“In [Februaryⁱ and] March of 1995, the UPN aired a most intriguing Disney-produced television special about UFOs, entitled ‘Alien Encounters from New Tomorrowland,’ writes the ForbiddenKnowledgeTV.com website. “This highly unusual broadcast presents UFOs and alien visitation to our planet as a matter of fact.” ¹

“The Disney company aired a major one-hour television Special, with no advance notice, on stations in only 5 US cities. Thanks to a few viewers who were able to roll their VCRs and capture it, we have a record of the startling quotes and statements it contained,” adds the UFOevidence.org website.²

Matt Staggs writes for disinfo.com website: “It’s a worthwhile curiosity if for nothing else than to watch Michael Eisner utter this awkwardly structured phrase”:

“In a top secret military installation somewhere in the United States, there are those who believe that the government is hiding the remains of an alien spacecraft that mysteriously crashed to Earth.” ³

“Robert Urich, the legendary Jim Street in ‘S.W.A.T.’, is the host of this voyage around the UFO’s and its mystery,” the Internet Movie Database chronicles further. “From New Tomorrowland, in Disneyland, Urich talks about UFO, contacts, evidences of its arrives, abductions, military documents and other things what surround this controversial thematic.” ⁴

“Many in the UFO research field felt that Disney’s Alien Encounters documentary was an effort by the powers that be to prepare us for Disclosure – a subtle test of public reaction to an official declaration that we are not alone,” writes Robbie Graham for the Silver Screen Saucers blog. “But in the sixteen years since the documentary was produced, not one UFO researcher has attempted to contact the film’s writer and director, Andrew Thomas, in order to learn the truth of the matter. So, in February 2011, [Graham] decided to do just that”:

There were aspects of the Alien Encounters project, however, that even Thomas considered strange – not least of all was the fact that Disney CEO Michael Eisner took a direct interest in the documentary, personally vetting its content and even filming his own introduction for the piece:

“I thought it was really odd because to me this was kind of a minor marketing project, but they [Disney] put a lot of weight into it. I mean Eisner doesn’t have to stop walking down the street to pick up a twenty-dollar-bill – it’s not worth his time. But they had him look through this. And he filmed this intro to the show. I didn’t do that. He had his own film crew take him out to a sound stage and film his own intro, which I thought was just really surprising.”

Also surprising to Thomas was Disney’s inexplicable TV scheduling for the documentary, which he described as “completely counter-intuitive,” because “it played on independent stations in the afternoon at like 2 o’clock or 3 o’ clock, or some horrible time when no one would be watching it.…

NASA UFO accounts

Regarding Close Encounters, Thomas explained that marketing executives at Columbia Pictures were concerned that Spielberg’s chosen title for the film made it sound “suspiciously like a pornographic movie, because no one had any reference to what that vocabulary meant.” This was where Thomas came in:

“Eighteen months before the film [Close Encounters] was going to premiere… before we’d even sold it to audiences, we had a campaign to introduce that vocabulary and make it part of the vernacular, so when the film opened-up everyone would know what was being discussed, and there wouldn’t be any question. So what I did was I worked with a planetarium to create a planetarium show that was about twenty-minutes long… you sit down and a UFO shoots across the planetarium dome and then the audience is trained on how to figure out whether that was a meteor, a comet, or actually an extraterrestrial. We managed to bus-in tens-of thousands of kids from all around the country on the pretence of seeing an educational planetarium show, but what they really got was a sophisticated message to explain to them that extraterrestrials and UFOs are real and what an encounter of the first, second and third kind actually meant.” ⁵

Notes

ⁱ The documentary was aired in only a handful of US cities at seemingly random times on selected dates in February and March, 1995, with no advance notice – a rather odd marketing strategy considering its purpose was to promote a major theme park ride for families.… The ride itself seemed like an afterthought.^*
– Robbie Graham Silver Screen Saucers), “UFOs and Disney: Behind the Magic Kingdom,” UFO Encounters Live, 2011, at http://ufoencounterslive.com/ufonews_ufo_disney.htm (retrieved: 23 March 2013).

^* The War of the Worlds (October 30, 1938), The Mercury Theatre on the Air, at http://www.mercurytheatre.info, MP3 at http://sounds.mercurytheatre.info/mercury/381030.mp3 (retrieved: 3 January 2011).

Related links

¹ “Disney’s ‘Alien Encounters from New Tomorrowland’ (1995),” forbiddenknowledgetv.com, 19 October 2011, at http://www.forbiddenknowledgetv.com/videos/ufosinterdimensionalultraterrestrials/disneys-alien-encounters-from-new-tomorrowland-1995.html (retrieved: 22 March 2013).

² “Disney’s Legendary ‘Alien Encounters’ Sneak TV Documentary Quotes”, UFOevidence.org, at http://www.ufoevidence.org/documents/doc811.htm (retrieved: 22 March 2013).

³ Matt Staggs, “Walt Disney’s ‘Alien Encounters from New Tomorrowland’,” disinformation, 8 February 2013, at http://www.disinfo.com/2013/02/walt-disneys-alien-encounters-from-new-tomorrowland/ (retrieved: 22 March 2013).

⁴ Alien Encounters from New Tomorrowland, IMDb, at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0235174/plotsummary (retrieved: 22 March 2013).

⁵ Robbie Graham Silver Screen Saucers), “UFOs and Disney: Behind the Magic Kingdom,” UFO Encounters Live, 2011, at http://ufoencounterslive.com/ufonews_ufo_disney.htm (retrieved: 23 March 2013).

See also

Kevin J. Crosby, “Mickey Finn,” Tinfoil Hat, at http://skewsme.com/tinfoilhat/chapter/mickey-finn/ (retrieved: 22 March 2013).

MADONNA COL BAMBINO E SAN GIOVANNINO (Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John) Attributed to Sebastiano Mainardi or Jacopo del Sellaio (Firenze, Palazzo Vecchio Museum, Sala d’Ercole)