Touches You

Powerful

A different way of telling a story

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

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.

The movie stands now mainly as an artifact of its time since the UFO fascination of the 1940's and 50's has largely faded away. In fact, younger folks may not be aware of how widespread the post-war fascination with the skies was. Viewers looking to the movie for entertainment should probably look elsewhere, such as the many entertaining space alien features of the time. Instead, the production takes pains to use only non-actors and documented content, concentrating on the genuinely puzzling instances of UFO's without speculation. The highpoint, I expect, are the two actual films of unsolved UFO's. They're put into slow motion at the end for more careful study, but remain even then little more than moving points of light. The overall result requires some patience since the narrative sometimes lags. Nonetheless, anyone interested in the UFO phenomenon should not pass up this 1956, 90-minute review.

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.

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.