“The Phenomenon” – Reflections on James Fox’s New UFO Documentary (Part 1)

“The Phenomenon.”  Directed by James Fox.  Released October 6, 2020.

“Of course, UFO skeptics don’t read sighting reports.  Nine out of ten insist on arguing in generalities, and couldn’t tell a good report from a poor one if their lives depended on it.”
–Alexander D. Mebane, ca. 1957 (memory quote)

“I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now …”
–Joni Mitchell

And me, I’ve looked at UFOs from both sides now.  First as a believer–a thoughtful, critical-minded believer, but a 15-year-old believer nonetheless–who pedaled 6 or 7 miles on hot summer afternoons to the used bookstore where one might find back issues of the pulp S-F magazine Fantastic Universe, containing Lex Mebane’s UFO articles.  Almost 60 years later, I vividly remember the sweat and thirst of those bike rides.  Just as vividly, I remember Mebane’s trenchant and articulate skewering of our shared enemies, the UFO debunkers.

Sure they dismissed the UFO evidence–they wouldn’t even bother to look at it!  “Nine out of ten insist on arguing in generalities,” and if you tried to turn the discussion toward specific data, they got bored and dismissed you as well.  I knew this from my own experience.

How, I wondered at age 15, could a rational person ever argue with such types?

And now here I am on the other side (“it’s UFOs’ illusions I recall / I really don’t know UFOs at all,” as Joni Mitchell might have but didn’t quite sing), and I understand my one-time adversaries all too well.  An unexplained UFO sighting is a thriller if you approach it with the assumption that, looked at from a perspective other than that of orthodox science, it might be the missing piece the cosmic puzzle that the UFO represents.  Otherwise it’s an exercise in tedium.

Assume, as skeptics will, that the event even if it happened is of no real significance; that a few general reflections will show how implausible and contrived are the hypotheses that the UFOlogists pile onto it; that the sighting is just as mundane and banal as the hundreds of misidentifications of birds, weather balloons, the planet Venus etc. etc. that fill the UFO files, except that the details that would allow a solution are for one reason or another missing.  It’s still a puzzle, but of far less interest than your daily crossword.  A book devoted to that sighting, and perhaps a dozen or two like it, will be a bore and a time-waster many times over.

All of which I offer as some background explanation for why James Fox’s just-released documentary “The Phenomenon”–hailed as “the most important documentary of the year and the most accurate examination of the world’s greatest mystery”–didn’t much impress me when I watched it a few days ago.

At age 15, I would have loved it.  Even more, surely, than I loved the 1956 documentary “Unidentified Flying Objects: The True Story of Flying Saucers,” which I tape-recorded when it was broadcast on TV in the early 1960s and then spent hours making a transcript of the tape.  Like the 1956 film, but with incomparably greater cinematic skill and with an incomparably richer storehouse of UFO lore to draw upon, “The Phenomenon” builds a reasoned, evidence-based case for the existence of UFOs.  Surely here, 15-year-old Dave Halperin would have said, the skeptics are forced to confront the nuts-and-bolts data they’d rather ignore.

Yet 72-year-old David Halperin remains mostly impervious.  Let me try to explain why.

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Let’s start with what “The Phenomenon” succeeds in demonstrating.  First, that there are prominent individuals in the government, the military, and various scientific disciplines who take UFOs very seriously.  The “tinfoil hat” stereotype of UFO believers is false, indeed defamatory.  They’re not weak-brained; they’re not crazy.  They’re smart, articulate men and women (but mostly men) who perceive a reality that for many is too fantastic to be entertained.

“We need to begin to prepare to accept and understand that we’re not alone in the universe, have not been at all throughout this time,” says Christopher Mellon, deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.  (Mellon, though the movie doesn’t mention it, is the author of a 2018 op-ed in the Washington Post complaining that UFOs aren’t taken seriously enough.  The Post‘s willingness to publish such a piece is at least as important a testimony to the UFOs’ respectability as the fact that Mellon wrote it.)  “These things are real,” says Mellon, “they’re here, this is happening now”; and Nevada Senator Harry Reid is hardly less emphatic in his endorsement.  “There’s more than one up there,” says the former Senate majority leader, as he declares it “very, very bad for our country” that the government hasn’t aggressively investigated what’s going on in our skies.

UFOs are socially, culturally, intellectually respectable.  Point made, and very welcome.

The second point made: that there have been a number of genuinely baffling events over the past 70 years.  For an old UFO buff like me, “The Phenomenon’s” cataloguing of them is almost a walk down memory lane.  The Kenneth Arnold sighting over the Cascade Mountains of June 24, 1947, which started it all … the still photos of a flying disk taken over a farm near McMinnville, Oregon, in May 1950 … the motion picture of UFOs against a blue sky near Tremonton, Utah at the beginning of July 1952 and the rash of sightings over Washington, DC, later that month … and of course “The Case that Changed Everything,” as the film calls it: the egg-shaped UFO that landed at Socorro, New Mexico, on April 24, 1964.  For this last incident, I’m obliged to admit, I’ve never seen a satisfying explanation.

The parade of cases extends into the 1990s with the “Phoenix lights” of 1997 and the very remarkable 1994 incident at the Ariel School in Zimbabwe, about which I’ll have more to say in the third installment of this post.  It reaches the present century with the Navy videos that created such a stir when the New York Times revealed their existence at the end of 2017.  (“The Phenomenon” leads off, appropriately, with the Times article, which stunningly reversed a decades-old tradition of that newspaper’s contempt for UFOs.)  Still, it does seem that the film’s cases come mostly from the 1950s and 1960s, and this clustering hints at a weakness in its argument.  If extraterrestrial beings have been visiting us for seven decades up to this day, why does the best evidence for them come from more than 50 years back?

Here I’m shifting into the “generalities” that, as per Lex Mebane, are the favored arguments of us skeptics.  I can’t help it.  They’re real arguments, not frivolous nit-picking.  No, I can’t explain the McMinnville photos of 1950: they do seem to show a solid object in the air, corresponding to the conventional image of a flying saucer.  (Did the farmer and his wife, who took the photos, fake them?  They would have been acting out of character, but people sometimes do that.)  But why is it that the 21st century, with its incomparably greater opportunities for taking photographs at a moment’s notice, hasn’t yielded anything comparable–if there are indeed unknown solid objects zooming around the sky?

“The days are prolonged, and every vision faileth.”  This is quoted as a proverb in Ezekiel 12:22, and although Ezekiel vehemently objects to the skepticism it expresses, it well applies to the UFO situation.  Promises of imminent “Disclosure” fail with monotonous regularity.  So do predictions of the impact UFOs are bound to have, whether through friendly contact or invasion or redemption, on the affairs of humanity.  And this has gone on now for more than 70 years.

Strange indeed–if we’ve really been visited by some alien civilization for those 70 years–that in all that time it should not have had the smallest impact on the affairs of this world.

The narrator of “The Phenomenon” (Peter Coyote) seems to recognize the problem when he announces, at the film’s beginning:  “To fully understand, we must examine a body of evidence long suppressed, a parallel history to the one we think we know, stretching back at least 70 years.”  Which I take as an admission: belief in alien visitation will not fit comfortably into the history of the past decades as we’ve always known it.  “A parallel history,” supposedly “long suppressed,” must be constructed to encompass it.

Do we really want to do something so drastic, on the basis of a handful–spread out over 70+ years, that’s all they are–of puzzling incidents?

Or should these incidents be approached with a different set of questions, leading not to outer space, but to our own inner space as human beings?

Which will make them, even for the skeptic, not such bores or time-wasters after all.

(To be continued in two weeks, in the next installment of this post.)

by David Halperin
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