Monday 8 February 2016

Cosmic Whistleblowers- a review

In November on HPANWO Radio I interviewed Simon Sharman, a film maker who had just premiered his documentary Cosmic Whistleblowers, see: http://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/programme-160-podcast-simon-sharman.html. I hoped I'd get the chance to see the film because I couldn't get to the cinema. It will be broadcast on TV sometime soon, but only in a heavily condensed format; however I then learned that the feature cut is now available on pay-per view online, see: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/cosmicwhistleblowers. A release on this platform is not always a good sign; it certainly wasn't with Moonwalkers, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/moonwalkers.html, but I still couldn't wait to see it. The film is a personal journey. Simon presents the movie as well as directs it, and he takes us on his exploration to get to the bottom of the Roswell Incident of July 1947. To do this he travels to New Mexico where the event happened and enlists the help of UFOlogists Don Schmitt and Jaime Maussan. He helps them at the crash site trying to dig up new forensic evidence of the shipwreck from the stars that came to grief on that spot almost seventy years ago. He also discovers some exclusive new information from witnesses who were speaking out for the first time, including the granddaughter of Mac Brazel and a member of the aircrew that flew the debris to Wright Field where the AAF Technical Data Section was based. The film contains some excellent diagrams showing analysis of why the official government line on Roswell is nothing but a series of lies, with new lies piled upon old to contribute to the confusion. During one scene Simon gets lost driving round the desolate and barren New Mexico desert. I wonder why this was not an outtake. Could it be because it signifies Simon's own feelings towards the labyrinth at the centre of which lies the truth about Roswell? But can he get past the Minotaur of bureaucratic belligerence and state denial? To find out he then travels to Washington DC and visits some people who are experts in that field of UFOlogy, Stephen Bassett and Richard Dolan. (Steve has been a guest on HPANWO Radio as well many times, for example see: http://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/programme-153-podcast-stephen-bassett.html). Interestingly both Presidents Barrack Obama and Bill Clinton have spoken about the UFO issue in interviews with the talk show host Jimmy Kimmel and Clinton said that if he had found out the truth he would definitely have told the American people... maybe that's why they didn't tell him. 

Simon then gets caught up in a situation that, with hindsight, was a terrible disaster, the infamous "Roswell Slides". I myself have covered this extensively and also ended up deeply disappointed, see: http://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/programme-136-podcast-roswell-slides.html and: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/ufo-disclosure-2015-roswell-slides.html. Cosmic Whistleblowers gives the viewer a revealing behind the scenes look at the process leading up to this all-or-nothing pageant in the focus of publicity. From his position backstage, having dealt directly with the protagonists involved, it didn't take long for Simon to realize something was amiss; long before the curtain dropped on the photographic slide of a mummified child from the three thousand year old Mesa Verde culture, taken in the late 1940's at the Million Dollar Museum in New Mexico. Then came the spectacular hologram of a walking, living alien modelled from the body in the slides (By then I'd fallen asleep watching the live stream because it was 5 AM in my country). Simon's candid camerawork shows that there was conflict and doubt within the Roswell Slides "team" on that anticlimactic evening. Cosmic Whistleblowers is an important historical document for that reason alone. Only by learning from our mistakes can UFOlogy stop repeating them. The Roswell mystery remains. Simon managed to publicize the testimony of witnesses who otherwise might have gone to the grave unheard, but the government remains mute, cryptic and evasive. However, the viewer is left in no doubt that the supposed terrestrial explanations for Roswell are completely false. All in all this is a neat and informative film that I very much recommend. It's well worth £3.49 fee to watch it.

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