Revisiting Witch Mountain

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Suspension of disbelief is essential for many movies.  When a friend pointed out that Disney had rebooted Witch Mountain, of course I suspended.  Recast as a new millennium-style action sci-fi movie, it really didn’t rock the critics, but there’s a lot going on in it.  Shall we start at the beginning?  The opening credits sympathetically establish the reality of UFOs as alien visitors to Earth.  In other words, we know from the beginning that the kids are aliens, not witches.  And the chasing begins immediately and doesn’t let up.  Not only is the government after the kids, so is a “bounty-hunter”/“terminator” from their home planet.  A body-building cab driver and an ostracized academic (with you there!) work to get the kids back to their ship, which is being held by said government in Witch Mountain.

In a nod to the original an RV is thrown in, and the setting at a Los Vegas UFO convention ads a kind of surreal twist. That’s what was kind of disturbing, in my experience—the blending of “nut job” UFO enthusiasts and the reality aspect prompted by the prologue.  UFOs, like most things in American culture, have become extremely divisive.  With nods to everything from The X-Files to Close Encounters, and many enthusiastic high-fives to Star Wars, there are mixed messages and there’s too much going on.  It’s difficult to process.  The cameo by Whitley Strieber was a nice touch.  Long gone are the locals with shotguns trying to find witches.  Witch Mountain itself is a government facility more secure than Area 51.

The reimagining of the story is signaled by the change of title to Race to Witch Mountain.  So the story seems to have gone off the rails at some points.  I always find movies where people faced with the obvious “supernatural” simply refuse to believe, fascinating.  It is, after all, about belief.  The plot, with its “our planet is dying—yours is too” message, is a bit tricky to decipher.  There are those convinced that we need to abandon Earth to other worlds where we can continue our acquisitiveness unhampered, and those who believe we should repair the damage here.  As I say, everything is divisive.  Overall, the movie seems to say that the system kinda works, so let’s keep with it.  And wreck lots of stuff along the way.  I couldn’t help but notice the borrowed trope from Pirates of the Caribbean, “You’re a good man, Jack.”  It seems Jack is a favored protagonist name.  And strange things like that happen on planet Earth, at least seen through the Disney lens.

Brain Exercise

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Why do we read, if not to expand our minds?  I’ve read all of Diana Walsh Pasulka’s previous books but Encounters is mind-blowing.  I feel particularly honored that a scholar of religion has been able to put together so many pieces of a very strange puzzle.  Pasulka’s first book was about Purgatory.  Having grown up Catholic that seems a natural enough choice.  Her second book, American Cosmic, focused on a topic that academics were just starting to address at the time—UFOs.  That book justly earned her acclaim.  Encounters takes a few steps further into the mysteries of being human.  Those who experience UFOs have much in common with people who have other extraordinary encounters.  The profiles in this book will give you pause time and again.

Many of us have felt that the unfortunately successful government strategy of ridicule toward experiencers has been a blanket covering up the truth for too long.  I was interested in UFOs as a child and was unmercifully teased for it.  One of the reasons I was interested was that I learned, when I was about eleven, that my grandfather had been interested as well.  I was only two when he died, so there was no way to learn this personally.  It came through discovering a couple of his books that my mother had kept.  Since she was one of five siblings, it’s difficult to say if he’d had any other books on the subject, but being a reasonable kid, I wondered why this was a forbidden topic.  You could talk about ghosts (at least a little bit) and be considered “normal.”  Mention UFO’s and you’re insane.

When the Navy’s video recordings of UFOs—renamed UAPs—were released in 2019, there was silence in the room for about half an hour.  Serious people began to realize there might be something to this.  Of course, those who’d internalized the ridicule response continued to fall back on it, perhaps as a defense mechanism.  That revelation has allowed, however, serious consideration of what is a very weird phenomenon.  I’ve deliberately avoided saying too much about what Pasulka covers in her book.  As I generally intend when I do this, what I’m hinting is that you should read this book.  You should do so with an open mind.  If you do, you might find yourself thinking in some new ways.  Of course, some will ridicule.  Others, however, may walk away with an expanded perception of reality.