The Hopper Files

We're sure to see many loving tributes to recently-deceased actor Dennis Hopper. Prepare for a lengthy applause break during next year's Academy Awards death montage, for example. And the next time you visit your friend with the collection of "Waterworld" action figures, don't be surprised if they're draped with a black cloth. But paranormal researcher Jon Kelly is celebrating Hopper's life not as an accomplished thespian, but as a proponent of true facts about UFOs. According to Kelly, Hopper's scene with Jack Nicholson in "Easy Rider" laid out many realities about extraterrestrial visitation that the public had yet to absorb. In the film, Hopper tells Nicholson about the strange lights he's seen in the sky, and Nicholson launches into an explanation of how aliens began building bases on the earth in the late '40s, after humans "started bouncin' radar beams off the moon". Kelly says before this scene, ideas like this were dismissed as belonging only to "marginalized kooks". "Easy Rider", he suggests, might have been created in part to indoctrinate the public to the realities of extraterrestrial visitation. Although that doesn't seem like the best idea, since the characters in the film are almost all marginalized kooks. Anyway, you can read more about Kelly's hypothesis here. Watch the scene yourself and make up your own mind: