Close encounters of all kinds are the focus of “Abducted!” a special on the sensational subject of people claiming to have been kidnapped by space aliens. Produced by MTV News, the otherworldly show airs at 9 p.m. Tuesday.
Many people snicker at the notion that aliens might consider Earth a choice destination, but after watching “Abducted,” hosted and written by MTV’s Kurt Loder, that snicker could turn into a full-blown belly laugh when subjects talk about being spirited away by odd-looking creatures.
In the special, Loder admits that some of the abductees are just garden-variety “wingnuts,” but think about a report issued by the Air Force just a few weeks ago.
The document concerns the well-known incident in Roswell, N.M., where some claim alien bodies were recovered from a crash site 50 years ago this month. The Air Force now says those bodies were, in fact, dummiesthat previously had been used in parachute tests. For years, the Air Force said the unidentified flying object in question actually was a weather balloon.
“Geeze, that’s an interesting wrinkle,” says Loder about the dummy theory. “Very interesting. Why would dummies be there, I wonder?”
Added Dave Sirulnick, the executive producer of “Abducted!”: “I think it’s funny that 50 years later, they’re still trying to justify what happened out there. It was so curious that they felt compelled to come up with another answer after all these years.”
What’s the number of special FBI agents Mulder and Scully?
The popularity of “The X-Files,” “Independence Day” and the new movie “Men in Black” figure in “Abducted!” as does Roswell, which has become a popular tourist attraction.
But the accounts, in the words of “abductees,” are what give the quick-moving “Abducted!” a certain weird appeal. There’s Carrie, who relates her experiences aboard a space ship, and Vogue, who believes he was assaulted by aliens several times.
“It’s an interesting popular-culture phenomenon,” says Loder, 52. “I mean, it’s always interesting when people say they’ve had contact with any form of extraterrestrial sentient being. There’s not a lot of evidence for it, but I’m not going to say it can never happen. It could, but there’ve just never been very many persuasive cases, if any.”
Although “Abducted!” may be a breezy subject, it nonetheless is an example of what has emerged as MTV’s strong commitment to its news operations, a philosophy that is especially unusual for a cable channel dedicated to music videos.
In addition to giving news updates every hour, and the weekly news wrapup “The Week in Rock,” MTV News has done reports on hate rock, racism, kids and guns, drugs, the job market, violence in rap, religion and the Simpson verdict.
MTV also has heavily involved its audience in politics, with coverage of the 1992 and ’96 presidential elections.
Sirulnick, who is senior vice president and executive producer of news and specials for MTV, said the network’s entrance into news reporting first started when “The Week in Rock” came on the air 10 years ago.
“We decided that to gain the audience’s trust and their confidence, we really needed to be really good at covering music,” he said. Once MTV established itself as a credible source for music news, “we could then move forward into social issues,” he added. Sirulnick says MTV News has a staff of 70 people.
“What we felt gave us the freedom to do that was the fact that we knew that music was a very, very important thing in the audience’s lives,” Sirulnick says, “but we knew there was more to that. We knew that if you were sitting at home listening to NWA in the late ’80s or Public Enemy (both socially-conscious rap groups), there were a lot of other things on your mind as well.
“As the music became more politically and issue-oriented, it certainly made the foray into that kind of coverage a little easier.”
