now and in the past, then interpreting them “to the furthest reaches of the mind.” He says that, similar to everyone else, he will be glued to the television news coverage on Day One, but that even as he is watching, he will also be directing design teams to base a new generation of physical and digital creations on the emerging reality. Even if all he has to go on at first is a black-and-white photo of a dead alien from decades ago, that will be enough to begin.
The hitch in the work flow, however, is that the demand for his company’s services will be fundamentally changed.
Currently, his buyers want fantastic eye-popping creatures. They want to see movies that are “what-ifs,” whether they be about alien parasites or never-before-seen werewolves. After Disclosure, Masters thinks that non-fiction will eclipse fiction, at least for a while, and that audiences will want stories based on fact. He thinks that many films that would have been dismissed as too “sci-fi” in the past will now be greenlit to production as true stories.
Filmmakers Thrust into the Future
James Cameron’s Avatar, a massive success today, may immediately be seen as a hopelessly naive, antique artifact of the last days of official denial. That is, his portrayal of humans as the marauding bad guys may be inverted if we learn that human culture has been subverted by an alien presence. If so, it will not end the desire to hear stories, but merely change which ones have the greatest resonance. It could potentially tarnish or damage Cameron’s career, given his heavy-handed “bad human, good alien” storytelling.
We have already discussed Steven Spielberg, but here we can add that, given the suspicions through the years that he has been part of a government plan to acclimate the public to the reality of ET, one can imagine that he will jump into the fray.
Disclosure will not end Steven Spielberg’s fascination with aliens. Rather, it will send him off on the journey of his lifetime. He may abandon whatever pro
ject he is currently working on and begin on what may be his seminal work. The man who has given so many windows into contact can hardly turn his back on the field when his dream of knowing the truth finally comes true. Nor will the movie-going public accept passivity from him. They will have seen him on television as a regular commentator in the immediate aftermath of the confirmation of contact, opining on what it all means simply because—by virtue of having tried to make sense of it through his own prism of film—he will be considered an expert. And compared to the average human being on the planet who has only given the subject passing thought, he will be one.
A Comic Book Perspective
Many have already thought about this world of AD because they have read widely in the world of comic books. After all, alien invaders, predators, and warriors have always been a staple of storytelling in these pulpy pages.
The aliens of Marvel Comics tend to be more spiritual, blurring the line between God and extraterrestrial. Characters such as Galacticus and the Silver Surfer possess vast cosmic abilities that make Earth’s superheroes look like insects.
In DC Comics, the concept of the alien is more about the heroes. Superman and Martian Manhunter, for example, are given great powers by virtue of coming to Earth to live.
Beau DeMayo, a self-described “comic book nerd,” has read them all. Perhaps most important about aliens in the Marvel Universe, he points out, is that they are responsible for the evolution of human life on Earth, an idea supported by many who believe in ETs. The DC Universe is also interesting, DeMayo points out, as it takes a “community approach to its aliens.” In its pages are organizations similar to the Federation in Star Trek, or intergalactic police forces comprised of many aliens.
Both the DC and Marvel universes share one common theme: To rise to their full potential, aliens must discover and embrace the essence of humanity. “Being human,” for example, is the way Superman seeks to check the potential abuse of his powers that he might otherwise indulge in. The Green Lantern is the best of the Lantern Corps, because of his human will and spirit. Even the Norse God Thor, whose Asgardian past is now being played as rooted in extraterrestrial origin, must live among humans to be humbled and grow to be a better man. Because the focus is always on the discovery of the hero’s humanity despite his or her off-world heritage, it could be seen as creating a strange prejudice against aliens.
A.D. After Disclosure: When the Government Finally Reveals the Truth About Alien Contact Page 22