“Discussing his classic UFO blockbuster Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Steven Spielberg once revealed in an obscure and now defunct academic journal that he ‘really found faith [in alien visitation]’ when he heard that the government opposed the film. ‘If NASA took the time to write me a 20-page letter, then I knew there must be something happening,’ Spielberg said. ‘When they read the script, they got very angry and felt that it was a film that would be dangerous. I felt they mainly wrote the letter because Jaws convinced so many people around the world that there were sharks in toilets and bathtubs, not just in the oceans and rivers. They were afraid the same kind of epidemic would happen with UFOs.’ ”
___
Ward Kimball, the Oscar-winning animator, revealed this story in 1979. He was talking about a project in the mid-1950s where the U. S. Air Force approached Walt Disney himself to make an animated educational documentary on the subject of UFOs, flying saucers. Disney had worked with the USAF and military previously during the Second World War and he had a very close relationship with the Department of Defense. He produced propaganda shorts for the military during WWII and they were quite cozy, really.
So, according to Kimball, Disney went along with this deal. According to Kimball, the purpose of the documentary was to help acclimatize the American public to the existence of extraterrestrials. That would seem to be a departure from the USAF's previous efforts to more along the debunking side of things.
So, what happened was the Air Force, according to Kimball, offered Disney real footage of UFOs for use in his documentary. And Disney started to draw conceptual designs for this UFO documentary. But at the last minute, the USAF decided to pull out and said they would no longer provide the footage. When that happened, Kimball said he challenged the official USAF liaison to the documentary film project who was a Colonel. This Colonel allegedly told Kimball, ‘There was indeed plenty of UFO footage, but that neither Kimball nor anyone else was going to get access to it.’ So, of course, the project was abandoned.
http://www.earthfiles.com/news.php?ID=1507&category=Environment