The first memory I have of what would blossom into a silly obsession with UFOs is of watching that episode of The Simpsons in which a steaming drunk Homer stumbles into the woods and bumps into a medically high, radioactively glowing Mr. Burns, and thinks he’s an alien. I was six. It terrified me so much that the show was subsequently banned from our house by my parents, including for my much older siblings, which must’ve been a bit frustrating.
Nevertheless, I became hooked on UFO stories: encounters with interstellar ships and their occupants, of people plucked from bed in the dead of night to be experimented on by cruel, bug-eyed imps with spindly fingers, and of government cover-ups by men with big sunglasses who may or may not have been Tommy Lee Jones and/or Will Smith. I devoured books, films, and radio shows at a gluttonous rate. But the TV documentaries were the best, not least because as a kid I was less discerning about what could or could not be true.
I had forgotten all about this until the last couple of months, with aliens having the stellar year that they are, penetrating the zeitgeist anew like a well-used anal probe. There have been UFO hearings in the towering halls of U.S. Congress. The alleged bodies of interstellar visitors — as shrivelled as your dad after a particularly long one down the local, and skinnier than one of the manifold twinks in Troye Sivan’s “Rush” music video — were shown off in Mexico. Buckets of ink have been spilled on both these events, not only by tabloid provocateurs and Twitter tinfoil-hatters but publications like The New York Times and The Atlantic, lending the subject of sky anomalies and spaceships atypical credibility. It started, really, in 2017, when the Times reported on a modern “UFO program” orchestrated by the Pentagon. More reports followed — so many that Wired reported on the reportage itself — and with it, interest grew. Streaming platforms seldom miss a trend, so it’s hardly a surprise that a new (and old) array of a low rent, History Channel-esque documentaries and docuseries are now emerging full of the age-old clichés of UFO non-fiction-fiction.
You know the drill: lights in the sky, shaky video cam footage of said lights, blurry non-terrestrial figures seen in the Guatemala bush; anything that might evoke the newsreel bit from Signs. Adjacent to their monopolisation of true crime documentaries, Netflix in particular have made a fruitful cottage industry of popping out UFO docs like abductees discarded from the dump-shoot of a spacecraft. Look at 2021’s Top Secret UFO Projects: Declassified (ooh!), which lists such tantalising episode titles as “The White House Cover-Up,” and “Soviet Secrets,” promising to unpack conspiracies and reveal concealed truths. In 2020, after a ten-year absence, they cryogenically unfroze Unsolved Mysteries, which isn’t exclusively about UFOs, but episodes on UFOs (and their interstellar occupants) can be found alongside the other paranormal and bizarro goings-on the series covers. One of their archive syndications is the awful 2013 Channel 4 documentary Confessions of an Alien Abductee, which would at least be funny if it wasn’t so cruel to the titular subjects to whom it dishes out plenty of mean spirit. Coming at the end of this month: Encounters, appropriately part-produced by Steven Spielberg‘s Amblin Television, a four-part series which promises to explore “true stories of human contact with otherworldly phenomena.” How said truth will be verified is yet to be seen.
What is the appeal of these things? Reaching back to my slightly weird childhood obsession, I think it’s something to do with how they exist in the liminal space between fact and fiction. My scepticism has grown with age, but even now they make you think: what if? Of course, more than a pinch of salt should be taken alongside stories of people slathered on metal tables and prodded by terrible instruments at the hands of greying foetuses, or cigar tubes zipping around the sky at an impossible pace and pattern. But then you meet the people who are convinced they’ve seen these things, utterly convicted, and you think again: what if? You watch something like the aforementioned Confessions, whose subjects clearly aren’t all there, and it’s no, no, not a chance. There are rational explanations for their overnight surgical wounds, their missing time, their imagined encounters with skeletal creatures. But still: what if?
And that’s the bit that gets me, at least. Indulging in fanciful stories, even for a second or two, is nostalgic. It reminds you of the time that you thought there was a monster in your closet, or under your bed, which paradoxically also reminds you of the safety of the duvet, pulled back just a touch. UFO documentaries are also just tremendous fun. They’re produced within an inch of themselves to be as entertaining as possible, snappily edited to keep us hooked, and scored with impressive, booming themes that evoke clandestine conspiracies, like All the President’s Men. They’re packed with the drama and conflict of a Hollywood script: the behind-closed-doors goings-on between shady suits, the public kept in the dark as The Government conducts backroom deals with beings from beyond the stars. The individual, whistle-blowing heroes who face down the barrel of banishment, even death, to bring about the righteous truth. (Attendant fame, lucrative book deals and such notwithstanding.)
And though you know it’s all a load of bollocks, it’s spooky. Like their close cousin the true crime doc, what you’re watching is at least purportedly based on true events. And while UFO docs share a much more questionable relationship with our friend reality, it still plants that seed, much like The Blair Witch Project goes to no end to promise you that it is the authentic recording of a doomed hike in the woods. When you’re in bed later at night, it creeps up on you. You might find yourself looking at your bedroom window, out into the depths of the night sky beyond, waiting for a light to flash in the sky or a hollow, oval-eyed face to appear, ready to snatch you away to the stars. Best close that curtain.
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