From 1946 onwards, people around the world start vanishing mysteriously. They stare up at a white, blinding light and they are gone. Then, one day, they are all returned — 4,400 of them — in a glowing sphere. They are not a day older than when they disappeared, and they have no memory of what happened to them. Over the ensuing months, many of them begin to discover that they have acquired extraordinary powers, such as clairvoyancy or the ability to kill at a distance or heal by touch.
This is the premise of The 4400, a new television series from Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope, to be shown on Sky One from next weekend. If it sounds familiar, that’s because Steven Spielberg’s recent series Taken told a similar story, as did Chris Carter’s The X Files. You also saw much the same thing in 1977, in Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, as well as in countless lesser movies and television series. This is not a criticism of The 4400. It’s a good show; on the basis of the first episode, it’s better than Taken, but not as good as the best of The X Files. It did well critically, as well as in ratings terms, when shown in America last year. In any case, we don’t complain that westerns or space operas such as Star Wars and Star Trek all tell much the same story. They are familiar, indeed consoling, myths of our time. And that, strangely, is what the whole alien abduction narrative has become.
With The 4400, the myth has hardened into a convention. The nosebleeds of the abductees are shared with The X Files. The blinding white light always signals alien arrival, as do glowing spheres. The “lost time” of the abduction period — abductees never age — is shared most graphically with Close Encounters, notably the US Air Force squadron that vanishes in the 1940s and reappears in the 1970s, planes and pilots as good as new. The aliens are generally agreed to be small, grey creatures, and seem to empathise strongly with children, frequently according them special powers. The topical development here is that the investigators are no longer from the FBI, as in The X Files, but from the Department of Homeland Security.
In The 4400, you might start to think that this convention has hardened to the point where the acting profession has also been abducted. The chewed features of Peter Coyote appear to represent sympathetic authority, as they did so well in ET — and, amazingly, he’s not a day older. Joel Gretsh also stars. Not only was he in Taken, he’s the son-in-law of William Shatner, Captain Kirk of the Starship Enterprise. Get sucked into the alien maw and you never get out.
It is, perhaps, the children who provide the clearest hint of what this is all about. It is a child in Taken who delivers the central wisdom of the series: “Life is all about asking questions, not about knowing the answers. It’s wanting to see what’s over the next hill that keeps us going.” The same childish but pure spiritual longing is embodied in the motto of The X Files, “The truth is out there”, and in Roy Neary’s explanation of why he so desperately wants to see the aliens in Close Encounters: “I just want to know it’s really happening.” The authorities have tried to deny Neary the truth, just as they wish to steal the baby-like ET from his young friends. The uncovering of the hidden truth — a truth often identified with the adult’s lost vision of childhood — is to the alien abduction story what the arrival of the cavalry is to the western.
The further refinement that makes these shows so effective is the widespread, paranoid conviction that the aliens really have landed, that mass abductions have indeed taken place. For there is a straight documentary aspect to all these works. Close Encounters features two real UFO investigators. The character Claude Lacombe, played by François Truffaut, is based on the French UFO theorist Jacques Vallée, and the odd man with a pipe who appears in the climactic scene really is J Allen Hynek, a former US government scientist brought in to debunk UFO sightings, but who went native and decided they were real. Hynek had threatened to sue Spielberg over the film’s use of his research material, so the director placated him with this cameo role.
Even the planes found in the desert are a reference to a well-known real-world event. On December 14, 1945, five US Navy torpedo bombers disappeared off the coast of Florida. Flight 19’s last transmission, picked up by a ham radio operator, was: “Don’t come after me... They look like they are from outer space...”
In The 4400, the abductees are returned near Mount Rainier, in Washington State. This is a reference to the most influential alien encounter of all. In 1947, a pilot named Kenneth Arnold saw a squadron of alien craft against Mount Rainier’s snowfields. It was the most vivid and most precisely described, though not the first, UFO sighting of the post-war period, and it started the alien “flap” that has continued unabated ever since. Arnold is the primary cause of all subsequent alien contact and abduction movies.
Almost all the abduction imagery, meanwhile, is derived from the real-world story of Betty and Barney Hill. In 1961 in New Hampshire, they claimed, they were taken by aliens and subjected to various procedures that seemed to focus on their reproductive systems. They were embarrassed by the incident, and their story did not come out until 1966. Like Arnold, they were good, respectable witnesses, and widely believed. Their testimony — involving bright lights, powerlessness in the face of alien technology, genital examinations, lost time and even, in some accounts, implants — was repeated in thousands, some say millions, of subsequently reported experiences. According to one estimate, no fewer than 5m Americans have been subjected to alien abductions, although, as the aliens impose amnesia on their victims, most have no recollection of the incident.
But the real-world story that provides the most paranoid twist to all this is Roswell. Two weeks after Arnold’s sighting, a US Air Force officer announced, straight-faced, that a flying saucer had been recovered in New Mexico. This was quickly retracted — or, in alien lore, “covered up” — and the object in question was said to be a weather balloon. In fact, this really was a cover-up, as it was probably a constant-altitude device designed to detect Soviet nuclear tests. The denial stopped the Roswell story in its tracks for more than 30 years. It was resurrected in a book, The Roswell Incident, in 1980.
From then on, many assumed that it had indeed been a saucer, and that alien bodies had been recovered and hidden for investigation at Area 51, a secret base in Nevada. This story is at the heart of the 1996 film Independence Day, of almost everything that happens in The X Files and, of course, of the teen television series Roswell. In more refined versions, the American government is in league with the aliens and is assisting them in their abduction programme.
Piquancy is added to the Roswell myth by the fact that, as with the weather balloon, an official cover-up is definitely involved. The government has routinely denied that there is such a place as Area 51. In fact, it does exist, and its operations are indeed shrouded in intense secrecy involving cinematic comings and goings, such as the unmarked jumbo jets that fly its employees in from nearby Las Vegas and the mysterious soldiers, “cammo dudes”, who appear out of nowhere to discourage sightseers.
So what we have, both in the real world and in fiction, is a single, broadly consistent story that occurs from the mid-1940s and continues to the present day. The alien ships are spotted. Speculation suggests they are concerned about our development of rocketry and nuclear weapons. They make contact and start abducting people. Some sort of cover-up is involved. The aliens are covering it up by imposing amnesia on abductees, or governments know what is going on and are co-operating with the aliens, or they are fighting an alien threat and don’t want us to know. The last possibility is brilliantly captured in Barry Sonnenfeld’s 1997 comedy Men in Black. “There’s always an Arqu- illian battle cruiser,” says Tommy Lee Jones’s fabulously jaded Agent K, “or a Korilian death ray, or an intergalactic plague that is about to wipe out life on this miserable planet. The only way these people get on with their happy lives is they do not know about it.”
From such comic fantasy right through to the tense, gloomy realism of The 4400, the real-world tales of aliens feed directly into fiction. The impact of the fiction is enhanced by the underlying hint that something like this really may be happening, and the real-world stories are endorsed by the vividness and immediacy of what happens in the movies and on television. In this mutually reinforcing spiral of aspiration and anxiety, as Carl Jung saw when he studied the flying-saucer phenomenon in the mid- 1950s, we are witnessing the creation of a modern myth.
The most potent aspect of this myth is the idea of the hidden truth, the conviction that somebody, the aliens or the government, is hiding something from us, and that heroic warriors — like Fox Mulder in The X Files or Roy Neary in Close Encounters — must fight to wrest this vital knowledge from their grasp. The knowledge itself is fundamental to our being: it tells us who we are and what we must do. It tells us what “life is all about”.
The 4400 is the latest chapter in a new bible that is being written on television, in films and on the internet. It tells a new story of salvation. This version is distinctively modern in its paranoia and its technological context, but it’s also very old, in that its conviction that true knowledge is hidden is borrowed from the ancient heresy of gnosticism. In a couple of centuries, it is perfectly conceivable that Roswell will have become a new gnostic Bethlehem. Unless, of course, Hollywood and our anxieties have moved on to construct another myth. The moral of the story will be the same — it is always the same, whether aliens or angels are involved: we must seek salvation because, in this world, we don’t fit.
The 4400 begins on Sky One on November 21 at 9pm
www.usanetwork.com/series/the4400
Official site, with trailer, cast biographies and downloads
