the timboucher experience

I heard somewhere recently that there is an apocryphal story about Steven Spielberg doing a screening of E.T. at the White House in 1982. Supposedly, Reagan is purported to have said:

“You know, there aren’t six people in this room who know how true this really is.”

I’m having trouble tracking down the original source of this story though. The closest I could find is that Producer Jamie Sheridan claims this incident is true, but Spielberg won’t discuss it. Could be one of those things that’s totally made up, but which weaseled its way into widespread acceptance somehow - much like this image that George W. Bush is holding up, from a 2000 issue of the Weekly World News.

That’s kind of a nice testament to how quickly and easily reality and fantasy blend and become almost indistinguishable. Found that on a site called Presidential UFO. I also found another source of possibly-real/possibly-fake stories involving Reagan and UFO’s. That site also has more elaborate description of the alleged E.T. Reagan quote. Also kind of interesting is the conjecture that the “government” may have had a say in having Spielberg depict E.T. as a weird creature, rather than as the classical big-headed small-frame aliens we’re more accustomed to. It seems Spielberg also travelled around the world showing his movie to also the UN, and to the Queen of England, who were also UFO “enthusiasts”.

None of this really proves anything, but it has got me wondering about people in high places, and how many of them are UFO enthusiasts, and how many have a history of UFO sightings or other encounters. Reagan is also alleged to have made several official remarks, especially to Soviet leaders, about how if there was to be a UFO invasion of the Earth, that the people of the world would unite as one and put aside their differences - essentially the theme of Independence Day with Will Smith and Bill Paxton.

Also reminds me immediately of the testimony of Dr. Carol Rosin before Congress in 2000:

The strategy that Wernher Von Braun taught me was that first the Russians are going to be considered to be the enemy….Then terrorists would be identified….Then we were going to identify third-world country “crazies.” We now call them Nations of Concern. But he said that would be the third enemy against whom we would build space-based weapons. The next enemy was asteroids. Now, at this point he kind of chuckled the first time he said it.

Asteroids- against asteroids we are going to build space-based weapons.

And the funniest one of all was what he called aliens, extraterrestrials. That would be the final scare. And over and over and over during the four years that I knew him and was giving speeches for him, he would bring up that last card. “And remember Carol, the last card is the alien card. We are going to have to build space-based weapons against aliens, and all of it is a lie.”

Hm…

Does make you kind of wonder though, doesn’t it?

• Doubting Aliens
• Circus is in, aliens are out
• Aliens Control The Media
• Aliens Fear Factory
• The Oval Office: America’s Vagina