Emperor is based on a screenplay by David Klass (Walking Tall, Desperate Measures) and Vera Blasi (Woman on Top). It stars Matthew Fox as General Bonner Fellers, “one of MacArthur’s leading Japanese experts, who, at the end of World War II, is charged with reaching a decision of historical importance: should Emperor Hirohito be tried and hanged as a war criminal?”
ComingSoon.net continues:
“Interwoven with this nail-biting political thriller is the story of Fellers’ love affair with Aya, a Japanese exchange student he had met years previously in the U.S. Memories of Aya and his quest to find her in the ravaged post-war landscape help Fellers to discover both his wisdom and his humanity and enable him to come to the momentous decision that changed the course of history and the future of two nations.”
Politically fascinating material, for sure, and more than worthy of the silver screen treatment. Also fascinating are General MacArthur’s alleged ties to the UFO issue and public statements he made about what he perceived to be a potential threat to Earth from extraterrestrials. In a speech to cadets of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in May, 1962, MacArthur said:
“We deal now, not with things of this world alone, but with the illimitable distances and as yet unfathomed mysteries of the universe. We are reaching out for a new and boundless frontier. We speak in strange terms, of harnessing the cosmic energy... of ultimate conflict between a united human race and the sinister forces of some other planetary galaxy.”
The General made a similar statement to the Mayor of Naples, Achille Lauro, in 1955. In an October 7 meeting between the two men that took place in New York, MacArthur told Lauro that the nations of Earth would one day be forced to “make a common front against attack by people from other planets.”
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| MacArthur and President Truman, Wake Island, Oct. 15, 1950 |
What inspired such seemingly bizarre comments from MacArthur may never be known for sure, but certain ‘whistleblowers’ have suggested that the General was intimately involved with the UFO/ET issue, both during and after the War.
Disclosure Project witness Buck Sergeant Leonard Pretko (USAF retired), for example, is on record with his story of how, in the early 1950s, one of MacArthur’s personal security guards told him that “General Douglas MacArthur was very familiar with the Roswell incident, the crash material, and also the bodies because he himself has seen them.”
Another Disclosure Project witness, Sergeant Clifford Stone – who claims to be a deep insider on the UFO/ET issue – goes even further. Stone says that MacArthur was in charge of the Army’s Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit (IPU), which is thought to have been established sometime during the early-to-mid-1940s.
In September 2000, Stone told Disclosure Project Director Steven Greer that the IPU “continued all the way through to present day. Names have changed and records still haven’t surfaced.” Stone, also said that the IPU bore fruit:
“It came to conclusions that were not popular, i.e. interplanetary spacecraft. And they [the IPU] continued to do exactly what they do today and that is to be part of a multi-intelligence operation in the recovery of objects of unknown origin, particularly those that are of non-Earthly origin.”
Stone went on to tell Greer that the IPU’s purpose is to “get raw field intelligence data, and process that data into some type of useful intelligence product to disseminate to the field – to those people who have a need to know.”
“MacArthur definitely had physical evidence,” said Stone. “From the documentation I saw [while working this issue in the Army], I was not able to ascertain exactly what that evidence consisted of, but it was there.”
The IPU is intriguing. Still shrouded in mystery, the existence of the unit was not formally acknowledged until 1984 (approximately forty years after its formation) when UFO researcher William Steinman made an enquiry about the IPU with the Army Directorate of Counterintelligence. In response to Steinman’s enquiry, Lieutenant Colonel Lance Corine explained that:
“The unit was formed as an in-house project purely as an interest item for the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence. It was never a ‘unit’ in the military sense, nor was it ever formally organized or reportable, it had no investigative function, mission or authority and may not even have had any formal records at all. It is only through institutional memory that any recollection exists of this unit.”
Three years later, in 1987, UFO researcher Timothy Good made a similar enquiry with the same office. The response was brief and clearly intended as the Army’s final word on the subject – but it was also encrusted with a twinkly UFOlogical nugget: the IPU’s files, it turned out, had long ago been handed over to Project Blue Book – the US Air Force’s long-running UFO investigations program that was disbanded in 1969.
Colonel Anthony Gallo Jr, Director of Counterintelligence, informed Good that the IPU “was disestablished during the late 1950’s and never reactivated. All records pertaining to this unit were turned over to the US Air Force Office of Special Investigations in conjunction with operation ‘BLUEBOOK’.”
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| Letter to Timothy Good confirming that the IPU's files were turned over to Blue Book |
That the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit was associated with the UFO issue is hugely significant in light of the unit’s name: this was not a unit concerned with the discussion or investigation of advanced German or Soviet technology; it was not concerned with flocks of geese, weather balloons, swamp gas or other unusual atmospheric phenomena as explanations for UFOs. No, the IPU’s UFO concerns were“interplanetary” in nature...
in·ter·plan·e·tar·y:
adj.
Existing or occurring between planets
Some UFO researchers believe that the IPU was established in response to the Battle of Los Angeles, in which flying elliptical objects – still unidentified to this day – were sighted over LA on the morning of February 25, 1942. The unknown objects were greeted by heavy but seemingly ineffectual artillery fire from the US Army. Six civilians were killed during the “raid.”
It is notable that, to date, no documentation from the IPU whatsoever has been officially released. However, a number of leaked documents – the authenticity of which is debatable – paint a truly eye-popping picture of the IPU’s activities during the 1940s. In one document, dated March 5, 1942 – just nine days after the Battle of Los Angeles – General George C. Marshall states in a Top Secret memo to the President:
“This Headquarters has come to the determination that the mystery airplanes are in fact not earthly and according to secret intelligence sources they are in all probability of interplanetary origin."
Marshall continues: "As a consequence I have issued orders to Army G2 that a special intelligence unit be created to further investigate the phenomenon...” Thus was established the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit, which, so the story goes, would soon be headed-up by General MacArthur in close cooperation with General Marshall himself.
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| IPU field order instructing the officer in charge (OIC) to lead a counterintelligence team (including a scientist and medical doctor) to the Roswell crash site and to provide a report by 28 July. This leaked document is dated 4 July, 1947. |
Admittedly, rumours of MacArthur’s involvement with the IPU have never been fully substantiated, but then neither have rumours about J. Edgar Hoover’s romantic feelings for his FBI number-two man, Clyde Tolson. Clint Eastwood nevertheless saw fit to explore these rumours in his recent biopic of the FBI head honcho, J. Edgar – a movie in which the UFO issue receives not one mention, despite reams of official FBI documentation detailing Hoover’s forty-year preoccupation with flying saucers.
I am certainly not suggesting that all biopics of historical figures whose lives have intertwined with the UFO mystery should devote screen time to the issue (though, in a post-disclosure world, this may well become the norm), but how refreshing it would be for just one Hollywood screenwriter, just once, to draw inspiration from beyond the established historical meta-narrative and to transcend generic conventions when penning biopics of heavyweight political, military, and intelligence figures. John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Richard Nixon, George W. Bush, James Jesus Angleton, Margaret Thatcher – all have had varying degrees of knowledge about the UFO issue, and all have been the subject of award-winning Hollywood movies in which the term “UFO” is not once uttered.
The upcoming Emperor may tick all the boxes required to receive an Oscar (and no doubt Tommy Lee Jones is already making space on his awards shelf), but ask yourself: what would you rather the focus be in a movie about MacArthur – a predictable cross-cultural romance as promised by the synopsis, or, instead, a legendary military leader in a war-torn land, deeply concerned, not only by weighty post-War terrestrial matters, but also by “interplanetary” events quietly but dramatically impacting our world (details of which are known only to the most highly polished of officialdom’s top brass), all the while trying desperately not to drop the ball for fear that enemy nations will exploit these otherworldly phenomena to their military advantage...
Now that’s a movie I’d pay to see. Sadly, I think I’ll be waiting a while to see it.
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