it’s Basically accepted by the TCM community that the original titlecards for the film were made using recordings of Solar Flares, but the info was confirmed by Tobe Hooper himself durring a interview in 2001, where he said the following:
“The sun was a part of the problem. And so, under the opening credits, and you see all that red, well that’s solar flares, y’know, sun spots, well, solar flares affect things on earth…”
but sources arent really that important for this topic because it is vary apparent just by watching the titlecards that it in fact is footage of the sun.
(here is a youtube link so you can watch it and see for yourself.)
watching just once, its easy to see why the community accepted this expenation, but nobody ever tried to find the footage sampled to make the titlecards to my knowledge, so i went on a quest to find it so i could make it available to the public, the budget for the movie was low as hell, they most likely only used one recording, it cant be that hard to find it right?
i started my search like anyone else would by typing “Old Solar Flare Footage” on google, and got some good results, i found a recording of the sun in a stock footage website that was identical to some parts of the titlecard, here are some comparison edits i made using this footage:
making this comparison, i was pretty much sure that this clip of a film (whatever it was), used the same Solar recording as TCM, the problem is, the stock footage website had zero info about were the clip was from, meaning that finding the source would be a tedious, but do-able, so i had myself a pretty ok lead, and i shared my findings with Texanology on instagram to get his opinion, and he gave me some more clues to work with from what he knew about the subject, he told me that the footage was made by the Lockheed Martin company, and he provided the following images to me as proof:
even though none of the frames he provided matched any parts of the titlecards, they were very similar in style, so it wouldnt hurt to give them a try, anyway with this new found info, i decided to search “Lockheed Missiles And Space Co. Solar recording” on google to see what would happen, and believe it or not, i found a German website with a compilation of solar recording from the Lookheed Solar Observatory, and in the second recording of the compilation, there were scenes that matched identically to parts of the titlecard, have a look at these comparison edits i made with the footage:
This is it! i found the footage used! now the mistery is solve right? not really, although i was able to match these two scenes, the previous ones i matched on the stock footage clip were absent in all the recordings from the compilation, and there is also the fact that the recording from the German site is in B&W, and the one from the Stock footage site is in full colors, meaning that more then one recording of the sun was used to make the title cards, so i only found the full recording of 1/2 used, and there was still more searching to be done.
After much searching on government databases and tedious work searching on google for keywords and names, i was finally able to find the full version of the film from which the stock footage website took a clip, and it was called Ultimate Energy : Nuclear Fusion Reactor Research Documentary, it is a Documentary about nuclear Fusion and its possible avancements and benefits in the future, in the en credits, i was able to find out that it was made by “Argonne National Laboratory” an was commisioned by “ERDA’s Division of Controled Thermonuclear Research”, “ERDA” or “Energy Research and Development Administration”, was the agency responcible for Energy Research in the US at the time, before it got merged with the “Federal Energy Administration” in 1977 to form the current “United States Department of Energy”.
i tried contacting both agencies in hopes of getting more info, but got mixed result, when i reached out to Argonne National Laboratory, the basically told me that the info they had about the documentary in their Archive was basically wat you could find in the youtube upload, and the United States Department of Energy basically just ghosted me, so i tried contacting the individuals in the credits but had no luck, likely due to the fact that the documentary is 50 years old, so everyone involved is most likely to old to use the internet and have a Linke in account, or is just straight up dead, so investigating this documentary might be a dead end (might revisit it later…), but at least i was able to collect a good amount of the Second Solar Recording to use for the search, i made a compilation with all the Solar Footage available in the Ultimate Energy Doc, have a watch:
with all that i found as of now, it can get convoluted real quick, so i made a diagram to illustrate all the progress i made as of now:
I have uploaded The First Recording to my Profile at the Internet Archive, but unfortunately, my search for the Second Recording is still ongoing, so if you feel like helping, you are more then Welcome! be sure to contact me with any discovery you make, any bit of info helps right now seeing as i’ve run dry on leads LOL
Thanks for reading!