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

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Brilliant and touching

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

If you have the slightest interest in the UFO phenomenon then this is a must see. In many ways the word 'fiction' in relation to this movie does it a disservice. Sure everything is re-staged and re-enacted but only to highlight what Press Officer Albert Chop insists really did happen. From a social history point of view it's a little goldmine too. There appears to have been so much respect in American society throughout the 1950's and it oozes through here. For the serious UFO enthusiast the inclusion of the original Tremonton and Grand Falls UFO footage makes it an invaluable movie from a research point of view.

Unidentified Flying Objects: The True Story of Flying Saucers (1956) * 1/2 (out of 4) Pseudo-documentary about reporter Albert Chop (Tom Towers) who begins to investigate several reports of UFO's and by the end of the film he's convinced that they are in fact real. This movie uses stock footage, documentary footage and reenactments to try and tell people that UFOs are real and throughout the movie we're told a few dozen times that the cases we're hearing about are true. The most annoying thing about this movie is the Dragnet-type narration that runs throughout the running time and it's just so dry and dull that by the ten-minute mark you'll be wishing that you were abducted by a real spaceship just so you can get away from this film. To be fair, it's important to note that this was released when the UFO craze was extremely high in this country and it's clear that the producers were playing this to folks who wanted to know the "truth" even if they weren't really going to get it from this movie. The reenactments are also quite annoying as they never let you actually see the spaceships and usually it's just non-professional actors opening their eyes wide to show what type of shock they're in. The majority of the cases told here are based on true stories but we're never given any clear evidence or any real facts. Instead we're just told over and over that we're supposed to take their word. Another problem with the film is that at 91-minutes it goes on for way too long and considering you really don't get to see anything until the final ten-minutes it would be a lot better skipping this "documentary" and actually watching one of the fake, low-budget films, which would at least give you something to see. I mentioned the final ten-minutes and this is when we see two "actual" UFO films, both in color. Being the early 50s on a hand-held camera, the footage is quite poor but I'm sure the film ended with many people believing that these were actually flying saucers.

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.

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.