Wednesday, August 5, 2009

UFO: The Motion Picture Script (Part 12)


If some major participants, Chop and Towers high among them, were disappointed that the movie spent too much time on details, it's good that the Utah UFO film concerned only Newhouse's personal account and airing of the footage. Just prior to the first Utah film showing, Francis Martin's script goes off on a tangent, depicting a military film analysis lab featuring white-gowned technical analysts equipped with microscopes and checklists. As extreme close-up shots and panning of the Newhouse film's individual frames are accomplished, with highly magnified still images of objects in the film, Chop's (Towers') narration is heard -- again, none of this is in the movie, nor was it scratched out in Towers' copy of the script:

"Ruppelt's organization was staffed by good men," Martin wrote. "Every detail that might be a clue to the solution of the baffling saucer problem was put through Project Bluebook's analysis and investigative staff. Step by step, the Newhouse film moved through the minds and machines of the photo analysis lab, until the final report was ready. Then the film was taken by an Air Force courier and hand-carried to Washington to be viewed by the Director General of Air Force Intelligence."

This segment also shows film images of the UFOs being transferred to paper enlargements and another scene exhibits two men putting a new slide of the Newhouse UFOs into a slide projector and then using a special grid to make chalk outlines of "saucer" positions on the screen.

Elsewhere, according to the script, an Air Force pilot wearing a flight suit is given a metal can containing the important Newhouse film by Capt. Ruppelt himself, and the pilot signs a receipt indicating responsibility and acceptance. As this elaborate scene continues, the pilot, having apparently flown from Dayton to Washington, D.C., departs a plane and meets Major Fournet nearby. Fournet then signs a receipt for the canned film, gets into an official staff car with an enlisted man waiting behind the wheel, and the car "rapidly" drives off. Officials are anxiously waiting to see the Newhouse UFO film. In the motion picture, we only see military officers and Chop waiting in a room as the film is about to role, with no hint whatsoever of all the behind-the-scenes efforts written into the script.