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Are we alone in the universe? If we aren't, do our alien brethren listen to the radio?
National Geographic attempts to answer these questions in
Phantom Quest: The Search for Extraterrestrials, a half-hour program that pits wide-eyed UFO abductees against wide-eyed scientists from the Search for Earthly Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), the program immortalized in the movie
Contact. While SETI "channel surfs the cosmic dial" for radio signals from otherworldly civilizations, those who claim to have been visited by alien life forms offer chillingly consistent testimonials of various close encounters. Both parties come off as alternately convincing and kooky. A UFO-welcoming party sets up camp in the Nevada desert and proceeds to discuss who gets to walk up the ramp first, and SETI's funding battles in the halls of Congress take on an equally absurdist air. These highlights aside, the program is too short to comprehensively cover such an expansive topic. And while the question of whether we've been visited is never answered to anyone's satisfaction,
Phantom Quest left us wondering whether it's possible to make a documentary about aliens without using theremin sound effects and halogen-lit dramatizations.
--Ryan Boudinot
