Hangar 18 (film)

Hangar 18 (film)

Released	25 June 1980 (United States)
Studio	Sunn Classic Pictures (credited as Schick Sunn Classics)
Director	James L. Conway
Writers	Ken Pettus (as Steven Thornley), from a story by Thomas C. Chapman and Conway
Cast	Gary Collins, James Hampton, Darren McGavin, Robert Vaughn, Pamela Bellwood
Locations	Midland and Big Spring, Texas; former Pyote and Webb Air Force Bases; Salt Lake City
Running time	97 minutes
Date	July 1980
Topics	Crashes & retrievals (topic), Beings & bodies (topic), Secrecy & cover-up (topic)
People	Barry Goldwater
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 92
Year	1980 in UFO history
Timeline	1980 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	18

Hangar 18 is a 1980 science-fiction thriller from Sunn Classic Pictures, directed by James L. Conway and starring Gary Collins, James Hampton, Darren McGavin and Robert Vaughn.^[1][7] It tells of a government cover-up of a crashed alien spacecraft. Its title comes from the legend, popularised by Robert Spencer Carr in 1974, that alien craft and bodies were stored in a "Hangar 18" at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.^[1][2] In the film itself the hangar is at a fictional "Wolf Air Force Base" in Texas.^[1] Its director later described it as a modern dramatisation of the Roswell incident.^[2]

Plot

The story runs as follows:^[1][6][7]

• The collision. A satellite just launched from a Space Shuttle collides with an unidentified object, killing an astronaut in the payload bay.
• The cover-up. The damaged craft makes a controlled landing in the Arizona desert and is taken to Hangar 18 at Wolf Air Force Base in Texas, where NASA's deputy director, Harry Forbes (McGavin), leads a study of it. With a close presidential election two weeks away, the White House chief of staff, Gordon Cain (Vaughn), orders total secrecy.
• The astronauts. The surviving astronauts, Steve Bancroft (Collins) and Lew Price (Hampton), are blamed for the accident, and the telemetry proving the collision is erased. They set out to expose the truth. Government agents pursue them, and Price is killed.
• The discoveries. Inside the ship the scientists find two dead crew members and a living human woman in stasis. Symbols match those of ancient Earth civilisations. Surveillance video shows power plants, bases and cities marked as "designated landing areas".
• The revelation. The aliens once visited Earth, and humans are their descendants. They are about to return, from a mothership the small craft must have come from.
• The ending. Cain has an explosives-laden plane flown into the hangar. Bancroft and the scientists survive inside the alien ship, and Forbes calls a press conference.

A television version, Invasion Force (1983), had a different ending. Leonard Maltin felt it undermined the film.^[1][7]

The legend

The film drew on the Hangar 18 story:^[2][4][7]

• Carr's claim. In a radio interview on 11 October 1974, and at a Tampa flying-saucer symposium, the writer Robert Spencer Carr claimed that a crashed saucer and frozen alien bodies from a 1948 crash at Aztec, New Mexico, were kept in Hangar 18 at Wright-Patterson.
• The denial. The Air Force said there was no Hangar 18 at the base. It noted that Carr's story resembled the 1968 novel The Fortec Conspiracy, itself inspired by a one-line tale of alien bodies in a Wright-Patterson "morgue" in the 1966 book Incident at Exeter.
• Carr's son. He later described his father as a teller of tall tales who insisted they were true.
• Goldwater. Senator Barry Goldwater's account of being refused entry to a restricted area at the base added to the legend.
• The 1985 statement. "There are not now, nor have there ever been, any extraterrestrial visitors or equipment on Wright-Patterson Air Force Base."

The 1980 In Search of... programme filmed at Hangar 18A at Wright-Patterson. Its manager said the freezing cells had never held alien bodies and were used to test aircraft parts.^[2]

Production

Sunn Classic Pictures was known in the 1970s for sensational "documentaries" on Bigfoot, ancient astronauts, near-death experiences, Noah's Ark and the Bermuda Triangle, and for its Grizzly Adams television series.^[1][5][6] Conway and three of the four writers were Sunn veterans. The film was Sunn's first attempt at a conspiracy thriller, modelled on Capricorn One (1978).^[1][3] Its other influences:^[1][3][6][7]

• UFO lore. The Roswell incident and rumours about Area 51.
• Ancient astronauts. Erich von Däniken's theories of ancient alien visitors, including symbols resembling the Nazca Lines.
• Film and television. Echoes of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Twilight Zone and Nigel Kneale's Quatermass.

Shooting took place in Midland and Big Spring, Texas, at the former Pyote and Webb Air Force Bases, and in Salt Lake City.^[1] In November 1979 local papers reported that Roswell was being scouted for the film.^[2] A novelisation by Robert Weverka and the producer Charles E. Sellier Jr. appeared in 1980.^[7]

The film opened with Sunn's familiar text crawl. It claimed that "with the help of a few brave eyewitnesses who have stepped forward", the story "can finally be told".^[3][5] Its television spots promised to "reveal the truth" about UFOs, while showing a Space Shuttle in orbit before the shuttle had flown.^[1][3]

Reception

The film had a mostly poor reception:^[1][6][7][8]

• The New York Times. Vincent Canby wrote that it "pretends to be skeptical, but requires that everyone watching it be profoundly gullible". He said the saucer looked "like an oversized toy".
• Ares. Christopher John wrote in Ares that it was "the perfect Sunday evening movie for television".
• Moria. The review called it "the National Enquirer version of Close Encounters".
• Encyclopedia. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction found it "poor" and "Cliché-ridden" but enjoyable "in the right frame of mind".
• Rotten Tomatoes. It holds a 40 per cent score from five reviews.

Later writers were kinder. Den of Geek's retrospective enjoyed its UFO investigation scenes. Film Stories called it "hugely entertaining" and a companion piece to Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day.^[3][5] It was one of very few American films shown in Soviet cinemas, and was broadcast on Soviet television from 1 January 1982, where it became popular with young viewers.^[1]

Influence

The folklorist Thomas E. Bullard described the film as "nascent Roswell mythology".^[2] Together with the press coverage of Carr's claims, it helped bring the crash-retrieval idea into popular culture, and it helped fix Wright-Patterson's place in UFO lore.^[2][4] Its legacy:^[1][7]

• Megadeth. It presumably inspired Megadeth's 1990 song "Hangar 18".
• Star Trek. Conway revisited the theme in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Little Green Men", set in a Roswell Hangar 18.
• MST3K. The film was featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000 in 1989.

Claims of intelligence involvement

Some UFO writers have suggested that intelligence agencies helped shape UFO lore in this period. The examples cited include the Air Force Office of Special Investigations' disinformation aimed at the physicist Paul Bennewitz in the early 1980s, which is documented in Greg Bishop's Project Beta (2005) and the 2013 documentary Mirage Men.^{[12][13][14][15]} Another is Philip Corso's 1997 book The Day After Roswell, whose foreword Senator Strom Thurmond withdrew. One article placed Corso among the "Shickshinny Knights", a fringe order of anticommunist ex-officers.^[9][10][18] Also among the sources is an obituary of the businessman Patrick Frawley, chairman of the Schick razor company from 1958 to 1970 and a Knight of Malta. The Schick name appears in the film studio's credit, but the obituary does not mention the film.^[6][17]

None of these sources shows that the government or any intelligence agency influenced Hangar 18.^[12][17][18] Stanton Friedman's review of Corso's book refused automated access, and a Michael Heiser summary of the Bennewitz affair could not be loaded.^[11][16]

People and topics

• Hangar 18 — The legendary hangar at Wright-Patterson said to hold alien craft and bodies.
• Unidentified anomalous phenomena — The U.S. government's current term for unidentified objects in the air, in space and underwater.
• Unidentified flying object — An object in the sky that can't be identified; the older term for UAP.
• U.S. Air Force — The U.S. military service that ran the official UFO projects from 1947 to 1969.
• Wright-Patterson Air Force Base — The Ohio air base that housed Project Blue Book and is linked to the Hangar 18 legend.
• Barry Goldwater — U.S. senator and Air Force Reserve general who said he was denied access to UFO material at Wright-Patterson.
• Crash retrieval — The alleged recovery of crashed non-human craft by governments.

On the Timeline

• Doty's psychological operations claim (1980s) — Doty says an Air Force unit ran psychological operations on people who saw secret aircraft.
• Andrew Basiago and Project Pegasus (1981) — Andrew Basiago claims he took part in a secret time-travel project.

See every 1980 event on the UAP Timeline →

Further reading

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia articles “Hangar 18 (film)”, “Hangar 18 (conspiracy theory)”, “Paul Bennewitz”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.