In April I was a delegate at the second AMMACH conference,
during which I spoke to the location director from Off The Fence Productions,
who was making a film about the Helpline, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/ammach-conference-2013.html.
I was impressed by her, she seemed sincere and interested. I thought to myself:
"Maybe this is it! Maybe we're finally going to get a proper, professional
and factual representation of the alien contact subject on primetime television."
The broadcast date was scheduled for the autumn but was brought forward to
Thursday the 13th of June. It's available to watch on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGk7IUVDRbc.
What can I say? Well on the plus side it's better than the
BBC's Conspiracy
Road
Trip- UFO's... slightly better, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/bbc-conspiracy-road-trip-ufos.html.
But that's about the only good thing I can say about it. Of all the fascinating
information AMMACH has published they had to focus on the sensationalist stuff:
"I've got an alien wife and child!" and "These are the human
reproductive organs where they stick in the implants." They portrayed
Chantelle Pyper as a crazy, fearful spinster suffering from delusions; why
didn't they mention that she has a boyfriend? Why didn't they mention that she's been married and her ex-husband was there when filming? Because it's not the fictional
image they want to paste onto her identity. There was no tribute at all to the
enormous courage she showed appearing on stage at the first AMMACH conference,
see: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/ammach-conference-2012.html
(part 6). At least they had the basic honesty to admit that Marie Kayali's
polygraph test might not be 100% accurate, but you can bet the Skeptics will
jump on it; of course if she'd passed the test the Skeptics would be the first
to point out the potential inaccuracy of the method. (What's more, as I
explained in my review of the BBC programme above, they stopped Brigitte
Barclay having one possibly because they were scared she'd pass.) There was a
scene in which Miles is shown leading Marie into his darkroom and saying:
"Lift your top up". This is bordering on slanderous, in a very
passive-aggressive unprovable way.
It was naive of me to feel the hope I did when I met the
production team at the conference; I should have expected this. Actually I
partly did, because a few days before it came on TV, I spoke to one of the cast
members who had seen a preview of the programme, and she was absolutely livid.
Perhaps the future for us is to stop hoping at all, to give up on the
mainstream media altogether; if it won't do its job properly we should stop
asking it to, and replace it instead. AMMACH has gone through some major
changes since this documentary was made; Miles is no longer officially involved
in the project. But alien contact is not going to go away. Contrary to what you
might hear, the phenomenon did not begin in 1961 with the Hill Case (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4L0PFcbFy-k);
the Hill's were merely the first experiencers to be widely publicized. Alien
contact experience can be traced back through all of history, indeed there's
every reason to suppose people had these encounters in prehistoric times.
Therefore it's extremely likely that people will continue to have alien contact
experiences for the foreseeable future. So the role AMMACH and similar
organizations play will continue to be necessary, hopefully even more so as the
subject inevitably emerges from the world of the fringe and taboo. Hopefully more
and more people will switch off the ToiletVision and come over to the
independent online media like AMMACH's website and video channels. TV companies
like Off The Fence can then either join us, or be left behind among the soap
operas and Reality TV. (Incidentally the launch of Channel 5's much anticipated
new Big Brother series was scheduled
parallel to Confessions of an Alien
Abductee... or perhaps it's the other way around.)
See here for more
background: http://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/programme-11-podcast-mary-rodwell.html
And: http://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/programme-6-podcast-ellis-taylor.html
2 comments:
I actually thought it was a fairly sympathetic documentary overall, although the focus on the more outlandish was to be expected. The only people to come out looking like fools were the AMMACH pair.
Sympathetic!? I saw it as the exact opposite, Trystan. They tried to turn these brave and dedicated people into clowns, and turn a very serious subject into a frivolity.
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