Winston Jones

(On Cable TV, May 2021) As someone with a deeply held skeptical streak, I don’t have much patience with UFO mythology. Still, there is something almost refreshing in the proto-UFOlogy “documentary” Unidentified Flying Objects: The True Story of Flying Saucers. Dating back from the earliest days of the UFO delusion, this documentary takes a surprisingly humble approach to the phenomenon of unidentified flying objects. There’s something up the air, no one knows what it is, but it’s not necessarily a reason to start screaming about aliens, abductions and government conspiracies. Much of the footage is fictionalized, meaning that director Winston Jones shows “authentic” 1950s-style takes on the UFO myth, with actors reacting to revelations in ways most closely influenced by Hollywood films of the time. (Don’t watch the film for gripping narrative — it’s too tortured between dramatization and a pseudo-documentary intent to be particularly suspenseful.)  The film presents “real” footage toward the end, making the jump to colour footage as it allows audiences of the time to look at the footage without the benefit of a pause button. For twenty-first century viewers, it’s worth putting the film in the context of the red scare and a barely acknowledged presumption that, maybe, the evil Soviets are behind it all. I was expecting the worst (or rather: the dumbest) from Unidentified Flying Objects, but ended up perhaps more interested by what the film leaves out than what it throws in. You can chart a steady sensationalization of UFO mythology in the decades following this early entry, culminating in 1990s X-Files quasi-hysteria in which every-single-bad-thing in the history of the world could be thrown against mysterious lights in the sky. In this context, the quaintness of this 1956 pseudo-documentary is almost refreshing.