The best image I could get…
Robert Emenegger emerged from the advertising and entertainment industry in the 1960s as a sharp and innovative mind. The United States Department of Defense took notice and asked him and his partner Alan Sandler to produce a few small films on contract. In 1971, they hit him with a bomb: would he like to produce a film on what the Government knew about UFOs and aliens? He would have the full cooperation of the Air Force and other agencies, and they also promised to provide film footage of an actual flying saucer landing at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico sometime in the 1960s.
Who could refuse? Soon, Emenegger was visiting the Pentagon, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and Holloman itself. He was given apparently free reign of the facilities and encouraged to ask anything he wanted. Even Major Donald Keyhoe, who failed to get the U.S. government to open up about the subject in the 1950s, called to say he was outraged that mere civilians were getting access to stories he was never allowed to hear. The film, which was entitled UFOs: Past, Present and Future, was going well.
Just before deadline, an Air Force contact, who had been nothing but cooperative, called to say that they would not be allowed to use the Holloman footage. The climax of the film was ruined and Emenegger had to go with some hastily-produced drawings to describe the story.
Along the way, he saw government scientists blowing holes in concrete walls with lasers, using computers to read human minds, and sophisticated (for the time) 3-D holography. During the interview, I sometimes thought that Emenegger was trying to tell us a little more about advanced technology in the last 50 years than most of us could know or guess.
He also describes a meeting with Col. Phillip Corso in the 1980s when Corso described finding pictures of alien-looking beings in a file cabinet, and how that story may have changed considerably to fit the bill for his sensationalistic 1997 book, The Day After Roswell.
Enjoy this fascinating and rare talk with a little-known figure in the history of the UFO subject.
P.S. Bob was also a major creative force behind the Lancelot Link: Secret Chimp kid’s show of the early 1970s, which I watched faithfully when I was a wee lad. He wrote all of the songs for the show, among other contributions. We talked about this, but for some reason the recording cut off about 5 minutes from the end of the interview. Does someone want to keep Lance Link under wraps!? You decide!
