Unidentified Flying Objects: The True Story of Flying Saucers (1956)

Overrated

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

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.

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.

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.

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.