It is generally acknowledged that the first UFO sighting of the postwar era was on June 24, 1947 when pilot Kenneth Arnold saw several shiny discs shooting through the skies above Mount Rainier. The press called them "flying saucers," though the less sensational term UFO (unidentified flying object) was used by the Air Force when they began investigating these sightings, which continued well into the mid 1950s (and still happen today). This movie prefigures the History Channel quasi-documentary programs of recent years in which interviews and actual documentary footage are mixed with dramatic recreations of events featuring actors. Narrator Marvin Miller lets us know at the beginning that this film is "not fiction," and the throughline narrative follows a real man named Albert Chop (played by Tom Towers, not an actor but a Los Angeles reporter), a former reporter who got a job as a PR man for the Air Force's Air Materiel Command in Dayton, Ohio during the initial UFO fuss and later did PR for the Pentagon. The film begins at a Pentagon press conference in July of 1952 as Maj. Gen. John Samford (a real person) addresses the issue of UFOs. We then backtrack to the initial sighting in 1947 and move ahead to a sighting by Kentucky police in 1948, a Life Magazine cover story on UFOs in 1952, and the sighting of multiple UFOs over Washington DC in July of '52. Along the way, the Air Force sets up the secret Project Sign to investigate. They shut it down when the press finds out about it but then reactivate it as Project Grudge. Chop is often stuck between reporters seeking information and government contacts who seem reluctant to share any findings. Along the way, we see genuine footage of two UFO sightings, repeated at the end of the film, before we return to Gen. Samford whose money quote is that there are "credible observers of relatively incredible things."
Though I noted above this movie’s similarities to current day recreated documentaries, this one is not a slickly made product with CGI and dramatic scenes. It very much follows the traditional non-sensationalistic documentary format with constant narration, interviews and proclamations interspersed with recreated scenes involving Albert Chop; these are resolutely presented in a realistic fashion to the point where, except for one scene set in Chop's home, the viewer tends to forget that these are fictional scenes. The closest the film comes to anything dramatic is when Chop is called away at night during the DC sightings: he says blandly to his wife, "Radar is picking up unknowns over the Capitol—don't wait up!" For all of its set-up as being real, the filmmakers don't tell us that we’re seeing actors in the scenes involving Chop, and there are no credits at the end identifying the actors. IMDb has a cast list of about 20 people, with less than half noted as playing themselves (or appearing in documentary footage). I guess I appreciate the low-key tone of the film, but more transparency about recreated scenes would have been welcome. Still, the key draw here was and remains the few minutes of actual UFO footage. The longer film was taken in Utah and unfortunately looks to me like reflections of lights superimposed over footage of the sky. Probably best appreciated as a historical novelty. The film’s subtitle on screen is, "The True Story of Flying Saucers." Pictured is Tom Towers to the right of a shadowy government guy. [YouTube]
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