Tag Archives: Netflix

A private search for extraterrestrial intelligence

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Watching John Was Trying to Contact Aliens for New Scientist, 27 August 2020

You have to admire Netflix’s ambition. As well as producing Oscar-winning short documentaries of its own (The White Helmets won in 2017; Period. End of Sentence. won in 2019), the streaming giant makes a regular effort to bring festival-winning factual films to a global audience.

The latest is John Was Trying to Contact Aliens by New York-based UK director Matthew Killip, which won the Jury Award for a non-fiction short film at this year’s Sundance festival in Utah. In little over 15 minutes, it manages to turn the story of John Shepherd, an eccentric inventor who spent 30 years trying to contact extraterrestrials by broadcasting music millions of kilometres into space, into a tear-jerker of epic (indeed, cosmological) proportions.

Never much cared for by his parents, Shepherd was brought up by adoptive grandparents in rural Michigan. A fan of classic science-fiction shows like The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone, Shepherd never could shake off the impression that a UFO sighting made on him as a child, and in 1972 the 21-year-old set about designing and constructing electronic equipment to launch a private search for extraterrestrial intelligence. His first set-up, built around an ultra-low frequency radio transmitter, soon expanded to fill over 100 square metres of his long-suffering grandparents’ home. It also acquired an acronym: Project STRAT – Special Telemetry Research And Tracking.

A two-storey high, 1000-watt, 60,000-volt, deep-space radio transmitter required a house extension – and all so Shepherd could beam jazz, reggae, Afro-pop and German electronica into the sky for hours every day, in the hope any passing aliens would be intrigued enough to come calling.

It would have been the easiest thing in the world for Killip to play up Shepherd’s eccentricity. Until now, Shepherd has been a folk hero in UFO-hunting circles. His photo portrait, surrounded by bizarre broadcasting kit of his own design, appears in Douglas Curren’s In Advance of the Landing: Folk concepts of outer space – the book TV producer Chris Carter says he raided for the first six episodes of his series The X-Files.

Instead, Killip listens closely to Shepherd, discovers the romance, courage and loneliness of his life, and shapes it into a paean to our ability to out-imagine our circumstances and overreach our abilities. There is something heartbreakingly sad, as well as inspiring, about the way Killip pairs Shepherd’s lonely travails in snow-bound Michigan with footage, assembled by teams of who knows how many hundreds, from the archives of NASA.

Shepherd ran out of money for his project in 1998, and having failed to make a connection with ET, quickly found a life-changing connection much closer to home.

I won’t spoil the moment, but I can’t help but notice that, as a film-maker, Killip likes these sorts of structures. In one of his earlier works, The Lichenologist, about Kerry Knudsen, curator of lichens at the University of California, Riverside, Knudsen spends most of the movie staring at very small things before we are treated to the money shot: Knudsen perched on top of a mountain, whipped by the wind and explaining how his youthful psychedelic experiences inspired a lifetime of intense visual study. It is a shot that changes the meaning of the whole film.

Belgium explained

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Watching the sitcom Space Force for New Scientist, 2 June 2020.

As recruitment advertisements go, the video released to Twitter on 6 May was genuinely engaging. Young people stared off into the Milky Way, as rockets of indeterminate scale rolled out of unmarked hangers.

“Some people look to the stars and ask, ‘What if?'” drawled the voice-over artist. “Our job is to have an answer.”

This admirably down-to-earth sentiment was cooked up by the US Space Force, the most recently founded arm of the US military, officially brought into being by President Donald Trump on 21 December 2019.

It’s been the butt of humour ever since. On 18 January the Space Force showed off its uniforms to Twitter. Apparently there’s a use for camouflage in space. Six days later it revealed its logo — a sort of straightened-out, think-inside-the-box version of — yes — the Federation symbol from Star Trek.

Then — the coup de grace — Netflix announced it would be streaming a sitcom about the whole enterprise, created by producer Greg Daniels and actor Steve Carell.

A lot of expectation has been gathering around this fictional Space Force. Greg Daniels’s writing and production credits include the US version of The Office, Parks and Recreation and King of the Hill. Everyone’s expecting a savage parody. So any initial disappointment with the show ought to come tempered with the realisation that the real Space Force, at its birth, would outcompete any television satire.

On the same day the U.S. Space Force’s recruitment video was released, 6 May, General Jay Raymond, its Chief of Space Operations, had a piece of advice for Carell, who plays the Space Force chief in the new sitcom: “Get a haircut,” he grinned, during a webinar hosted by the nonprofit Space Foundation. “He’s looking a little too shaggy if he wants to play [me].”

I’m glad he can see the funny side. While the fictional General Naird and his head of science Dr. Adrian Mallory (John Malkovich) spar spiritedly over the launch procedures of one giant-looking rocket after another, in the real world the redoubtable General Raymond is being tasked with defending US satellites from laser and projectile attack from multiple potentially hostile forces, all on a start-up budget of $40m. Think about it. There are streets in London where that wouldn’t buy you a house. Meanwhile the total US annual military budget stands at $738 billion.

Space Force the sitcom is, likewise, a labour of love, produced on an obviously low budget. It would not feel strange, at this point, if the showrunners abandoned parody entirely and went over to give General Raymond a hug.

Space Force’s small satisfactions take a while to build. Naird’s elevation means the family must relocate from Washington to an old NORAD facility in Colorado (an “up and coming” state, according to Naird. His wife, played by Lisa Kudrow, sobs softly into her pillow). At work, Dr. Mallory insists on taking two steps of at a time when he climbs a staircase, even though his fitness isn’t quite up to it: trust Malkovich to make comedy gold out of nothing. Other cast members underplay themselves. Improv comedian Tawny Newsome, as helicopter pilot Angela Ali, plays straight-woman to both Naird and his exasperated and lonely daughter. Silicon Valley’s Jimmy O. Yang gets decent lines, but in demeanour he remains the soberest of Mallory’s team of interchangeable scientists.

Trump wants boots on the Moon. American boots. What does that mean? Naird, in a speech, tries to clarify: “Boots with US feet in them, I mean. Can’t be certain where the boots will be made. Maybe Mexico, maybe Portugal.”

This is the main point: what does it mean to make nationalistic noises about space when doing anything worthwhile up there requires massive international cooperation? In a later episode, Naird demands to know what the foremost aeronautical engineering theorist in Belgium is doing on his oh-so-secret base. Gently, Mallory explains: Belgium is part of the European Space Agency, and that’s because Belgium is part of Europe.

Space Force arrives at an difficult moment. We may, after all, have had enough parody, and no-one on this show seems entirely sure what comes next. A little kindness, perhaps. An acknowledgement that the US is a nation among nations. A general agreement that we should not turn space into “an orgy of death”.

And if the show is not quite what we expected, still, there is real charm in watching gruff General Naird expressing his feelings at last, and learning to get along with his teenage daughter.