Strong and Moving!

Overrated

Absolutely brilliant

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

This is a One of Kind Documentary (with a dramatization thread) using Non-Actors and Real-Life Flying Saucer Stories from the Late Forties and Early Fifties. It is a Matter-of-Fact Investigatory Film and doesn't even Try to be Entertaining. It just lays out the Facts and Presents the Phenomenon as it Occurred. Ufologists of Today can have a "gold mine" of a Time going Back in Time to get a Glimpse of what the First Wave of Sightings Looked Like. Nothing is Embellished or Sensationalized. It is Dry and not Distilled. It is Bare Bones and brought to You as Unfettered and Untainted as Possible. It Capsulized the Early Days of the Flying Saucer Flap and Touches Upon the Mantel Crash, the Two-Time Fly-Over of Washington D.C. in 1952 and Screens the Montana and Utah Amateur Movie Footage in Detail, Slow Motion, and Close Up at the end of the Movie. It also includes the General Stanton Press Conference Highlights. There are Multiple Interviews with Pilots and other Professional Observers.These are All still with Investigators Today and have Never been Explained. It is a Fascinating Time Capsule. An Historical Expose and a Commendable Effort to Make Sense of the Situation when No One could Then or Even Now make any Sense of it. There is just too much Evidence ("credible people reporting incredible things") to Ignore, yet Not Enough Evidence to make a Conclusive Explanation.For the Non-Ufologist and Casual Inquisitor of the Subject this may be much too Academic to set through as Entertainment, but as an Educational Tool it still Holds Up quite well and is an indispensable Artifact of its Time and has Importance to this Day.Highly Recommended for Ufologists and Mainstream Historians, Educators and Skeptics.

Fascinating documentary on UFOs made just shy of a decade after the first flying saucer sighting by Kenneth Arnold. The age of this and its matter-of-fact approach is what makes it so interesting. I've seen countless documentaries and television programs on UFOs. They are a staple of cable and satellite television these days. This stands as one of the best I've seen. It's just a lot of fun to watch and compare to the docs made about the subject today. It's interesting how some things have changed and others haven't, even after half a century. The presentation of facts, as well as the dramatic reenactments, are a little dry by today's standards. But keep in mind that the intention here was to handle the subject matter like a serious news story, which is kind of refreshing. Unlike most approaches to the subject today, it tries to stay unbiased and just report the cases of UFO phenomena without leading the viewer to a specific conclusion. The approach is to put the evidence forth and let the audience make up their own minds about it. This will probably be pretty shocking to those used to being spoon-fed their opinions by comedians and pundits.

If you have the slightest interest in the UFO phenomenon then this is a must see. In many ways the word 'fiction' in relation to this movie does it a disservice. Sure everything is re-staged and re-enacted but only to highlight what Press Officer Albert Chop insists really did happen. From a social history point of view it's a little goldmine too. There appears to have been so much respect in American society throughout the 1950's and it oozes through here. For the serious UFO enthusiast the inclusion of the original Tremonton and Grand Falls UFO footage makes it an invaluable movie from a research point of view.

This documentary-style film follows reporter Al Chop as he begins his minor job for the U. S. Air Force around 1950 and gradually works his way up the Civil Service scale, changing along the way from UFO skeptic to -- not UFO "believer", but let's say "open-minded everyman." He has no idea what they are but he's now convinced that something is up.The acting is so poor that I thought the performers had been hired from the ranks of Hollywood extras or had simply been brought in off the streets. At times they seem to be reading directly from cue cards off camera. I recognized only one actor, and only by his voice. It was Henry (Harry) Morgan, or Harry (Henry) Morgan, or Edward Teach, or whatever his name is, who played Jack Webb's sidekick and the Commanding Officer on "Mash." Maybe he can't make up his mind about his name but he's the only performer involved who is able to inject a note of drama into the proceedings, even if only audio. "I see 'em now. They're closin' in on me." The principal figure is that of Al Chop. He looks rather blandly middle class, a bit like Kent Smith, if Kent Smith were a little pinched, maybe suffering from a severe case of Calvinism. There is a bit of his home life but it's restricted to a few scenes of his wife telling him worriedly that he looks piqued. He tosses her matter-of-fact orders like, "Get my car keys." The direction is full of clichés and the dialog is clipped and unconvincingly stylized, as if gotten from "Dragnet." The editing is clumsy. We're given mere second-long glimpses of the two color films that the script describes as awesomely important. And the data are dated. This was released forty-five years ago and a lot has happened since then. The population of the United States alone has grown by more than a third, with every person a potential observer. The global population has more than doubled from about 3 billion to 7 billion. I can't estimate the growth of video cameras because their number was zero in 1956 and any percentage of zero is still zero.It's a hastily organized, poorly performed, amateurish documentary. That aside, the subject is one of monumental importance. And for reasons we can only guess at, the subject has been officially disregarded by the government. A reasonable guess would be that no official agency, especially a military one, is eager to admit that they know nothing about what's up, and in any case are unwilling to display their ignorance because of a possible panic.Of course there have been crazes and fads before, lots of them. The phantom gasser of Mattoon, Illinois, is one of my favorites. And many of the UFO sightings reported are illusions or misidentified airplanes or other ordinary phenomena. But a few of them are incredible tales told by credible observers. (Karl Popper would have loved this.) All it takes is one, after all. And what does a UFO have to do to be a convincing UFO -- land on the White House lawn? The phenomena dealt with in this film differ from other familiar crazes. It refuses to go away, whether it gets publicity or not, whether the Air Force has decided it's unworthy of further investigation or not. The sightings keep cropping up. The interested viewer is invited to check out the many recent and archival reports at NUFORC.The lack of official and public interest in the subject is understandable from a psychological point of view. These are what Leo Strauss and others called "known unknowns." We know they're there but we don't know what they are. Two responses are expectable: we should fear it because it's unknown, and we should joke about it because there is nothing else we can do to allay our fear. On the streets, this is known as whistling in the dark.