UFOs: It Has Begun

Rod Serling introduces this hour-and-a-half examination of the UFO phenomena, with the help of various talking heads and the use of movie footage and video clips. I don't mean to disparage those contributors by calling them talking heads. They include people like Jacques Vallee and Allen Hyneck, two guys who know more about what they're talking about than anyone else -- on earth. Both, by the way, look as if they should be the poseurs that they're not. Vallee, a handsome, dapper young Frenchman was running a computer consulting business near Stanford, I think. Hyneck, with his cunning little beard, his glasses, his pipe, is a caricature of the astronomy professor that he was, at Northwestern University.

But that's all beside the point. The point is that I, at least, can't imagine how anyone who has any familiarity with the UFO business can believe anything other than that there is something out there that just can't be explained by what we now know.

I'm inclined to view the animal mutilations of the time, 1975, with skepticism and I am glad that the crop-circle craze hadn't yet become popular. But there is an extended interview with four members of an Army helicopter crew that serve as an example of a convincing experience. On a night cruise near Cleveland, the helicopter was approached at high speed by a glowing red object the size of the helicopter itself. It aligned itself with the helicopter and tracked along with it on the right side. It illuminated the copter's interior with a green light. The pilot depressed the controls to lose altitude and yet the copter was drawn up at a rate of about 1,000 feet per minute. Why would four sane and responsible Army men -- one a sergeant, the pilot a major -- put their careers and dignity in jeopardy by making up such a bizarre lie? The mystery is a real one and no film is long enough to explore it in detail, let alone a review of that film. Incredible tales from credible people are innumerable and come from around the world. I'm talking airline pilots, military personnel, police officers, the Secretary of the Navy, and one president of the United States. My own sketchy report is listed at NUFORC under Keansberg, New Jersey, 1953.

At least as interesting as UFOs themselves has been the government's response to the flood of sightings. Only a handful of dispositions is available to the authorities. (1) We don't want to panic the public, therefore all UFOs are radar inversions, hoaxes, weather balloons, or Venus, so they can be disregarded. (2) It may be foreign technology and we want to know all about it. (3) It may be REALLY foreign technology and we are helpless to cope with it, therefore we want nothing to do with it. (4) "Other," by which we mean an as-yet undiscovered state of matter, maybe akin to plasma, or perhaps an errant thought in the mind of some cosmic intelligence, of which we're only a small part.

Of course, there are in fact a lot of hoaxes out there and a lot of misidentified planets, as well as some entirely natural psychological anomalies like Barney and Betty Hill's soi-disant abductions. But this is a case for Karl Popper. Even if we were able to dismiss 99% of all sightings as drunken hallucinations, we're stuck with that left-over 1%. And all it takes is one.

Ten years ago, Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, was ridiculed for announcing that there were known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. I never understood why fun was being made of that typology. The existence of UFOs is clearly a known unknown. Each time an on-camera reporter cracks a joke about a sighting made by multiple responsible observers, it makes me wince -- not so much at the cavalier dismissal of a paradigmatic threat but at our own arrogance in thinking that there can no longer be anything we don't know.

The film doesn't deal with the Condon Report of 1969, which is just as well, since the volume was a travesty of science. I've spent thirty years as a sort of scientist myself and know something about how research reports work.

Anyway, I'm afraid I was carried away there for the last two or three paragraphs, due to the intensity of my interest in the subject. But I shouldn't have gotten so far away from the material under review. Can I take those paragraphs back?

Timely documentary about the UFO ,or really extraterrestrial and intelligently manned space craft, debate that has been baffling military men scientists and astronomers, as well as the public, since the end of WWII. Released about the same time that the Roswell Crash of 1947 became public the film "UFO's :It Has Begun" has gone from being just another one of many UFO films or documentaries to a forerunner to the real facts that came out of the Roswell Crash. The evidence that has been made public, released due to the Public Freedom of Information Act, make the point that there's a real possibility that were being visited by beings or spacemen from outer space not just over the last 50 years or so but since the dawn of human history.

There's three cases, or UFO encounters, in the movie that have been known long before Roswell was made public in 1978 that really stand out. These cases show that UFO's may very possibly be real and that the US Government has been covering up their existence from the public in order not to create panic in the fear that they, not the US military and air force, rule the skies and that there's nothing the government can do about it.

The first of the three earth-shaking encounters took place outside Louisville Kentucky on January 7, 1948 when veteran combat pilot Capt. Mantell chased, in his P-51 fighter plane, an unidentified object that was reported to be at least 200 feet in diameter. After reaching the 20,000 foot level Capt. Mantell lost control of his plane and crashed or what some eye witnesses said exploded in mid air as he fell to his death below. Mantell who flew hundreds of combat missions in WWII and during peacetime we were told, by the USAF, mistook the UFO for the planet Venus! A pilot of the caliber of Capt. Mantell would never mistake a planet, this in broad daylight, for something that was less then a mile away from him and climbing at tremendous speed unless he was either drunk or high on drugs which, as the autopsy on him proved, Mantell wasn't!

The second UFO incident in "UFO's: It Has Begun" that shows that UFO's may very possibly be the real McCoy had to do with the spectacular July 1952 UFO flap over the Alexandria-Clarendon Axis or corridor that covers the very seat of power of the United States Government its capital Washington D.C. For over two weeks aggressive and unconcerned UFO's criss crossed the night skies over D.C, the most heavily defended place on earth, with the USAF totally unable to not only stop them but even keep up with the mysterious glowing flying objects.

Playing a dangerous, for the USAF, game of cat and mouse the UFO's out maneuvered, making sharp and unbelievable right angle turns, and out paced, going at speeds of over 7,000 mph, the most modern USAF fighter aircraft, the F-94 saber-jets. Things got so out of hand that President Truman almost called for a state of emergency feeling that the nation was under attack and was unable, with the USAF rendered useless by the speedy unidentified flying objects, to do anything to stop it. Trying to keep the American public from panicking the US military reported that the UFO's seen both on radar and by thousands of eye witnesses, including experienced combat pilots, were nothing more then weather inversions!

The third UFO incident of note in the film "UFO's: It Has Begun" took place on October 18, 1973 outside of Cleveland Ohio. It's there when a US Army reserve helicopter came face to face with a large object in the night sky that not only paced along with it but, hovering over the craft, kept the helicopter from descending to the ground by toeing it up into the sky, like it was a giant and powerful magnet. The with the pilot in charge of the craft Capt. Coyne desperately pushing hard on the controls for it to go down! The craft was totally under the unknown flying objects control for at least ten minutes as it inexplicably and slowly ascended upwards, with the UFO hovering just a few feet overhead, from 1,000 to almost 4,000 feet. All this was seen by dozens of eye witnesses as well as recorded on ground radar by startled and terrified air traffic, civilian as well as military, controllers!

The Documentary show called UFOs: It has begun is great program hosted by the legendary Rod Serling and Burgess Meredith! The program goes by another name of Alien Abductions and Sightings. I own the DVD and its weird that the title of the DVD is UFO's There Here but when the viewer watches it its titled Alien Abductions and Sightings ! Also on the DVD is another program titled Evidence of the Arrival. Anyway the show has many interesting segments of extra-terrestrial activity such as hundreds of UFOs and alien abductions. The real Betty Hill was interviewed here who her and her husband Barney were abducted by alien beings. She explained about the visitors and the sign that one of them showed her. The programed also had about crop circles and more! The footage of the UFOs look legit to Me. This was really a treat that Rod Serling and Burgess Meredith hosted this program. If you love aliens, UFOs, Crop Circles, Rod Serling, Bergis Meredith, and Documentaries this I strongly recommend this DVD!

Although this show seems silly and passé now...in the 1970s, when the U.F.O. scare and excitement was in full-throttle, this was a 'great show!'

In 1979, when I was thirteen, my mind was on 'all of these great and fun' things from outer space, as was every other teen (boy)! Our minds were on such things as - "Outer Space Documentaries" like this; as well as "Star Trek" (TOS); "Close Encounters of the Third Kind;" "In Search Of;" "U.F.O." (British TV show); "The Night Gallery;" "Dr. Who;" "Project U.F.O;" "Battlestar Gallactica;" "Space 1999;" "Planet of the Apes" (1974 TV show and movies); "The Six Million Dollar Man;" "The Twilight Zone;" etc.

I even remember that we kids in the 1970s even had 'eyes-on' "Bigfoot!" The 1970s was the "Golden Age" of U.F.O.s, phenomena, and, the unexplained; and...we kids ATE IT UP and LOVED IT!

I'm now 49 years-old, and, quite happy that I didn't seek-out this documentary! Instead, my fourteen-year-old Son 'sent' it to me! It's great that the youngsters of today have taken an interest in what us 'old men' once viewed as an interest when 'we' were youngsters!

Because of a child, MY CHILD...I'm now interested in all of this once again! Thank you :)

UFOS: IT HAS BEGUN is an hour-and-a-half exploration of UFO sightings in America, hosted by none other than TWILIGHT ZONE creator Rod Serling. Burgess Meredith serves as some-time narrator, and Jose Ferrer even shows up near the start too.

The format of such feature-film documentaries is quite a straightforward one: there's talking head footage from various experts in the field, interspersed with grainy footage of real-life UFO sightings. The cases featured are noticeably American-centric here, although I did like the way that little-discussed sightings from the 19th century are explored. Plus, cattle mutilations get a look in, which is all for the creepy good.

As ever, this documentary is heavily biased in favour of believers - there's nary a sceptic in sight - but nonetheless it provides a nice time capsule of UFO thought and belief during the 1970s.