teee_peee wrote (Subject: Close Encounter ...):-
> Guess who bumped into Ed Bishop on his way to work this
> morning? ... To think I was talking to the man who stood between
> Planet Earth + alien colonisation / mutilation. ...
If SHADO was not there, the aliens would likely have carried on as
they did before, taking a few humans and leaving the rest alone.
If they managed to knock SHADO out, perhaps the same; perhaps
they would take whatever measures were necessary to stop Earth
from developing space defence technology; perhaps they would
have threatened to. I don't think the UFO series aliens had the men
and ship strength to take over the rule of Earth on the ground like
the Lizards did partly (and narrowly missed doing completely) in
Harry Turtledove's "World War" and "Colonization" series.
If the aliens brushed SHADO out of the way :: I have explored that
time line in
http://www.buckrogers.demon.co.uk/ufo/end.txt and
http://www.buckrogers.demon.co.uk/ufo/end2.txt (total about 564
kilobytes; that story is also in the SHADO Library.)
... and a real sense of "otherness" about the aliens. The insights
gleaned about the aliens had a cohesiveness about them but
fuelled the sense of myth and "unknowableness" about
them. Series 2 however was a disappointment. ... But [its
episodes] shed no further insight on the aliens / their mindset /
culture / intentions / technologies etc. ...
Different readers and viewers will always want different things.
Some want the mystery to be kept. Some after a while want the
mystery to be solved.
In designing alien spacesuits, Gerry Anderson successfully
avoided "that NASA look" - a problem that the makers of the film of
"Dune" also had to face.
On Friday 28 December 2001 on Channel 4 (UK TV) I saw Ray
Harryhausen's 1964 UK film of H.G.Wells's "First Men in the Moon"
made at Shepperton in England. The story was set in partly in
1899 as in the book, and partly in 1964 when the first Apollo
astronauts find remains of what had happened. Earth diseases
brought by the 1899 expedition had killed all the Selenites. Unlike
in some space films, the producer showed that gravity is much
less on the Moon. In the 1899 events the spacesuits were old--
style hardhat diving suits, with helmets and corselets and chest
and back weights and weighted boots, but no lifelines or airlines. A
large Siebe Gorman type aqualung cylinder (described as an
oxygen cylinder) was slung across the back of each at an angle
connected by a hose to one of the connections on the helmet.
Nothing was said or shown about how they coped with the
ballooning problem in space vacuum. The 1964 astronauts wore
realistic spacesuits but each had a large Siebe Gorman type
aqualung cylinder vertical on the back instead of the familiar
astronaut rectangular backpack.
Locked
