Debunking a UFO "Documentary":
UFOs Are Real (1979)
Background
Whew, this movie really scared the crap out of me when I first saw it, at about the age of 8. I was living in southern California, and our local Fox 11 station used to broadcast a movie each week, and one night in 1989 they chose this one. We taped it, and kept the tape - it's still in storage somewhere - and we watched it over and over until I knew it by heart. It was fascinating and terrifying, a peek into a world of wonders and horrors, and I always ached to find out more about every sighting, every photo, every story it told. So here goes finding out more: here's finding out that the film is a peek into a world that never was.
You know, I can watch almost any horror movie and remain unfazed by it. One exception is the 2005 War of the Worlds (yes, the Tom Cruise one, eww); after watching it one evening I went for a neighborhood stroll and kept looking up at the overcast sky, purplish from the glow of city lights, half expecting to see an approaching tripod. But that's nothing compared to the utter terror elicited by UFOs Are Real. Seriously, don't show this to anyone who isn't well into their adolescent years yet. Especially if you are also abusing them.
(Besides, Tom Cruise would be hott if he weren't such an anti-science douchebag.)
Opening Arguments
The movie opens with title cards set to creepy "music". Honestly, I thought these were just wacky sound effects designed to impart a spooky feel to the film, and they definitely do that!, but nope, it's music of a sort. Much if not all of the music in this movie is by William Loose, who scored several shows and films and whose work was used posthumously in Ren & Stimpy. Some of the compositions used in the UFO movie can be found here. I've really taken to listening to these just as they are, independent of the movie. They're pretty nice if you like creepy music!
If you want, here's an embedded version of the creepy music for your listening pleasure while reading this page:
After the title cards, we get a nice learn-about-science intro where we find out a secret (oooooooooooo!) about scientists guessing at alien life, culminating in the claim that aliens have already arrived. Cue the fear. The film seems to be referring to the 1961 Green Bank meeting, where the Drake Equation originated. This meeting was arranged by the National Academy of Sciences in order to try to estimate how many inhabited worlds might be out there, a topic consistent with genuine scientific curiosity. Not governments hiding the truth from civilians like the film implies. The fact is, the Drake Equation hasn't been solved even to this day. We don't know if the answer is in the billions or if it's just one, and the long fruitless history of SETI seems to point to an answer near the low end of the scale.
Next, we cut to footage of... something. The clip is claimed to have been filmed on April 15th, 1966, around 9:45 in the morning, over Catalina Island, California. There is really not much to see in the clip. The video quality is BAD, really really bad. (Or maybe it's just the VHS quality. We did set it for super long play.) I recall watching something else years later where someone managed to analyze the video and determined that it was nothing more mysterious than an ordinary Cessna airplane. It wasn't this, but it'll have to do. The photographer who filmed it also claimed that the object was seen hovering motionless before starting to move. See, the thing with that is, the human eye is not well adapted to judging motion and distances of objects that far away. So if the plane was merely flying towards or away from the observer, it could appear to be hovering stationary. Another complication is that the camera was on a moving aircraft. If you have ever ridden in a vehicle near an airport, you likely have seen an airplane taking off or arriving, looking really tiny and stationary in the sky because of its trajectory relative to that of your own. This same illusion can totally happen in the air as well.
Then we get another clip, apparently from July 23, 1963 in Colorado. The presentation is scary as fuck. In what looks to be a daytime scene, the whole picture is anomalously dark, the sky a dusky indigo. Something is streaking across alright - two somethings - and the music they chose for this segment is one of the two creepiest works in the entire catalog! Plus, the clip is barely two seconds long.
The video seems to have been taken from a moving vehicle, and it depicts a rock spire of the type found in Monument Valley, or perhaps Devil's Tower, neither of which is located in Colorado. Why was the photographer filming from a moving vehicle? Perhaps there was some reason they weren't allowed to pull over to take a clear photo? If it were possible to see the original video in its entirety, would it explain what's zipping across the view during the brief clip? Whatever the actual explanation for the object and the video, it's clear the film producers were trying to scare the viewer into believing them. So what are they hiding?
For sightings like this one, where the actual explanation is not known, I am creating a term that I will be using on here as each mystery comes up: IDKWIWBINA, for I Don't Know What It Was, But It's Not Aliens.
Actually, I have an idea what might explain this one. The vehicle where the camera is situated isn't traveling very fast, maybe 40-50 MPH, judging by the road signs they pass. Probably the driver was going slow in order to help get better footage of the mountain spire. My hypothesis is maybe they weren't in the rightmost lane, and a truck passed them on the right, and a couple pieces of paper or shreds of plastic came off the truck. That would explain why the clip is so short—if they'd cut it any earlier we'd see the truck; any later and there wouldn't be any more litter falling off, or else there could have been bigger pieces of litter that obviously weren't UFOs.
(Dis)Reputable Sources
I want to take a moment here to address the credibility of the film's sources. Several sources are interviewed over the course of the film. Ultimately, I want to list everyone here, honest or otherwise, but I felt it important to write up this section here and update it as I go along.
Stanton Friedman
The producers thought that we wouldn't notice if they interviewed a nuclear physicist about UFOs. That seems like interviewing a biochemist about makes of automobile, but okay. They try to pass him off as an expert in the subject, whom they've consulted in some kind of appeal to authority fallacy. In reality, Friedman is pretty much the mastermind behind the whole movie. He spends the film hiding behind a façade of being a consultant, but the film is his baby. He is the producers.
Wendelle Stevens
The producers interview this guy, and he proceeds to spoon-feed them all these tales of his colleagues in the military seeing and photographing UFOs, having their planes damaged, snd so on. But Stevens lacked credibility and was and is frequently criticized in ufology for actively promoting UFO contactee stories, especially the Billy Meier story, to which I've given its own section below.
Stevens was also found guilty of kiddie diddling just a few years after giving the interview for the movie, and spent most of the '80s behind bars. (AZ Department of Corrections Inmate ID 047475.) Now, that detail doesn't have anything to do with his work with UFOs (I hope), but it does further degrade his credibility. What's worse, there is a translation of some kind of correspondence between him and Billy Meier and the text is just dripping with the exact kind of victim posturing that sex offenders often engage in.
So is anything Stevens tells us even real, or might he have fabricated all of it whole cloth? If these sightings really did happen, but the military wanted to keep them secret, why didn't they go after him in 1979 when he interviewed for the movie? Why didn't they court martial him or something? If you believe the conspiracy theorists, the government locked Stevens up on bogus molestation charges for revealing the truth about UFOs. But why do that when they could have just prosecuted him honestly? How do you get a jury to convict a defendant of sex crimes unless there's good evidence? Why fabricate evidence when you can just court martial? Stevens himself said that any current or former service member who reveals secrets is subject to legal retribution and forfeiture of all future payments they may be entitled to, so there are few veterans willing to say anything. Why would he himself even speak out when that much is at stake? Maybe he knew his days of freedom were numbered.
More to follow, so check back at a later date...
Photos and Sightings of Unidentified Objects
I'm going to address all the individual photos here in something resembling alphabetical order, because I don't want this page to turn into a play-by-play of the movie.
1290 CE
No location given, but the Internet identifies Byland Abbey, North Yorkshire, England as the setting."They all rushed out into the open, and behold! There was an awful thing. A nearly circular object of silver appearance, not unlike a discus, flying above them all. It excited amongst all the greatest terror."
It's a hoax. The notorious Jacques Vallée had a hand in this one. I think they left any mention of him out of the film because they were trying to make the film sound credible. But it's not, and neither is this sighting.
November 1st, 1461
No location given."There appeared in the sky a brilliant object like an iron bar, long and wide as half the moon. For fifteen minutes it hovered motionless, then suddenly the strange object began to rise in spirals, and twist and writhe like the uncoiled main spring of a watch. And after, it vanished in the sky."
It's a mistranslation of a meteor. Watches weren't invented yet in 1461; they first appeared in the 16th century.
Apari, East of Rome, 216 BCE
"At Apari, east of Rome, a round shield was seen in the sky."
Lenticular cloud?
Okay, so first of all, there's no such place as Apari. The actual quote, from Ab Urbe Condita, reads "...et Arpis parmas in coelo visas pugnantemque cum luna solem...", "...and in Arpis shields seen in the sky and the sun fighting the moon...". Whether or not there was an actual object is unclear; the Romans attributed lots of things to divine actions, so a shield falling from the sky would have been viewed as a gift from Mars (the god, not the planet, haha!).
Albiosc, France, March 23, 1974
Not much information about this one.
Looks easy to fake, though. Nice bokeh!
Jimmy Carter
Before he was President, Carter reported having seen a UFO in 1969. Attempts were made to explain the sighting as a misidentification of the planet Venus, but none seemed to fit the facts of the case. Then, in 2016, someone came forward with an explanation: rockets that were being launched around that time from Eglin AFB would leave behind a noctilucent cloud of chemicals including sodium and barium, and the appearance of this cloud fits what Carter observed. Noctilucent clouds sometimes occur naturally, when a cloud is at sufficient elevation that it is still in daylight and lit by the sun, even though the ground below it is in darkness of night; this can look eerie on its own, but an artificial noctilucent cloud would be all the more wtf-is-that inducing.
Centeno, Santa Fe, Argentina, June 21, 1977
Not much info on this one, but apparently the object was colorful. Perhaps a hat partially covered in foil and thrown into the air?
1960 "Goodyear Blimp" UFO
Bad ol' Wendelle Stevens describes an incident where a test pilot, flying an F-100, supposedly saw what looked like the Goodyear Blimp at far too high an altitude for any blimp to be able to achieve. The pilot surpassed 18,000 feet elevation and sighted the object at an even higher elevation. The pilot proceeded to chase after the object, and started to approach it, but then the object allegedly took off, rising steeply, and disappeared, with the jet unable to keep up even at maximum velocity. Apparently the pilot was at 33,000 feet when he lost sight of the object, still above him and still moving up up and away, far beyond the range of any blimp. The pilot came back badly shaken. I don't blame him that.
There's no corroborating information about this one to be found anywhere. Sounds like another IDKWIWBINA. I wonder if it could have been the same kind of object as the Tic-Tac UFO. Come to think of it, the aforementioned Colorado video might also be explainable by the same type of object or phenomenon. Or it's a total fabrication, there's no way to know.
Hamilton, Ontario, March 18th, 1975
Very similar to the Centeno photo. Possibly the same explanation.
Rex Heflin
Widely considered to be a hoax, however this article examines the photos and finds no evidence of fakery. But anyone else notice the UFO a little out of focus, when distant telephone poles are clear and sharp? And are those the headlights of an oncoming car in the distance? The occupant(s) of that car didn't see anything? Compare the shape of the disc to the Saas Fee hoax below. Any chance Heflin was an avid camper?
The guy even looks like a trickster.
Holloman AFB, New Mexico, October 16th, 1957
In the film this photo is only labeled "White Sands, New Mexico". The story behind this iconic photo is described here. Basically, a welfare nurse at the Mescalero Apache reservation was driving her station wagon when she sighted the object, watched it for a while, and eventually pulled over to take a picture. For some reason, the version of the photo seen in the film is mirror imaged.
What was it? Either a meteorological phenomenon or an experimental aircraft, according to the USAF, so another IDKWIWBINA.
Kapiolani Park, Hawaii, April 25th, 1974
Linky. Apparently this thing streaked across the sky and across the island. I dunno, it looks like it could be a bird or maybe even an insect.
Yup, bird.
What I would point out is that in the film they again mirror imaged the photo, and they also made it much darker to give it a spooky vibe. And I guess I can't blame them, because otherwise who's going to see an ordinary photo of a flying pigeon and believe it's an alien spaceship?
London, September 30, 1870
"The object was elliptical in shape, with a kind of tail. It crossed the moon from one side to the other in half a minute." Or maybe it was September 26th. Either way, the newspapers are all paywalled (fuckers!). There isn't much information about this one, but it's part of a trend of reporting wheels traveling across the sky. IDKWIWBINA.
McMinnville photos
Hoax. 'Nuff said.
Miki-Cho, Kagawa, Japan, January and February 1978
Linky. Looks manmade. Apparently the same object was photographed twice, exactly one month apart, in the same place. Perhaps a hoaxster didn't get enough attention the first time and decided to try again?
New Zealand, December 31st, 1978 Film
All we see is a single light, shaking and sometimes blurry. We're supposed to believe that the light itself is changing size and shape, when this is clearly motion effect. The camera is aboard an airplane and the light, as best we know, may as well be stationary. There is nothing else in the video to give any context to what this object or its surroundings could be. Allegedly, both ground based and airplane radar registered something there.
Unsurprisingly, given the poor quality of the video, the true nature of the light is unknown. However, a squid fishing fleet was operational in the area at the time, and the light may have been reflected by an atmospheric phenomenon that could also explain the radar returns. Additionally, ground-based radar operators said that false positives were commonplace.
The film tries to pass off one frame of the video as "unexplainable". The frame in question shows the light looking kind of like an ampersand in shape. However, even this has been explained: someone bumped the camera. Experiments with filming stationary lights have produced the same shape when the camera is deliberately bumped. You can even verify this yourself if you own a laser pointer; hold the pointer steady with the button pressed, shining against a wall or ceiling, and tap the pointer or your hand with your other hand. When you find the right spot, you'll see a shape very similar to the one in the video.
Rio de Janeiro, August 1954
This photo was taken during a big UFO flap. Whatever it is, it looks manmade. A disproportionate number of the UFOs shown in the film seem to be hoaxes. I'm starting to suspect that the UFO flaps probably tend to bring hoaxers out of the woodwork, unscrupulous assholes trying to get in on the action for money and notability.
Rome, 98 CE
"At sunset, a burning shield passed over the sky at Rome. It sparkled from the west and passed to to the east." ~ An unspecified Roman soldier.
The year is probably wrong; there is an account from 100 BCE of a round shield, called a clipeus, emitting sparks and moving from west to east across the sky at sunset. This account and others like it can be found here. So called "clipei flagrantes" were sometimes reported then, and the term seems to refer to aurorae.
So what were they? They could have been meteors. Otherwise, Romans made their shields out of materials like wood and leather that could burn. An enemy certainly could have, after capturing a Roman, set the captured warrior's shield ablaze and heaved it over Rome using some kind of catapult. The Romans were also a superstitious bunch, believing in omens such as burning shields following them into battle. The clupeus flagrans in the original account may not even have been a physical shining object, but perhaps a metaphor: "tomorrow, we shall prevail in battle."
But according to the film, we are to believe that the Romans saw the same thing that appreared in Salt Lake City in 1972 (see below). It may seem like a good match on the face of it, but refer to my interpretation of the SLC photos. The ancient Romans just did not have the necessary technology.
Rouen, France, 1954 photo
Seems to be the same type of object as in the McMinnville photos: a mirror from a pickup truck. The narrator kind of hits the nail on the head suggesting that the objects in the Rouen photo and the McMinnville photos might have been "manufactured at the same place." Yup, Earth!
Saas-Fee, Switzerland, July 26, 1975
In a perfect example of the kind of fact-twisting and distortion that this film engages in, this photo is first shown zoomed way in while the narrator describes the London Times article (see above), making it look like the Switzerland photo depicts an object "with a kind of tail" in front of the moon. But in reality, the object in the photo is in front of a mountainous rock outcropping, and it appears to be shaped like the object in the Rex Heflin photos. The story is that three hikers, near the end of their return hike, encountered this craft hovering in the distance and snapped one photo of it before it hid behind the trees.
If you look at the photo, the UFO appears very out of place. It lacks the hazy bluish cast apparent in the rest of the photo. There's a good debunking here, noting that the bottom of the UFO is too dark to be an object located near the trees; atmospheric Rayleigh scattering would have made it look more blue. The object is an aluminum camping plate, seemingly tossed into the air repeatedly by the hikers. Five attempts to photograph this "UFO" were undertaken, but only attempt #4 resulted in a convincing image, so the other photo slides were removed and discarded. The first three attempts resulted in the plate striking rocks and becoming dented; we'll probably never know how the plate looked by the fifth attempt.
Salt Lake City UFO photos
A set of 7 photos from either March 8th or August 3rd, 1972. (Ugh, can we all please just use ISO dates? 1972-08-03 would be totally unambiguous.) The photos show what looks like a flying saucer with protrusions around its edge. Apparently the photographer, one Roy Lauritson, was driving when he saw the object wandering by, so he pulled over, got out of the vehicle, set up a tripod, set up his camera, and took 7 pictures of the object in different random places above a nearby building. That's an awful lot of action happening there in a short amount of time to be able to capture any photos at all before the object disappeared! But maybe it was just hovering. And nobody else saw it, in a big city like SLC?
Lauritson claimed that the object, or the series of cloud-like knobs around it, was rotating, however in all photos the knobs are in more or less the same places, which would be a fantastic coincidence unless they were actually stationary. Photos 2 and 3 both feature some kind of arch-shaped lightness above the "saucer". You know what this looks like to me? It looks like a desk lamp. I suspect the photographer dressed up a desk lamp, perhaps with duct tape/electrical tape and some cotton balls, then took a series of double exposure photos.
Doesn't this look just like a desk lamp?
Tientsien, China, 1942
It's a streetlight suspended by wires.
Trindade, Brazil
A series of 4 photographs taken January, 1958 from a boat appear to show an oblate shaped object with a brim around its midsection flying over the water. Some have noted the object's resemblance to the 1990 Calvine UFO photo.
The Trindade photos may depict an airplane or even a hoax, since the photographer had a reputation for fakery.
Yungay, Peru, 1967
A set of two photos of obscure origin. The whole story is super shady. I'm betting on hoax for this one.
There are others in the film, but I got tired of typing "hoax" and "IDKWIWBINA".
Landing Sites
According to the film, UFO landing sites share the common features of compressed soil, dead plants, signs of intense pressure, signs of intense heat, and the inability of the compressed soil to support plant growth.
Here is some information about the 1969 Iowa landing site. In the movie, we're told that new plants can't grow in the compressed soil, but the Iowa farmer says grass comes back greener inside the landing site. So which is it? Additionally, ufologists examining the site found a "strange gray dust" and ruled out hoaxes by the fact that no chemical contaminants were found at the scene. But let me ask—have you ever used a cigarette lighter? Ever try to keep one full of fluid? It evaporates out faster than you can use it. What would sprinkled, not drenched, lighter fluid do in a crop field if set ablaze? (Genuine question, I don't know.) It wouldn't leave traces of volatile liquid sitting around for investigators to find days or weeks later. The ground doesn't look scorched, so maybe something was placed there and set ablaze, then discreetly removed afterward? And as far as the "strange gray dust", I got some strange gray dust for ya right here:
It's a quantity of ashes collected from a backyard fire pit. Just like the gray dust at the landing site. No mystery at all.
Internal Government Memos
J. Edgar Hoover Letter
Regarding the request to conduct serious investigations into UFOs: "I would do it, but before agreeing to do it, we must insist upon full access to discs recovered. For instance, in the La. case, the Army grabbed it, and would not let us have it for cursory examination."
What's the La. case? The film does not expand on this one. They're trying to make it sound like there's crashed flying saucers all over the place being hauled away in secret by the military, but they won't give their viewers details that can be used to corroborate anything.
The memo was part of correspondence in response to the Roswell incident. The "discs recovered" would be what crashed at two sites near Roswell, along with whatever the "La. case" was. Roswell deserves a section of its own later on in this page, but for now I will just say that the letter is essentially an uninformed plea by someone to have access to study something he doesn't know is classified U.S. military technology.
Gen. Nathan Twining Letter
The full memo, less a few redacted parts, is available here. So it shows that one person in the military in the 1940s thought the matter of UFOs was worth looking into. That's not actually an outlandish claim, especially in that era. The characteristics attributed to the unidentified objects are pretty much the same characteristics that are common knowledge today regarding UFO sighting claims. Here is a skeptical delve into the memo and its context. Essentially, the TL;DR of it is that the memo is a huge nothing burger.
The Big Stories
Lawrence Coyne Encounter
On October 18th, 1973, Coyne, a Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Army, and his crew were flying in a helicopter over Ohio. A red light appeared, following the helicopter for a moment before closing in. The red light turned out to be part of a larger object, which maintained a position above the helicopter, then shone a green light into the cockpit for about 2 minutes. Coyne attempted to execute a dive maneuver with the helicopter, but the aircraft was pulled upwards by the mysterious object.
A blogger known as Parabunk has explained this incident nicely. A tanker plane mistook Coyne's helicopter for one capable of airborne refueling, and attempted to do so; since Coyne and his crew were unfamiliar with this procedure, they misinterpreted the plane as a flying saucer.
The Roswell Incident
Story goes that one morning in July 1947, a farmer near Roswell, NM, actually closer to Corona, NM, went out to his field and found it strewn with wreckage. Metal pipes or struts, chunks of foil, and whatever else. Not far away, another crash site was discovered, in which a great big flying saucer and dead alien bodies were recovered. The local military base gets word of this and sends vehicles and crews to pick up all the mess and haul it away to parts unknown.
Once in military possession, the material was analyzed by one Maj. Jesse Marcel and his colleagues. They found the material to be incredibly light, incredibly strong—they couldn't dent it, even with a sledgehammer—and covered in mysterious writing or symbols.
The lore is that the wreckage and dead aliens were brought to Area 51.
So when the story broke, the newspapers resported that the military had recovered a crashed alien spaceship. The government stepped in and said "naw, that's a weather balloon." Of course no one believed that it was a weather balloon, because it clearly wasn't. So for decades, millions of people were convinced that extraterrestrials had crashed in the southwestern United States in the mid 20th century and that the U.S. government was keeping the extraterrestrials' remains locked away behind sealed doors and red tape.
Of course, at the time, the government and the military couldn't reveal what the crashed object really was. The official explanation was "weather balloon", but nobody bought it, and rightly so. Only relatively recently has the information about the object been declassified. It was actually a top secret reconnaissance balloon for spying on the Russians. No unearthly materials, no cryptic writing, and certainly no dead aliens. Pretty anticlimactic, but at least now we civilians know.
The Betty and Barney Hill "Abduction"
The Hills were driving home from Montréal to New Hampshire, at 2 in the morning. They saw a strange light in the sky. They pulled over to look at it, and next thing they knew they were headed back down the road, several hours later and a bit further along in their journey. When they got home, they found that the 190 mile trip had taken 7 hours to complete.
After the encounter, the Hills suffered medical and psychological effects, including nightmares on the part of Betty Hill. They believed that their memories of whatever happened in the wee hours of that morning could be recovered under hypnosis. The Hills were hypnotized, separately, and the hypnotist, one Dr. Benjamin Simon, instructed them to not remember the content of the sessions in order to prevent them from corroborating each other's versions of events. A story emerged from the hypnosis sessions:
Allegedly, the light in the sky turned out to be a flying saucer which came down and landed in the road in front of them. Out came several humanoids which physically grabbed the stunned Hills and dragged them into the spacecraft. The beings then subjected our protagonists to medical examinations, including what appeared to be an amniocentesis, which we're told hadn't been invented yet. Then, Betty Hill was shown a star map, in 3 dimensions, showing where the beings were from. Eventually, the creatures returned the Hills to their car, and the couple watched the spacecraft ascend vertically to the stars.
Betty drew her star map under hypnosis, and a schooleacher named Marjorie Fish decided to try to find out which stars are represented. We're told that Fish's first attempt, using an unnamed star catalog (it was the Gliese Catalogue of Nearby Stars, pronounced "GLEE-zeh") resulted in a match of only 9 of the stars, but that once a more accurate edition of the catalog was released in 1969, Fish was able to match all 15 stars from the map. We're shown the two maps, Hill's map and Fish's map, with lines drawn between the stars in each.
The Hills' case is notable because it introduced two things to popular culture: the archetype of the "Grey alien", and the idea that "Greys" originated from the Zeta Reticuli star system. But in fact the Grey archetype is not the original appearance of the beings described. Betty said that the beings had hair, while Barney recalled bald beings and drew one under hypnosis that seems to be wearing some kind of cap. (More like, the whole story is some kind of crap.) Many skeptics have identified a fictional alien depicted in the show The Outer Limits twelve days before their first hypnosis session as the alien the Hills recalled seeing, however the Hills denied seeing that episode. Skeptoid points out that a different TV alien, one from a Twilight Zone episode that aired in 1962, is a better match for Barney's drawing.
From left: Barney's drawing; the Outer Limits alien; the Twilight Zone alien.
In the film, we are given Betty Hill's firsthand account of the sequence of events recalled under hypnosis. Except, we aren't. That clip of her describing the UFO landing, beings getting out, hauling her and Barney inside, all the medical stuff, the star map, that's all Betty's recurring nightmare! The film tries to pass off her dreams as real events! Not only that, but the claim that amniocentesis and laparoscopy did not exist yet when the Hills were supposedly taken on board the spaceship, is bullshit. Amniocentesis most definitely did exist already, and had been in common use since the 1950s. Laparoscopy in humans has its origin in 1910. I wish I could say that this was an honest mistake on the part of the scriptwriter, or that this was the only blatant lie in the whole film, but that is far from the case. The producers are bald faced liars.
The star map story is also a bunch of nonsense. Looking at the Hill map and the Fish map side by side reveals that the stars in the former are just randomly strewn. The only thing they have in common is two stars with an additional star on each side and a group of three higher up. Other than that, there is no resemblance between the two patterns. You could call it a 7 point match if you're being generous, but that's it. In the words of the great (and hott!!) Dr. Malcolm:
But even if we entertain the idea that there may be something to the Hill map, it comes up short against newer information. In the decades since Fish's analysis of the map, astronomers have made great strides in finding exoplanets, or planets that orbit stars other than the Sun. Some exoplanets belong to stars that resemble the Sun in terms of mass, luminosity, temperature, and likelihood of supporting life. Sunlike stars form part of what's called the main sequence, indicated with a Roman numeral five (V) as part of their spectral type. These types range from O and B (hot, blue, short lived) through A, F, G, K, and finally M (cool, red, long lived but prone to flares), followed by a number so that for example a G0 is the next coolest star after an F9, etc. Our Sun is a G2V, and sunlike stars are generally considered to be in the range of F8V to K2V.
The first exoplanet found around a sunlike star was 51 Pegasi b in 1995, which shocked everyone by being Jupiter sized and orbiting extremely close to its star. For a while, it seemed like these "hot Jupiters" were the norm, but now with better instruments and better techniques it has been found that planets with intermediate masses between Earth and Neptune are common. We don't have any planets like this in our solar system, so it's anybody's guess what they're like, but I wouldn't be surprised if they turned out to fall along a continuum from "super-Venus" planets roasting under a thick atmosphere at the lower mass end to mini-Neptunes near the upper end of the mass range whose atmospheres become so dense near the solid core that the gases smoothly blend into liquid without a clear boundary.
Partially, it depends on how close the planet orbits to its star. Too close and you get hot Jupiters and scorching airless balls of rock like Mercury. Too far and oceans freeze solid and balls of gas turn frigid. Several of Jupiter's moons are made of ice, but they're so cold the ice is as hard as granite. Each star has a range where a planet can orbit, a "sweet spot" called the Habitable Zone (HZ) where temperatures are right for liquid water. Since we have only a small sample of planets to send probes to and study, there's some uncertainty how wide the HZ is, so astronomers define a conservative HZ and an optimistic HZ. Here on Earth we're near the inner (hotter) limit of our conservative HZ, which is why it's important to curb our fossil fuel use and watch our carbon emissions. Venus is near the inner limit of the optimistic HZ, and there's a small chance Venus could once have had life on the surface, and a smaller chance microbes still live in the clouds. Mars is near the outer (colder) limit of both habitable zones (the colder limits nearly coincide), and we now know Mars definitely had liquid water in the past, likely had life, and may even have life still. Tantalizing!
So let's look at the individual Hill/Fish stars and see what we know about them that maybe wasn't known in 1969.
| Star | Age | HZ planet? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zeta 1, 2 Reticuli | 3.4 Gy (zet1) 2.5 to 3 Gy (zet2) |
Unlikely. | A wide binary system comprising two sunlike stars. No known planets, and multiple observations have failed to detect a disk of asteroids or comets. Planets might exist and orbit face-on from our vantage point, making them difficult to detect, but the lack of detectable orbiting material is concerning. Even if this sytem has habitable planets, 3 billion years is not much time for a spacefaring civilization to emerge. |
| Tau Ceti | 8-10Gy | Possibly. | Three potential planet candidates, all larger than Earth, none in the habitable zone. If the planets exist at all, they are likely to be larger versions of Venus and/or smaller warmer versions of Neptune. An undetected Earth-sized planet in the HZ is not ruled out, however the system has a vast debris disk similar to our Kuiper belt but extending much farther inward. The sharp inner edge of the disk does imply the existence of planets, but those planets are likely subjected to frequent devastating impacts like Earth's dinosaur-killer asteroid. Life could exist here, but the odds aren't looking too good. |
| 82 Eridani | 9 Gy | Yes... sorta. | This is actually one of the most promising stars for extrasolar life. Three or four planets are known in the system, one of which is either a super-Earth or a mini-Neptune and orbits within the HZ. However, its eccentric orbit takes it in and out of the HZ, likely resulting in repeated global freezes over about half its 648-day year. If it is a super-Earth, then it probably has a thick atmosphere like Venus and may be too hot for life all year round. If it is Neptune-like, then life could exist in its clouds if the organisms can rise and sink with the seasons. |
| Sun | 4.6 Gy | Yes! | Life exists in this system. |
| Alpha Mensae | 6.2 Gy | Possibly. | Actually a binary star due to a red dwarf companion in a ~30 AU orbit. One possible planet detected with an orbital period of 359.5 days, well within the HZ, assuming the planet exists and isn't an observational artifact from our own 365-day year. The star probably rotates with one pole pointing about 21 degrees off from Earth, so if the planet exists and orbits in the same plane then it would weigh about 150 Earth masses, more massive than the 82 Eridani planet and with almost as high an eccentricity. This would make it a Saturn-sized gas giant that could experience as much as a 114-degree (Celsius) temperature swing throughout its year. |
| Gliese 86 | 10 Gy | Unlikely. | Another binary star, this time having a white dwarf companion. Originally this system comprised a bright hot A5V star with a dimmer K1V companion orbiting at 9 AU, until after about 370 million years the A star went red giant and pushed the K star out to a distance of 21 AU. Now the K star is the primary, and it has one known planet, a super-Jupiter in a tight 15 day orbit. Whether planets might exist in either star's HZ is iffy, as are the chances of life emerging after the red giant catastrophe. |
| 107 Piscium | 6.3 Gy | Unlikely. | Likely to be a binary star with an orbital period of slightly more than half an Earth year. If so, then no HZ planets would be expected here because such an orbit would not be stable. No infrared excess has been detected, meaning there probably isn't a disc of asteroids or comets. So there probably aren't habitable planets here. |
| 54 Piscium | 10 Gy | Unknown. | Has a brown dwarf companion 476 AU away from the primary. One Saturn-sized planet in a 62 day orbit. A HZ planet could exist in this system, but we don't know of one. |
| Gliese 67 | 7 Gy | Unlikely. | Has a red dwarf companion in a 19.5 year orbit, and possibly a debris disk. It is unknown whether a HZ planet can maintain a stable orbit in this star system. |
| Tau 1 Eridani | ? | Unlikely. | An F7V star, Tau1 Eri may be a little too short lived for a technological civilization to develop. No known planets. Has a small companion in an eccentric 958 day orbit, which would probably wipe the system's habitable zone clean. Technologically advanced life here seems exceedingly unlikely. |
| Gliese 59 | ? | Unknown. | K1V star with a red dwarf companion in a wide orbit. Not much else is known. |
| Kappa Fornacis | 5.7 Gy | Unlikely. | Only somewhat older and barely hotter than the Sun, yet already entering the subgiant phase. That means any formerly inhabited planets are now getting cooked. Probably cooled to G1IV from an original F-type, making it not necessarily sunlike to begin with. Has a companion, probably a white dwarf, in an eccentric 26 year orbit. The companion has a companion of its own, probably a red dwarf, in a 3.7 day orbit. |
| Gliese 86.1 | n/a | No. | Unless Marjorie Fish meant Gliese 186.1, Gliese 486.1, Gliese 686.1, Gliese 786.1, or Gliese 886.1, this star does not exist. |
| Gliese 95 | 9.61 Gy | Unknown. | G8V star making it similar in temperature and brightness to 82 Eridani, Tau Ceti, and Alpha Mensae. No planets or debris disk detected. No companion either, which is a good sign, but this could still easily be a lifeless star system. |
Note Gy = a billion years. One AU = the distance from the Earth to the Sun. There are also a few nearby sunlike stars that are oddly missing from the Hill/Fish map, that would be expected to be included as they're more sunlike than some of the stars that did make the cut.
| Epsilon Eridani | 1.1 Gy | Possible. | A young star, so its omission can be forgiven if the Hill map contains only older stars with enough time for technological lifeforms to have evolved. Three asteroid belts and one Jupiter-sized planet orbiting between two of the belts. An inner planet in the HZ could exist, defining the inner edge of the innermost belt. However, the same kind of frequent impactor problem that probably plagues Tau Ceti's planets would also occur here. |
| Epsilon Indi | 3.5 Gy | Unknown. | The host star has two brown dwarf companions that tightly orbit each other about 1500 AU from the primary. Nothing that would likely get in the way of planet formation, and indeed a gas giant is orbiting either 16 or 21 AU from the primary. This star looks like a good candidate for life, although it is about as young as the Sun was during the "boring billion", a long stretch of time in Earth's history when single celled life just sorta hung around and did its thing all day without any hopes and dreams yet about evolving into something more complex. |
| Gliese 69 | 6.89 Gy | Unknown. | Apparently a single star; no known stellar companions. One known planet, at least 8 Earth masses, whipping around the star every 3.8 days. That means the chances of existence of HZ planets is slightly reduced, but if HZ planets do exist they may have more water than usual if the 3.8 day planet migrated inward dragging along icy objects. But whether that happened here, we just don't know. |
I find it insteresting that the Zeta Reticuli star system ended up becoming associated with the supposed "Greys", when Betty Hill's aliens don't look very much like the "Greys" at all. The aliens described by Travis Walton (see below) do look more like "Greys", but the Grey archetype didn't really emerge until Whitley Strieber's book was published in 1987. It really seems that the public perception of these alleged beings evolved over the decades, instead of reflecting the appearance of any real species, and that the mythos changed from Zeta Reticulans being human-sized with olive skin and yellow eyes to them being short and pale gray with large, solid black eyes.
Even the Hills' missing time can be explained: they probably just fell asleep. It was the middle of the night. The "UFO" sighting took place at 10:30 p.m., and they wouldn't get home until early the next morning. It's hard to stay awake all night.
Betty Hill said in the movie that her UFO experience was always on her mind, that she thought of it all the time, that it was the subject of her very first waking thought every day and her very last thought before going to sleep, and that that would still be the case for as long as she lived. And it probably was. (Betty Hill died in 2004.) In the interview for the film, she frames the event as a thing that happened to her that left an indelible impression on her, that she would never be the same again after the experience.
But Betty Hill was already obsessed with UFOs before she and Barney saw the strange light. And I mean obsessed! Her nightmares started two weeks after the fateful road trip, but the hypnosis sessions did not start until TWO YEARS afterward. Two years of Betty writing about the nightmares, two years of telling Barney all about it, plenty of time for them to get their story straight. Look, I get being obsessed with something. I still want to figure out human olfaction. It's natural to blab at length about your obsession to anyone who will listen. It's what one does. Barney didn't even think the light was a spaceship, he thought it was an airplane, but the film doesn't mention this fact, it repeats Betty's dream-Barney telling her the beings were going to capture them both. Dr. Benjamin Simon himself did not believe that the experience was an alien abduction, but nowhere does the film interview him or make any attempt to present his conclusions or his side of the story. All we get of Dr. Simon is a black and white still photo.
Skeptoid offers one more detail, that there was a tramway visible from the road where the Hills stopped, and that through binoculars one of the trams would have looked an awful lot like the red lights and "figures standing behind windows" as described. I propose that a tram was the light they saw in the first place, not an airplane like Barney thought. Such a misidentification would add to the something-offness of the sighting and I think that would increase the likelihood of the couple later believing it was a flying saucer.
One problem with the tramway explanation is that the tramway seems to have only been open during the day and not at the time of year the Hills were traveling. Only if there was something unusual going on at the time of the sighting, perhaps a maintenance crew using the tram after hours for some purpose, could this explain the "craft" that the Hills said they saw. But that was true of the newer system installed in 1980; the original tram from 1938 might have run a different schedule. Still, if there was a cable car in the air at the time, and if it had people in it, it would seem to match closely at least the figures behind the windows, whether or not it had red lights on it:
And aren't red lights standard on things like this anyway to alert airplanes to the presence of an obstacle? Imagine how eerie one of these cable cars would look outfitted with red lights in the dead of night in wintry weather.
Pascagoula
We're shown a newspaper article about the supposed UFO abduction of two men fishing in Pascagoula, Mississippi in 1973, but we're told nothing about it.
So the gist is two guys were fishing one night in 1973 when a light descended from the sky and landed on the water. Three silvery looking entities with blank faces emerged and levitated the two men into their spacecraft, where they examined the two humans with a device that looked like a giant eye. Afterward, there were mysterious lights seen above the water for several nights.
The incident is most likely a hoax. I would have liked to hear the movie lie its way through twisting it as a real event, but oh well.
The Travis Walton "Abduction"
Roll your sleeves up, 'cuz we're about to get elbow deep in the bullshit. There's a lot to this story.
So the gist of it is, Walton was one of a team of loggers working in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest in northern Arizona. One evening in November 1975, the crew had finished their day's work and were headed back to civilization, when one of them noticed a light through the trees. The driver pulled over, and Walton got out to investigate a "metallic disc shaped craft" (remember this detail!) hovering over a clearing. At least one of the other guys in the pickup saw it too, and suddenly a burst of energy came out of it and knocked Walton to the ground. The other men panicked and sped away, beliveing Walton to be dead.
Over the coming days, searchers combed high and low through the forest looking for any sign of Walton. He was nowhere to be found, until one night, 5 days after the incident, he woke up in the middle of the road, saw the craft take off vertically, found his way to a pay phone, and called for help.
Once returned, Walton told a fantastic tale of coming to on board the "craft", noticing the air was thick and hard to breathe, seeing these entities standing over him, threatening them with a wand-shaped object, wandering room to room around the "craft", finding his way into some kind of control room with a chair and a view of the stars, then being led out into a hangar by a human-looking individual who put a mask over Walton's face and put him back to sleep. When told that 5 days had passed, Walton was surprised, beliveing it to be the same night.
I went to a MUFON meeting a few years ago here in the Phoenix area, and I listened to Walton give a presentation about the incident and the object he says he saw. He said it was a metallic disc, and that it emitted a sound consisting of simultaneously the very highest and very lowest pitches he can hear. The presentation speculated that maybe the aliens' spacecraft had broke down, and while they were fixing it, hovering in a remote unpopulated area, one of those ever-curious Earth creatures unexpectedly stumbled upon it and got zapped by the craft's malfunctioning electrowhatever system, so the aliens had to put the earthling in stasis and return it to somewhere near its home once it was safe to do so.
Yeah, okay. So anyway, the movie gives us an artist's rendering of the "craft". Remember how it was described as a metallic disc? Check this out:
Does this look like a metallic disc to you? (Maybe it does, but it's not what comes to mind when I hear "metallic disc".)
Now, at the time of the incident, Walton and crew were under a contract to clear out undergrowth and brush from an area, and they were so far behind schedule that it didn't look like they were going to make the deadline. The team could have really used some kind of way out, and there is evidence Walton and his boss Mike Rogers may have hoaxed the whole thing. If so, it paid off: The National Enquirer gave the team a $5000 prize.
Another strange thing about the incident is how Walton's mother, brother, and boss showed little concern for Travis' whereabouts. Perhaps they knew exactly where he was; perhaps they were hiding him and caring for him. Upon his "return", the police weren't even aware he had been "found", he declined one polygraph test, and then seemed to deliberately interfere with another polygraph test. Oh, and speaking of Travis Walton failing polygraphs, check out the ending of his 2008 appearance on the game show The Moment of Truth.
Okay, so this very much does look like a conspiracy between Walton and Rogers to get out of a contract they couldn't finish. But what about the object? Was there an object at all? What was it that scared the team so much they drove off without Travis? If it were just two of the team saying "what's that over there", the driver wouldn't have even pulled over, everyone else would have just said what the hell are you talking about. So in order for the hoax to work, it was necessary to create some kind of spacecraft.
Youtuber The Mystorian has a great video about this and other UFO cases. He presents the gentry tower explanation, in which fully ordinary, human-made towers used by forestry workers as lookout posts can be occupied at night and lit up from inside, looking eerily like a UFO hovering near the treetops. Travis' brother Duane could have staged the gentry tower setup, arriving in an unseen vehicle and parking it out of sight, even including suddenly turning a bright light on Travis to simulate a bolt of electricity, then brought Travis home to hide him. The whole thing, including the reactions of Walton and Rogers, would have looked and felt eerie, and it's easy to see how the other loggers could have been scared by it and believed it to be the real thing. Check out the comparison:
Metallic disc, my ass.
So there you have it, one of the most famous UFO abduction stories of all time: HOAX.
Billy Meier
Oh, god, I hate contactee shit. Even back when I was a firm believer in the extraterrestrial hypothesis, all that UFO contactee stuff was the one part I couldn't stand. My parents read Sheldan Nidle and Barbara Marciniak and swallowed their horseshit whole, but when December 1996 came and went, it was their disappointment and they seemed to lose interest. Thank fuck. One must be pretty darn ignorant of biochemistry and physics to believe all that 12-stranded DNA with antennae stuff. Consequently, the idea of emotionless, vaguely insect-like beings studying humans for scientific curiosity didn't trip my bullshit meter most of the time, but human-looking, Nordic looking (gotta appeal to the racists!) space brothers from the Pleiades were too implausible even for such a naive mistake as the me of back then. Especially after learning that the Pleiades are far too young for technologically advanced life to have evolved there. And why would aliens look like us, least of all one of our less physically attractive forms, anyway?
Billy Meier is an idealist who understands that humans are destroying Earth and that our species had better change its ways post haste. He claims (yes, he's one of the few people from the movie still alive as I write this) that his Pleiadean contacts are here to save us from ourselves. I get that he's trying to reach people who otherwise wouldn't care about things like the environment, peace, and all that—maybe his heart is in the right place, but I don't agree with his methodology. Meier has produced lots of photographs that are almost universally recognized as the hoaxes they are, which in the end only undermines anything good he might say about how we should collectively conduct ourselves.
Conclusion
This movie is pretty scary, but it's all smoke and mirrors. The producers have a clear agenda, and their methodology is interesting in and of itself. The film emulates the style of the series In Search of..., by employing a narrator who sounds a lot like Leonard Nimoy and using bizarre background music that resembles the scores from the series. However, the film takes things in a more serious and even patriotic direction, placing high importance on military and government sources of information and attempting to convince the viewer by instilling fear rather than logic and reason.
I will say one good thing though, Loose's piece "Spring Profile", which plays in the background during a motivational-speech style appeal-to-emotion shpliel near the end of the film, is undoubtedly far and away the most egregiously underrated instrumental composition I've ever heard. EARGASM!
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