Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Project UFO’ on Netflix, Where Little Green Men Hysteria Strikes 80s Communist Poland 

In the Netflix limited series Project UFO, from creator/writer/director Kasper Bajon, a Communist Poland of the early 1980s is turned upside down by the possibility of visitors from elsewhere. Did a rural man really discover space aliens living at the bottom of a lake? Whether he did or not, the resulting hubbub is a concern for the ruling Polish United Workers’ Party. Visual aesthetics and cultural commentary are on display as Project UFO imagines what might happen when a society built around state control suddenly starts to chafe at the concept of radical free ideas. Piotr Adamczyk, Mateusz Kościukiewicz, Julia Kijowska, and Maja Ostaszewska star.  

PROJECT UFO: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

Opening Shot: “The 80s have just begun” is written out in Polish on the green-glowing screen of an IBM computer, in a font that would indicate to anyone curious just how much the 80s have begun. As for the curious events developing on the Poland-USSR border, Project UFO says “they could have happened…”   

The Gist: From the perspective of Zbigniew Sokolik (Kościukiewicz), there is no doubt they are happening. He runs a small electronics repair shop in the rural region of Warmia, and one night, when his stack of analog equipment starts to go haywire, Sokolik bikes out to a nearby lake. He witnesses an otherworldly green light, and the area’s power lines on fire. He takes photos of the mysterious disturbance with his windable SLR. And he submits the negatives as proof of alien activity to Close Encounters, a national television program hosted by scientist-turned-media personality Jan Polgar (Adamczyk).

Invited to Warsaw to appear on Close Encounters, Sokolik is humiliated when Polgar makes fun of his assertions that “UFOnauts” have risen from the Earth’s oceans, where they were hiding for thousands of years. But Polgar’s motivations are deeper than just a quick dismissal for studio audience laughs. As a lackey for the state, which enables his life of comfort in a country kept poor and docile by the Communist party, Polgar sees Sokolik’s discovery – whatever its veracity – as a threat. While the repairman heads back to Warmia, where he complains about his treatment to local cop Julia Borewicz (Kijowska), Polgar and Warsaw-based news reporter/state mouthpiece Wera Wierusz (Ostaszewska) scheme to steal the publicity of Sokolik’s UFO discovery for themselves.

Project UFO gets a lot of mileage out of its Communist period setting, with Jan Polgar driving his cheap but yellow and flashy personal vehicle through drab landscapes of towering housing blocks, and his wife Lenta (Marianna Zydek) – who Polgar cheats on with Wera – enjoying creature comforts like a personal masseuse, even as Polish society bickers over union disputes and bread prices. But the series is also setting up a larger central question related to all this talk of alien visitation. What is the power of a grand idea in a place that grinds down individual thought? Maybe there really is a flying saucer hovering over a lake on the Polish-Soviet border. But from the Communist party’s perspective, the mere sense that there could be is a much bigger problem.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Project UFO star Piotr Adamczyk can also be seen in the Netflix crime drama Go Ahead, Brother. And 1983, which was the streamer’s first-ever Polish series, imagined a Communist timeline where the Iron Curtain never fell.

Our Take: Do you want to believe? It’s fun to be like Zbigniew Sokolik, consider a mysterious phenomenon with seriousness, and expect aliens who can breathe underwater to suddenly reveal themselves to a 1980s Polish citizenry advocating for solidarity and workers’ rights. But while a version of the truth is certainly out there, Project UFO probably isn’t that show. Instead, what’s intriguing here is how agitated agents of the state get by even the suggestion of an alien presence. The series shows how much money is being spent on producing Jan Polgar’s Close Encounters, and how its modern TV studio, with its modern equipment, is really only broadcasting a modern kind of propaganda. Trifles of first contact, and riffs on science fiction imported from the West. (The show’s very name is an import.) But UFO also shows how Polgar’s status as a helpful agent of propaganda is fading, and threatening to be replaced by a hypnotist. (Anything to keep the populace looking one way and one way only.) What would Polgar do, and who would he hurt, in order to continue his cushy life as the only conspiracy theorist in the country sponsored by the Communists?

Maybe that concept is more ambitious than the writing in Project UFO can actually pull off. But visually it’s certainly on the right track, with a real feel for a country in transition and culture in upheaval, and a mischievous sense for setting up Sokolik as the little guy versus Polgar, Wera, and the Polish Workers’ Party as the big guys. What can an electronics repairman with a singular idea do against money and power? Perhaps quite a bit, even if it isn’t aliens. And especially as his supposed discovery further reveals the desperation and ineptitude at the top. 

Sex and Skin: Jan and Wera meet for sex at the latter’s well-appointed apartment, a place in sharp contrast to the bare cement and graffiti-scarred corridors surrounding it. 

Parting Shot: The plot thickens as party leadership in Warsaw, via Polgar, sends Sokolik to interview an elderly farmer who claims he was actually abducted by little green men. “They brought me on board their ship…”  

Sleeper Star: Julia Kijowska is funny in Project UFO as Julia Borewicz, a police corporal in Warmia who gets wrapped up in Sokolik’s account of unidentified alien activity.  

Most Pilot-y Line: “Your show makes no sense – UFOs never land here, only in America.” Polgar’s boss hits on one of the larger themes in Project UFO: 1980s Poland as a place where even fanciful theories are imported from elsewhere, if they exist at all.

Our Call: Stream It. With a few bits of humor, a few more dollops of sci-fi hysteria, and a lot to say about state power vs. people power, Project UFO has fun imagining what might have gone down, if aliens had appeared in 1980s Communist Poland.  

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.