Customer Reviews

Contact UFO: Alien Abductions [VHS]

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I've seen many lame ufological documentaries and in my estimation this is a genuine classic. Granted there is the typical materialistic bias, but that bias is minimal here.

Much of its footage is dug out from the 50's & 60's and in terms of quality is only as good as it was filmed. The audio session of the Hills is especially gripping & revealing as to the nature of these beings. I highly recommend it!

Now I don't have a problem with dated documentaries per se. I enjoy stuff like Overlords of the UFO and Mysteries From Beyond Earth and they both scream '70s. UFO Contact: Alien Abduction, from 1991, is just the early '90s version of low-budget documentary. But since technology has improved quite a bit since the 1970s, you get much better picture quality (no streaks and grainy footage) and computer animation (but stock footage, mainly from the 1950s is used quite a bit, and of course, the picture quality of those will be grainy). But those are what a documentary makes not. The documentary starts off really cheesy, with badly dated computer animation, and when they talk about 1950s alien contactees, the music included is just so unbearably cheesy, it's not even funny. But after they move on to the Betty and Barney Hill alien abduction, and of Budd Hopkins, at least they dropped the cheesy music. But the problems this documentary is it totally lacks reenactment scenes, like you would see on the TV series Sightings. So while you hear people speak of their alien abduction, it become really disappointing that you don't see scenes of the Greys doing experiments, or whatever as you hear the people speak of their encounter, like you do on Sightings. You do see some artist sketches of the aliens, but that's about it. Another thing bothering me was the scene of R. Leo Sprinkle of the University of Wyoming in Laramie. There was this scene where he was hypnotizing one of his subjects, and all you saw was his mouth and mustache while he was speaking, which I found a bit annoying. And while you can't mistake mid '70s documentaries like Overlords of the UFO or Mysteries From Beyond Earth as masterpieces of the genre, they seem almost miles better than Contact UFO: Alien Abductions. If you're looking for subjects on alien abductions, you're better off looking elsewhere, like Nova.