My review was written in January 1993 after a Greenwich Village screening.
This bland documentary on UFOS is an exercise in naivete, both on the part of the subjects and the filmmaker. Copyrighted in 1991, the film most closely resembles Diane Keaton's "Heaven". Similar mix of extended interviews, man-on-the-street Q&As and old, mainly black & white film footage lacks focus and consistency.
Canadian filmmaker Dan Curtish (not the U. S. horror and miniseries maestro) does not offer any narration or opinion of his own, making this feature different from the gee-whiz or government expose approach of 1970s documentaries like "Overlords of the UFO" and "UFOs Are Real". Traveling across the USA and Canada, Curtis has found goofy, often lonely people who share a need to believe.
Some are messianic figures, like the nutty 90-year-old Ruth E. Norman and her Unarius cult. She calls herself Uriel and compares herself to Jesus Christ. Alan Moseley is a priest in a weird Los Angeles cult known as the Aetherius Society which collects prayers in Prayer Batteries and claims to have achieved a ceasefire in Cyprus in 1974.
Two of the oddest interviewees are Betty Hill and John Shepherd. Hill, famous from supposedly having been abducted with her husband Barney by aliens (shown portrayed by Estelle Parsons in a clip from the 1975 telefilm "The UFO Incident"), discredits herself with ridiculous statements. Even more pathetic is Shepherd, who looks like a hippy and spent 21 years transmitting signals to outer space and waiting for an answer. The audience almost calls out in unison: "Get a life!".
Less scintillating segments include Bud Hopkins, a Gotham artist who's written well-known books on the subject, and Larry W. Bryant, a Pentagon employee who moonlights as head of "Citizens Against UFO Secrecy". Curtis fails to follow up on this sober approach to the UFO craze.
Old movie trailers and excerpts from classics like "The Day the Earth Stood Still" and "This Island Earth" are fun, matched with newsreels and delightful clips from "The Arrival", a crazy, religioso special effects film made by Norman's Unarius Academy of Science.
Interludes of dumb questions asked of folks on the street elicit fatuous answers and add nothing to the film. Oddly, since the early pseudo-documentaries occasionally featured actors pretending to be real interviewees, one of the people caught on the street turns out to be B-movie actress Sherrie Rose, uncredited. Since she's being interviewed in Los Angeles, Curtis probably suffered from the locational hazard of sticking a microphone in front of a woman without realizing she was an actress.
