Kubrick and UFOs

Stanley Kubrick has long been my favorite director. His top films, the ones I would happily watch at any time, include 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dr. Strangelove, Paths of Glory, The Shining, Barry Lyndon, and Eyes Wide Shut. They are all fantastic.

Of those movies, though, 2001 stands out as the best. It won an Academy Award for visual effects, is often listed as one of the best movies ever made, is definitely one of the best science fiction films ever made, features an artificially intelligent computer going on a murderous rampage, traces the influence of extraterrestrial beings on human evolution, and has an ending that can't be explained, only experienced. As Kubrick stated, he "tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophic content."

So, it's a good movie.

Many years ago I came across a well-worn copy of The Making of Kubrick's 2001 at a used bookstore. It's an excellent book edited by Jerome Agel. There's really no narrative; it's just an eclectic collection of quotes, interviews, articles, reviews, fan mail, reactions, 96 pages of photographs, behind-the-scenes notes, basically a hodgepodge of anything and everything related to the movie. It was published in 1970, two years after the movie's release. For a fan of the movie, the book is heaven.

The best part of the book is at the end: a full reprint of Kubrick's interview with Playboy magazine in 1968. The topics are wide-ranging. After trying to get Kubrick to explain what 2001 means, which he refuses to do, saying "2001 is a nonverbal experience", the interviewer asks if the movie is a religious film. The answer is emphatically yes ("the God concept is at the heart of 2001") but in a very nontraditional manner. To explain his point, Kubrick brings up the topic of extraterrestrial life, and proceeds to blow our minds with a discussion of how extraterrestrials may have evolved, given enough time:

They may have progressed from biological species, which are fragile shells for the mind at best, into immortal machine entities — and then, over innumerable eons, they could emerge from the chrysalis of matter transformed into beings of pure energy and spirit. Their potentialities would be limitless and their intelligence ungraspable by humans.

...

They would be incomprehensible to us except as gods; and if the tendrils of their consciousness ever brushed men's minds, it is only the hand of God we could grasp as an explanation.

...

The important point is that all the standard attributes assigned to God in our history could equally well be the characteristics of biological entities who billions of years ago were at a stage of development similar to man's own and evolved into something as remote from man as man is remote from the primordial ooze from which he first emerged.

The interview continues on, focusing for several pages on various aspects of extraterrestrial life, such as the cultural impact of first contact. Eventually, the topic turns to UFOs. "What's your opinion?" asks the interviewer.

This launches Kubrick into a discussion of recent reports on the UFO phenomenon, such as by L. M. Chassin, a French Air Force general, and Dr. J. Allen Hynek, an astronomy professor at Northwestern University. He then covers some of the more conventional explanations for UFOs (ball lightning, etc) and briefly points out how they don't explain all the evidence. Then he adds:

As you've probably deduced, I'm really fascinated by UFOs and I only regret that this field of investigation has to a considerable extent been pre-empted by a crackpot fringe... That kind of kook approach makes it very easy to dismiss the whole phenomenon which we do at our own risk.

I was thrilled when I read this. I had always held the opinion that if you can set aside any preconceptions you have on the topic and seriously examine the evidence, then the conclusion was obvious. UFOs are physical objects that seem to represent a non-human intelligence. To learn that my favorite director thought the same way and shared the same fascination with the topic as I did was extremely exciting!

And speaking of examining the evidence, Kubrick offered this sobering statement: "Actually, if you examine even a fraction of the extant testimony you will find that people have been sent to the gas chamber on far less substantial evidence."

Before leaving the topic of extraterrestrials and UFOs, the interviewer asked one last question about critics who point to the speed of light as a reason UFOs can't be interstellar, saying it would simply take too long to travel between the stars. I've always loved Kubrick's reply:

I find it difficult to believe that we have penetrated to the ultimate depths of knowledge about the physical laws of the universe. It seems rather presumptuous to believe that in the space of a few hundred years, we've figured out most of what there is to know. So I don't think it's right to declaim with unshakable certitude that light is the absolute speed limit of the universe. I'm suspicious of dogmatic scientific rules; they tend to have a rather short life span.

The interview then moved on to other topics, but none were as interesting.

So that was my favorite used-book purchase ever. I bring all of this up for several reasons:

To hopefully demonstrate there's enough evidence to take the UFO subject seriously.
To show that Kubrick was awesome.
To lay the groundwork for a future post, where I'll discuss a book I read this summer. It's the most fascinating book I've read in a long, long time.