Filmmaker Paul Davids on Jesus in India, Roswell, & His UFO sighting

Interview with Filmmaker Paul Davids on Jesus in India, Roswell, & His UFO sighting

Could you give us a flash of nostalgia by telling it how it was working with Martin Sheen on your movie “ROSWELL”?

Paul Davids: Martin Sheen is an actor of high principles and convictions. He agreed to play the character “Townsend” in our film at a time in his career before he became President of the U.S. on “WEST WING.” He joined our cast not out of any conviction that the ET-UFO theory of the Roswell Incident was fact, but appreciating that there was ambiguity injected by his character: Is “Townsend” a government disinformation agent? Is he a whistle blower? Is he there to manipulate the witnesses? There’s never a final answer, and Martin liked that. Behind the scenes on the set, he spent time introducing us to the mysteries of the Marian apparitions (unexplained sightings of what has been thought to be the Virgin Mary) rather than discussing UFO’s. He was one of the first to educate me on the fact that many of the reported apparitions of Mary, considered miracles by Catholics, are genuine mysteries and not myths. That would include Lourdes, Fatima, Medjugorje, Cairo and the Mexico incident of the Virgin of Guadalupe of 1531. He narrated a documentary about the Medjugorje apparitions. What I learned from him was very much on my mind when I decided to produce and direct “Before We Say Goodbye” which deals with a grandmother’s faith in the Virgin of Guadalupe. That is my most recently distributed film.

Now let’s flip to Jesus in India. Could you give us a bit of history on the documentary Jesus in India?

Paul Davids: I prefer to make films on controversial topics, pushing the envelope in ways that are sure to make people think and examine their assumptions and beliefs. Associate producer Robert Rotstan, Jr., introduced me to a book by Edward T. Martin, a Texan who was raised as a fundamentalist Christian but who stumbled over the dilemma of the missing years of Jesus that are not discussed in the New Testament. A trail of reported evidence led him to believe Jesus had spent years in India, which it turns out is a prevalent belief among Hindus (and some Buddhists) in India. I had also been intrigued by the writings of Paramahansa Yogananda, specifically AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A YOGI. In some of his works, Yogananda claims that Christ was in India part of his life. When it became clear to me that several explorers of high reputation had reported seeing an ancient manuscript about Jesus in India at the Hemis Monastery in Ladakh, India, high in the Himalayas, I felt there was the making of a strong story. This was especially true because Edward T. Martin had become an outcast in his church for his beliefs about Jesus in India, and all of my films up to that point had been about gifted or unusual men who had become outcasts, including ballet artist Nijinsky, Roswell witness Major Jesse Marcel, “acid guru” Timothy Leary, Vincent van Gogh, a shaman in Sedona named Rahelio, and even science-fiction pioneers Forrest J Ackerman and Ray Bradbury, who were considered weird in the 1930’s because they seriously believed man would set foot on the moon in their lifetimes. CONTINUED

For more of the interview with Paul Davids on Roswell and his personal UFO sighting and Jesus in India

http://www.examiner.com/article/filmmaker-paul-davids-on-jesus-india-roswell-and-his-ufo-sighting