Hangar 18
Entry updated 11 October 2021. Tagged: Film.
Film (1980). Sunn Classic Pictures. Directed by James L Conway. Written by Tom Chapman, James L Conway, Stephen Lord (uncredited) and David O'Malley (uncredited) and Ken Pettus (as Steven Thornley). Cast includes Gary Collins, James Hampton, Darren McGavin and Robert Vaughn. 97 minutes. Colour.
After receiving congratulations from the President on their Space Flight mission, a space shuttle's crew members launch a satellite ... right into a passing flying saucer (see UFOs). The saucer crashlands in Arizona, whence it is quickly recovered by the US Air Force and taken to "an airforce base in Texas – Hangar 18", with Washington duly informed. With an election two weeks away and the polls saying the result is too close to call, the White House Chief of Staff, Gordon Cain (Vaughn), insists the news must be kept quiet until the election is over.
The Scientists studying the Spaceship discover that it has been monitoring Earth, but is incapable of interstellar flight – so there's still a mothership out there; designs on the ship resemble those cut into a Mexican plateau (echoing Peru's Nazca Lines). The Alien language is deciphered with surprising ease (see Linguistics): the scientists learn that thousands of years ago the aliens kept "pre-humans" as slaves, who worshipped them (see Religion); the aliens slept with the females, who gave birth to humanity (one scientist declares the aliens are "the missing link" in our Evolution). Furthermore, the aliens are about to return en masse to Earth.
Meanwhile, the accident had killed one of the shuttle's crew, and because the event is being suppressed the two surviving crew members, Steve Bancroft (Collins) and Lew Price (Hampton), find they are being scapegoated for the accidental death; they attempt to discover what happened to the Spaceship. Cain tries to hinder them, but matters get out of hand, escalating – including Price's death at the hands of US government agents – until he decides to remove all evidence of Hangar 18 by crashing a bomb-laden plane into it. However, the scientists and Bancroft are protected by being in the spaceship at the time, and so the truth comes out.
Needless to say, this is a poor, Cliché-ridden film with cheap special effects, although it can be enjoyed in the right frame of mind. The title originates from Robert Spencer Carr's assertion at the 1974 Tampa Flying Saucer Symposium that in 1948 the US Government had stored a crashed UFO and 12 dead frozen aliens in Hangar 18 of the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. This was a reworking of earlier Area 51-type stories (see Paranoia), with some new details added, such as naming the specific hangar. The film also stirs large dollops of Erich von Däniken and other conspiracy theories into the mix, foreshadowing similar Paranoia-laden themes in The X-Files (1993-2002). The novelization is Hangar 18 (1980) by Robert Weverka and Charles E Sellier Jr (1943-2011).
Hangar 18 was later televised (see Television) as Invasion Force (1983), with a new ending. The film (if not Carr directly) presumably inspired Megadeath's track "Hangar 18", from their album Rust in Peace (1990). [SP/GSt]
see also: Half Japanese.
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