Historical Piece - Alien Missile Crisis

Script PDF

One of the first things I wanted to know when given this assignment was that this script would be purely written for creative purposes, and know that I could write essentially whatever I wanted.

I first came up with the idea for Cuban aliens and a CIA agent sent on a mission to kidnap Castro because in real life, my great-grandfather was the director of the CIA’s Western Hemisphere operations and had even orchestrated a plot to assassinate Castro. He was also involved with the Bay of Pigs.

I also have a lot of interest in the Cold War. I find it a fascinating time in history because it was pretty much the closest we have ever been to completely annihilating the world through nuclear war. One of my favorite tidbits about the Cold War is about Stanislav Petrov, who worked at a nuclear early-warning system facility when he received a report that up to five missiles were being launched from the United States. The report was obviously faulty, but Petrov had no way of knowing that for sure, and had to make the decided whether or not to retaliate, and send the world into a real nuclear apocalypse. He assessed the data, and correctly deduced that the report was inaccurate, and thus saved the world.

With this historical piece, I decided to take some of these events that happened in real life – a CIA director, and the fate of the world resting in the hands of an individual – and try to tell a revisionist story about what would happen if Castro was actually an alien sent to Earth after the first time a nuclear device was used in a time of war, and if the man sent to (in this story) kidnap him was completely incompetent (in contrast to Petrov) and possibly ensured the world’s doom.

And, while the story is revisionist and fictional, I still feel that it communicates the overall absurdity of the cold war. So much of what drove the Cold War was simply paranoia, and the fact that in real life the fate of the world rested on one individual who was, by some miracle, rational enough not to retaliate, highlights how absurd the Cold War was. By telling a story that is in its own way absurd and over the top I feel I communicated a very real and still frightening aspect of the Cold War.

Like previous projects in this class, this project was collaborative, which was once again an enriching experience. I once again had to subject my idea to someone else’s interpretation, though it was much more comfortable than the Round Robin as Morgan and I could actively collaborate together, bounce ideas off of each other, and find a balance between an outrageous story with some historical background. I feel that if I was writing this on my own I would have gone too far with the outrageous aspects of the story, and having an other person working with me who may have had a more balanced approach to telling the story made the story better.