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law enforcement operations, is actually being developed for more sinister pur-
poses. In a somewhat similar vein, the narrative of the movie RoboCop (1987)
shows how megalomaniac leaders of the future plan to use another new law
enforcement innovation in this case a powerful half-human, half-robotic
creation to further their own lust for power.
On television, series such as Dallas, Knots Landing, and Dynasty frequently
resorted to conspiracy themes in their essentially soap-opera plots. Such
shows, which focused on the bad behavior of the rich and powerful, were
extremely popular in the 1980s. Their stories showed a world in which con-
spiracies were an integral part of business and politics.
Of course, sometimes the conspiracy theory theme continued to be de-
picted in a more intentionally serious way. The 1988 film Betrayed, for ex-
ample, involves a murder investigation that leads to conspiracy. In the movie,
director Costa Gravas follows the story of an undercover agent (portrayed
by Debra Winger) as she tries to discover who is responsible for the mur-
der of a prominent talk show host. As the plot unfolds, it becomes clear
that the victim was targeted because he was Jewish and that the killers had
bigger things than one simple murder on their minds. Indeed, to her hor-
ror, the agent eventually learns that a man she has befriended (a character
played by Tom Berenger) is not an innocent man, but instead leads a violently
militant white-supremacist conspiracy. This depiction of conspiracy deviated
Vision and Re-Vision 125
from what had usually been shown on screen, though it focused some atten-
tion on a facet of real-life conspiracy that had received only sporadic public
attention. (The conspiratorial aspects of racial hate groups received much
more public recognition within a few years. Awareness became especially pro-
nounced after the deadly bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City in
1995.)
THE ROSWELL EFFECT
Just as the beginning of the 1980s brought a change in the nation s political
landscape, that time also saw another development in the evolving story of
conspiracy theory in America. At first, it probably seemed to be an ephemeral
development about a topic of little consequence. But it developed into an
important narrative in popular culture within a few years.7 This was the
reemergence of an old news story, the supposed crash landing of a UFO in
Roswell, New Mexico.
Although that event has caused a stir in the context of the UFO mania
in the late 1940s, it mostly had faded from public memory soon thereafter.
Indeed, although UFOs remained a popular topic of conversation and had
attracted a cadre of committed enthusiasts, for three decades the Roswell
incident was seldom mentioned.
Soon after the 1947 incident, the government declared that the reported
crash was nothing more than a stray weather balloon. Officials produced mate-
rial evidence that seemed to back up that claim. Other UFO accounts had less
contrary evidence and seemed more open to interpretation for those wishing
to believe, and so interest in the Roswell event had been overshadowed.
In the months before 1980, that situation began to change. Several people
with a strong interest in UFOs, notably Stanton T. Friedman and William
L. Moore, reexamined the strange reports from Roswell in 1947 and came
away unconvinced of the official explanation that it was simply a govern-
ment weather balloon.8 Locating some of the people who claimed to have
witnessed parts of the story thirty years earlier, the new investigators heard
increasingly complicated accounts. After hearing these stories, the UFO in-
vestigators concluded that not only had a UFO crashed in New Mexico, but
that alien occupants had been recovered. The details varied, but for UFO
believers, it began to seem as though the Roswell incident had more to reveal
than originally thought. Soon, new accounts of the event started to make
the rounds. The stories were sufficiently interesting to attract a mainstream
audience.9
One of the themes that emerged with the renewed attention to the Roswell
incident was that of the government cover-up. Many committed UFO ad-
vocates believed not only that an extraterrestrial craft had crashed, but that
it had been recovered with its occupants (in some accounts, several of the
alien occupants were even alive to be captured). Of course, this meant that
there needed to be an explanation about why such a monumental occurrence
126 Conspiracy Theory in Film, Television, and Politics
was not acknowledged by the government or by the leading institutions of
society. The easiest reason seemed to be that the evidence was suppressed
and that officials constructed an elaborate system of lies to hide the truth.
Not surprisingly, then, for those persons who believed the fantastic accounts,
a conspiracy theory element was a central and necessary part of the story.
But it was not only the firm believers who were attracted to the aliens-and-
conspiracy story. Even those people for whom the Roswell story was mostly
an entertaining speculation (rather than something that was literally true)
were repeatedly exposed to the new version of the narrative. It continually
surfaced in popular tabloids and magazines, movies, novels, and other forms
of popular culture. With the attention that the Roswell story attracted, a
conspiracy theory mindset was found in yet another strand of contemporary
popular culture.
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