Yes, that’s me.
I’m standing alongside the poster for my movie The Riverman at the official A&E screening at the Ince Theater in Culver City. We won our night on Labor Day. We were the highest-rated A&E original movie ever in the key 18–49 year old demographic. So what does this have to do with UFO Magazine?
Riverman was about the ultimate capture of the Green River Killer, helped along by advice from Ted Bundy. The identification of Gary Leon Ridgway, who has since confessed, was convicted, and was sentenced to life in prison without parole, was made possible when a small sample of his DNA in evidence in King County, Washington, for almost 15 years, was finally tested using a new process called polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a method of amplifying DNA invented by 1993 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry Kary Mullis, PhD. In other words, the Mullis PCR method allows small samples of DNA to be copied and thence grown, theoretically, into usable amounts. It was the scientific basis for the motion picture, Jurassic Park. After a homicide detective in the King County Sheriff’s Office heard about PCR amplification, he sent the sample of Ridgway’s DNA to the lab for matches on some of the Green River Killer victims. It was a match and Ridgway was arrested.
Mullis followed in the footsteps of the legendary Francis Crick, who, with J. D. Watson discovered the double-helix structure of DNA and explained how DNA replicated itself. But Crick also was a proponent of a theory called panspermia, which is the theory that life exists and is distributed throughout the universe in the form of germs or spores. Thus life is a single, self-propagating system. But who dispersed these spores throughout the universe? Perhaps some form of highly intelligent life at the dawn of time as we know it? Kary Mullis, to some extent, has also been cited as a proponent of this theory. Thus, in a stretch that only can be made in Los Angeles, the developer of the method that was the mechanism by which the Green River Killer was caught, it can be argued, was a proponent of a theory that posits the intelligent design for dispersion of life in the universe via beings not from Earth.
At least that’s what I would argue in my personal vision of UFOs. Back to the picture. It took me 10 years to get this movie made. It will take another 10 to get The Day After Roswell made.
But in Los Angeles, life’s a pitch.
