This documentary-style film follows reporter Al Chop as he begins his minor job for the U. S. Air Force around 1950 and gradually works his way up the Civil Service scale, changing along the way from UFO skeptic to -- not UFO "believer", but let's say "open-minded everyman." He has no idea what they are but he's now convinced that something is up.The acting is so poor that I thought the performers had been hired from the ranks of Hollywood extras or had simply been brought in off the streets. At times they seem to be reading directly from cue cards off camera. I recognized only one actor, and only by his voice. It was Henry (Harry) Morgan, or Harry (Henry) Morgan, or Edward Teach, or whatever his name is, who played Jack Webb's sidekick and the Commanding Officer on "Mash." Maybe he can't make up his mind about his name but he's the only performer involved who is able to inject a note of drama into the proceedings, even if only audio. "I see 'em now. They're closin' in on me." The principal figure is that of Al Chop. He looks rather blandly middle class, a bit like Kent Smith, if Kent Smith were a little pinched, maybe suffering from a severe case of Calvinism. There is a bit of his home life but it's restricted to a few scenes of his wife telling him worriedly that he looks piqued. He tosses her matter-of-fact orders like, "Get my car keys." The direction is full of clichés and the dialog is clipped and unconvincingly stylized, as if gotten from "Dragnet." The editing is clumsy. We're given mere second-long glimpses of the two color films that the script describes as awesomely important. And the data are dated. This was released forty-five years ago and a lot has happened since then. The population of the United States alone has grown by more than a third, with every person a potential observer. The global population has more than doubled from about 3 billion to 7 billion. I can't estimate the growth of video cameras because their number was zero in 1956 and any percentage of zero is still zero.It's a hastily organized, poorly performed, amateurish documentary. That aside, the subject is one of monumental importance. And for reasons we can only guess at, the subject has been officially disregarded by the government. A reasonable guess would be that no official agency, especially a military one, is eager to admit that they know nothing about what's up, and in any case are unwilling to display their ignorance because of a possible panic.Of course there have been crazes and fads before, lots of them. The phantom gasser of Mattoon, Illinois, is one of my favorites. And many of the UFO sightings reported are illusions or misidentified airplanes or other ordinary phenomena. But a few of them are incredible tales told by credible observers. (Karl Popper would have loved this.) All it takes is one, after all. And what does a UFO have to do to be a convincing UFO -- land on the White House lawn? The phenomena dealt with in this film differ from other familiar crazes. It refuses to go away, whether it gets publicity or not, whether the Air Force has decided it's unworthy of further investigation or not. The sightings keep cropping up. The interested viewer is invited to check out the many recent and archival reports at NUFORC.The lack of official and public interest in the subject is understandable from a psychological point of view. These are what Leo Strauss and others called "known unknowns." We know they're there but we don't know what they are. Two responses are expectable: we should fear it because it's unknown, and we should joke about it because there is nothing else we can do to allay our fear. On the streets, this is known as whistling in the dark.

I have this movie on Video, tped in VHS in 1994 from broadcast from Atlanta (hint.) I picked it up from a man running a little memorabilia shop / museum in downtown Roswell0. That Roswell! Other Sci-Fi movies I like include these: Every time I drive by an old Drive-In Movie site or an old Theater, I am reminded of the many "B" movies that played during my childhood. found a liking for sci-fi. Early in the 20th century, Jules Verne stirred the imagination with books about fantastic adventures. Some of those books spoke of the Earth, the Moon and creatures from outer space. When I started watching this new and most often scary stuff, the Sci-Fi craze was barely upon us. The very first film I saw was "The Thing,"starring James Arness (Matt Dillon of Gunsmoke fame) as a gigantic cabbage man who had crashed his flying saucer in the Arctic, and the Army Air Force found him in a large block of ice. When the Thing thawed out he ravaged the polar post, killing sled dogs and any other creature in his path. It was the trip home after the movie that literally scared me to death. When I walked home, all the shadows were concealing the huge green man. As I sprinted home up Ninth Street, I ran from light post to light post on alternate sides of the street, to keep out of the dark shadows. Boy, how I wished mom or dad would come along to snatch me into the car and deliver me from this evil.

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.

Trivia question for sci-fi fans: name the 1956 film that featured the talents of Les Tremayne (the general in `War of the Worlds' and the opening narrator of `Forbidden Planet'), Marvin Miller (the voice of Robby the Robot in `Forbidden Planet'), Olan Soule (who had a supporting role in `The Day the Earth Stood Still' and `Captain Midnight'), and Harry Morgan (Colonel Porter of `M.A.S.H.'). Here's a hint: Harry Morgan plays an Air Force pilot whose plane is surrounded by six flying saucers above the Washington, D.C. If all this sounds too good to be true, take a peak at this drama-documentary, based on the experiences of Al Chop, a reporter who served as press liaison for the Pentagon during its investigation of UFO's from 1947 to the early 1950s. Miller, Soule, and Tremayne provide the voices for the narrated portions of the film. Although the movie contains only two brief film clips to serve as photographic evidence of UFO's, the producers build a good case based on the credibility of certain UFO witnesses (airline pilots, military personnel, radar operators, etc.). On a more subtle level, director Winston Jones pulls off a clever trick; he begins the film as a pure documentary, but he gradually modifies this approach and focuses on reporter Al Chop's personal involvement in the UFO investigation. Chop slowly changes from UFO skeptic to UFO believer (and so will you). The climax is a gripping reenactment of a true incident which occurred in 1950, when a group of UFO's cruised above Washington DC for several hours. The voice of Harry Morgan is heard over the radio as an Air Force pilot whose plane is literally surrounded by UFO's, during which Al Chop and a group of bewildered military men cluster around the radar scope, watching in wide-eyed wonder. Dramatically speaking, this scene is far superior to its counterpart in `Close Encounters of the Third Kind'. The most amazing thing about this film is the fact that it was made with the full cooperation of the United States government, and every scrap of evidence it presents was made available to any and all scientific agency who wanted to examine it. Watch it and make up your own mind about UFO's -- but you'll loose some sleep over it before you do. Note: Some reviews mistakenly identify the star of `Unidentified Flying Objects' as Tom Powers, a co-star of `Destination Moon' (1950). The star of `UFO' is actually a Los Angles newspaper reporter (not a professional actor) named Tom Powers, who portrays the real-life reporter Al Chop.