While you wait for more information on the Defense Department’s report of its UFO studies to be released in full to Congress by the end of June and peruse the news for analysis of the parts of the study that have already been leaked, I would like to recommend a nicely original little film about alien encounters.
I ran across “UFO” (2018) while randomly looking through Amazon.com’s recommendations of science fiction films. I was in a sci fi mood and desperately hoping to find something more interesting than superhero films or Star Wars. The user comments for this film were very positive, making the story sound blessedly original. I was definitely not disappointed after adding the DVD to my collection.
The film is based on a 2006 sighting of a disc-shaped object over Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, an event quite familiar to UFO enthusiasts. You can check out the overview of the O’Hare incident right here. The plot involves a mathematics graduate student who is able to figure out that the FAA’s explanations for strange aerial phenomenon over an airport (moved to Cincinnati from Chicago) don’t make sense. After convincing his friends and one of his professors (Agent Scully herself, Gillian Anderson, in a nice bit of casting) that there is something unusual going on and government investigators’ prosaic explanations don’t make sense, our headstrong hero finds himself under surveillance by a shadowy group of investigators who want to know how he figured out what he did.
That synopsis might sound like something that could have been recycled from a million UFO-conspiracy films, but the film is much more than that. It uses the archetypes of the genre to examine the psychology of what it’s like to crave answers, the obsessive need to know in the face of an unsolvable mystery. I don’t want to go into more details about plot points because I don’t want to spoil anything, but do check out the film to see how effectively one can tell a story about the true nature of the unknown.
It might make you look at the latest UFO discussion and speculations playing out in the news every day in a whole different light. Just what if there really is something extraordinary flying around in the skies out there, but we may never know what it is? What if there is nothing more in the hidden government files than the admission of total ignorance?
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