The Disappearance of Flight 412 (1974)

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

The acting in this movie is really good.

The logic of the prologue to this film is astounding. The narrator says that there have been a huge number of UFO sightings and if only 1/2 of 1% are true, then them's A LOT of aliens out there. Huh?! Unassailable logic, right?!The film is done in a semi-documentary style. This makes it look rather official and real. The story is about an Airforce flight that claims it saw flying saucers. Glenn Ford and Bradford Dillman are in it but don't have a heck of a lot to do. You also get to see a pre- "Starsky and Hutch" David Soul. It lost my interest after a while...and even if I believed in UFOs, the film was extremely high on talk and light on action. Pretty dull, actually and not a film for Ford fans. Let's just pretend he didn't make this one...

The Disappearance of Flight 412 is a rather cheaply made TV movie with really bad sound that doesn't seem to make any point. If there are indeed UFOs visiting our fair planet we can't seem to ever get a handle on it with anything definitive. If they are and the government has documentation they are covering it up. Hardly anything revelatory.Air Force Colonel Glenn Ford is in charge of a flight group in which one of his flight crews is making some radar equipment checks. They see a strange object in the sky, some Marine jets are scrambled and they disappear off the radar scope. Ford's crew is diverted to a secret base nearby his base that he does not know anything about. But with a little sleuthing he tracks down where his men are gets them out.Quite frankly he should have dropped it right there, but he pursues it and gets himself in a ringer with General Kent Smith. The conclusion, there really isn't any.Robert F. Lyons does the best acting job as the colonel in charge of the top secret installation, a really smarmy type. Ford does his usual professional job. But in the final analysis the only people who this film might appeal to are aviation buffs.

"The Disappearance of Flight 412" has the look and feel of a documentary based on a real UFO encounter and the aftermath. I'm sure some people will see this movie and from then on remember it as fact. In fact, no one ever says that it is based on reality. It is fictional, pure and simple. It's just another movie trying to cash in on the UFO craze. At the end of the film there is a statement saying that it is fictional and is not based on anything, anybody or anyplace living or dead. As a semi documentary based on reality it would at least have been interesting. As a sci-fi movie, which is what it is, it is just plain boring. There is no action and very little drama. You never see an alien, or a UFO. All you get out of this movie is that the government is hiding knowledge about the existence of UFOs. The plot is slow, boring, very predictable and goes nowhere. When it ends you wonder what was the point of this movie. Very strange. I wish the movie disappeared with the flight.

**SPOILERS** Four years before the 1947 Roswell Incident was made public in 1978 a film came out about a fictitious UFO cover up that had all the hallmarks of what was really going on in the US military, notably the US Air Force, for some twenty years. On a sunny summer day a radar plane took off from the Whitney AFB and got caught up with what the US Government has been keeping under the rug since the end of WWII: Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO's). Are they or are they not real? from another solar system do they come from? and are a danger to the national security of the United States? The crew of the radar plane spots by sight and their radar system as well as it being confirmed by ground radar an eerie and frighting sight. Three unidentified flying objects moving threateningly towards their plane! Two marine jet fighters are scrambled to confront them or, if necessary, shoot them down. As the fighter jets come within cannon fire of the strange objects they either disappear or are themselves shot down by the UFO's who then make an incredible right angle turn, almost at a standing position, and shoot out of sight at speeds, clocked by the radar equipment on the plane and ground control, of up to 5,000 MPH. What happens next is what we've learned over the years since the movie was made. The radar plane is diverted to an obscure and abandoned air field, the old Digger air base, and the pilots debriefed by members of the SID, Special Intellengence Detatchment. And made to see things the the way the military wants things to be seen, and have the entire incident filed away and forgotten. Four months later the same kind of UFO incident happens again at the same Whitney AFB and those who suffered through the first one at the start of the film had by then learned their lesson and said of the incident what they were told to say from their higher ups. Not what their eyes and brains told them what they saw and what they knew to be the truth. Even though UFO's are still considered by many in the news media as mass hysteria at worse or the results of an overworked imagination at best they are real enough for the US military to have covered up and stamped Top Secret and Eyes Only thousands of documents about these elusive objects since at least back to 1947, which shows what those who are in the know really think about them. The incident that happened in the movie "The Disaperance of Flight 412" is not unique to those who served in the USAF over the last fifty or so years. With intelligently flown aircraft being spotted all over the USA, as well as the entire planet, unopposed with those responsible for the safety of the people not being able to stop them or shoot them down It's no wonder that the government doesn't want this information, if true, to become public.