On opening day of the new film Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, my brother Caleb and I eagerly attended an early showing to see the film before the evening after-work-rush began. An entertaining flick by all means, it nonetheless seemed to lack a bit of the spark (or perhaps in this case, a bit of the all-spark) of its predecessor, though I was still glad to see it maintained a variety of anomalous references in the film. These included an apparent near-death-experience by Shia LeBeouf’s character Sam near the film’s climax; also, what may have been a reference to various locales where fossilized dinosaur footprints allegedly appear alongside early human tracks is shown during the film’s opening sequence, as explained by the arrival of “the Fallen” to prehistoric Earth eons ago.

Though these instances provided a bit of food for Fortean thought, they pale in comparison to the number of Ufological references made in the first film. For instance, the initial teaser trailer depicted the famous loss of the Beagle 2 probe, a British landing craft sent to Mars by the European Space Agency in 2003. In reality, whether the Beagle 2 ever made it to the red planet is uncertain, as it mysteriously lost contact with the European Mars Express, six days before its scheduled entry into Mars’ atmosphere. In Transformers the event was explained as being the result of an “exo-skeletal-type” robot (apparently the popular Autobot character Bumblebee) encountering it after it successfully landed. The trailer detailed classified footage which “…transmitted approximately 13 seconds”, before the rover is crushed by the robot, initiating a cover-up by the film’s “Sector 7” organization, which fabricated the story that the probe had crashed.

Though this early teaser trailer for the film seemed to foreshadow a host of anomalous references that would be made in Transformers, in their article The Deep Politics of Hollywood: Close Encounters with the Pentagon, authors Robbie Graham and Matthew Alford allude to the kinds of the hoops Michael Bay and his crew may have been made to jump through regarding use of such material:

The original film’s script is loaded with UFOlogical references and laboured rhetoric absolving the U.S. military of complicity in what turns out to be a massive cover-up of alien visitations. The finger is pointed instead at the quasi-governmental ‘Sector 7’ which has been concealing its ‘Top Secret’ alien research for decades within “special access projects” – and all without the knowledge and consent of a shocked and concerned Secretary of Defense.

“The United States Air Force (USAF) provided Transformers director Michael Bay with hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars worth of state-of-the-art hardware for use in the 2007 movie, including the F-117 stealth fighter and – in its first ever Silver Screen appearance – the F-22 Raptor fighter. The DoD’s support for the Transformers sequel (2009) was no less enthusiastic as Bay was granted every benefit of the Pentagon’s coveted ‘full co-operation.’

When I saw the first film, I recall wondering why there weren’t more popular motifs involving UFOs used, considering the unique extraterrestrial elements already incorporated into the story. True, many conspiracy theories involve ways in which Hollywood has allegedly been used in the past to disseminate information about extraterrestrials, or to “condition” the public to the reality of UFO visitations. However, considering an alternative perspective, could it instead be that a lack of cooperation from various organizations, due to intended use of sensitive subject matter, might have led to some of these elements being excluded from films like the Transformers franchise?