Unidentified Flying Objects: The True Story of Flying Saucers

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.

Interviews, footage, and recreations are combined to make the case for U.F.O.s being real, sentiently guided and likely of extra-terrestrial origin. The film is very dated and only covers the first six years of U.F.O. encounters in the US, starting with the 1947 Kenneth Arnold sighting and closing with the famous appearance of multiple mysterious flying objects over Washington, DC in 1952. The few interview and footage sequences are bridged by recreations of US Air Force press officer Albert Chop's (Tom Towers) examinations of various sightings. Real footage of the Montana and Utah sightings is shown (and examined frame by frame in the epilogue) but, after 90 minutes of portentous setup, the brief, grainy images are anticlimactic. More interesting than the U.F.O.s themselves are the reactions of the public and responses of the government (including President Harry Truman) who were genuinely concerned (although at the dawn of the cold war, the fears were as much about foreign powers as about malevolent aliens). Overall, 'Unidentified Flying Objects: The True Story of Flying Saucers' is tedious (especially the endless monotonal narration by Olan Soule) but at least is more sincere and less sensationalistic than later entries in the 'U.F.O.s are real!' genre (notably, there are no 'recreations' of saucers or aliens, just of human observers and analysts). To be fair to the film and its makers, it should be 'seen' through 1950 eyes, not 2020 eyes: more than 60 years have passed since the Arnold sighting and the entry of the term 'flying saucer' into popular culture, but despite the off-and-on hype, nothing has ever come of the claims that extra-terrestrial intelligences are visiting our skies other than a lot of great (and not-so-great) movies and TV shows, a few amusing songs, some celebrities making fools of themselves, and the memorable debut episode of 'South Park' (but, just in case, "Keep watching the skies!").

This documentary features, among several incidents, the re-enactment of the 1950's flying saucer encounters over Washington DC and recordings from the Mantell crash. Very scary stuff at the time. I saw this on television when I was around 10 years old. It gave me quite a few sleepless nights thereafter. My father, who was a radar expert with the Army at the time, confirmed to me that everyone in the Signal Corps was well aware of the Washington incident. Further, he described to me their "hunting" UFO's with radar in the White Sands, New Mexico desert. He was there frequently in the 1950's. They were launching captured German V-2 rockets, doing above-ground A bomb tests, sending men into the stratosphere with ballons. THERE CERTAINLY WERE ALL KINDS OF WIERD STUFF GOING ON WITH THE ARMY IN THE SOUTHWEST DESERT. To me, at age 10, this seemed to be proof that the flying saucers were real. I spent much of my teenage years searching for the truth - What were the UFO's? Why were they here? As an adult, I've finally accepted that the aliens are NOT here, no Roswell crash, no attack on DC, no death ray shot at Mantell. I sometimes wonder WHY they're not here. In the 1950's and 60's, flying saucers were not the silly stuff of abductions and other talk show nonsense. No, in the 50's and 60's the military feared that there really was something beyond our own technology in the skys. I guess that our more mudane modern reality disappoints me. I recently captured this movie on tape. I had not seen it in 40 years. The production was certainly made on a shoestring. Still, the DC incident is gripping. It captures beautifully an important chapter in our history. one characterized by cold war paranoia, fear, but also a sense wonder and mystery. I miss it.

It would seem that hardly anybody has seen this remarkable film: those who have seen it don't soon forget it. It's kind of like a 1950's science FACT film that tops most of the 1950's science FICTION films which thrilled so many young viewers during that magic decade.

The movie begins and ends by naming a daunting number of professional and government agencies who authenticate the claims which UFO makes. If the viewer keeps in mind the strict accountability this motion picture holds itself to, the remarkable events the film documents are impossible to doubt. There is absolutely no attempt at sensationalism. These are the facts about unidentified flying objects -- and the facts are very disturbing.

I recognized several familiar voices among the narrators, people whose talents were closely associated with the sci-fi movies of the 1950s. In terms of my enjoyment of the film, this proved to be some very sweet icing on the cake. It was a fond tie-in to great movies like `Forbidden Planet', `War of the Worlds', and other classics from that Great Age of Curiosity -- the 1950s.

A prerecorded tape is available through Amazon.com. I'm going to get it. So should you.

Unidentified Flying Objects: The True Story of Flying Saucers (1956)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Pseudo-documentary about reporter Albert Chop (Tom Towers) who begins to investigate several reports of UFO's and by the end of the film he's convinced that they are in fact real. This movie uses stock footage, documentary footage and reenactments to try and tell people that UFOs are real and throughout the movie we're told a few dozen times that the cases we're hearing about are true. The most annoying thing about this movie is the Dragnet-type narration that runs throughout the running time and it's just so dry and dull that by the ten-minute mark you'll be wishing that you were abducted by a real spaceship just so you can get away from this film. To be fair, it's important to note that this was released when the UFO craze was extremely high in this country and it's clear that the producers were playing this to folks who wanted to know the "truth" even if they weren't really going to get it from this movie. The reenactments are also quite annoying as they never let you actually see the spaceships and usually it's just non-professional actors opening their eyes wide to show what type of shock they're in. The majority of the cases told here are based on true stories but we're never given any clear evidence or any real facts. Instead we're just told over and over that we're supposed to take their word. Another problem with the film is that at 91-minutes it goes on for way too long and considering you really don't get to see anything until the final ten-minutes it would be a lot better skipping this "documentary" and actually watching one of the fake, low-budget films, which would at least give you something to see. I mentioned the final ten-minutes and this is when we see two "actual" UFO films, both in color. Being the early 50s on a hand-held camera, the footage is quite poor but I'm sure the film ended with many people believing that these were actually flying saucers.