HUGE SPOILER...It was sweet that they gave the central character, the actor Micky Hayes, the part. He was good considering the rest of the garbage that surrounds him, except Jack Elam...the only highlight of the film. You know by seeing him that he is the boy that made the talk show circuit back in the eighties when they tried bringing attention to his disease. They say he got the role through Make a Wish...which makes me wonder if they wrote the part for him. But, as I said, aside from all this and Jack Elam, the movie was horrible. The acting was way sub par. The audio kept dropping out and the special effects were despicable. Hard to believe the teacher is really flying her bike/airplane when you see that cable hoister her into the air, not to mention the numerous cables hoisting up the spaceship. I know this was before digital painting...but these were so obvious...no doubt hoping your imagination would erase them. Didn't work for me. I am a HUGE sci fi fan, but this is the kind of movie that gives sci fi a bas rap. Don't waste your time...even those horrible B movies out there are eons ahead of this. The Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman looks like Shakespeare compared to this little...gem. Speaking of Gem's, the little alien leaves these baseball sized jewels around when he gets out of his space ship. That's how you call him, so the school teacher takes apart a hurricane lamp that has those little prism teardrops on it, hands them out to the towns people, and there is the whole town holding up these little things hoping to call him...only to get shot by another bad actor. Even Dottie West, God rest her soul, should have stuck to singing, not acting. You can almost see everybody looking at the filming crew waiting for the instructions on what to do next. Like I said....wow.

Apart from the sad facts about the star, and about Dottie West not too much later, I only know two things about this film. First, it's the only movie I know of that's connected with the 1897 "Airship" (a subject I'm very attached to), which was (strangely enough) a wave of U.F.O. stories from much of the country in 1896-97. (Although most U.F.O. and / or Airship believers don't believe the Aurora, TX. story.) The other is this - a rural comedy, or comedy-drama, or fantasy story, cannot possibly be all bad if it has Jack Elam! And the other actors (including Dottie West, not a professional actress) did very well too. I'm sure this has been labeled a low budget answer to a Disney movie, or E.T., as one person put it, but there's nothing wrong with that.

Thirty years ago I read a historical account in UFO literature where a spacecraft crashed into a windmill in a small Texas town back in the late 19th century. The townsfolk found a dead little occupant in the wreckage and gave him a "decent Christian burial". This is the jist of the original story that inspired this film. Everything else in the movie has been added for dramatic effect. One other thing---the place where the alien was supposedly buried has this kind of weird colored fungus or lichen that grows on top of the ground that can't be killed. I saw a picture of the landowner kneeling by the spot. I guess no one ever thought to exhume the grave to find out the truth of the whole matter. And whatever happened to the spaceship wreckage? I thought the movie was very long, dry and boring, the only exception being the little alien scenes.

I live one town over from Aurora, TX. I read about his movie recently in the local newspaper. It is based on a "true story." Local legend holds that the ship did crash, and the alien was buried near Aurora.It is pretty bad. Jack Elam some how pulls off the really bad dialog, and it is interesting to see an adult Spanky.