New documentary ‘The Phenomenon’ uncovers 70 years of UFO sightings in the United States

A secret, parallel history of the United States stretches back at least 70 years, according to director James Fox and writer Marc Barasch.

In their new documentary “The Phenomenon,” released on streaming services today, they aim to reveal that history, step by step, and build the case that it is time for that history to be known and taken seriously.

The secret? Years of government cover-ups of the UFO phenomenon, its implications for national security and for our understanding of our place in the universe.

“The Phenomenon” contains a great deal that the public has not heard and seen before.

Major figures go on the record, sometimes for the first time, testifying to the importance and anomalous nature of the UFO phenomenon and the extraordinary recovered materials associated with it. They include former Nevada Sen. Harry Reid; Christopher Mellon, former deputy assistant secretary of defense; Leslie Kean, an investigative journalist who has written about UFOs and the military; and, in a rare media appearance, Jacques Vallee, one the world’s most respected researchers into the UFO phenomenon,

“It took me years to get some of those interviews,” Fox said. “But from my earlier documentary, ‘50 Years of Denial,’ I was known as someone who is serious and trustworthy.”

The film also includes archival footage of the late Lt. Col. Hector Quintanilla, the former head of Project Blue Book, the Air Force program that investigated UFOs from 1947 to 1969. Quintanilla grew up on the West Side of San Antonio and retired here.

Taken together, the people interviewed in the documentary make a case for greater scientific study of the UFO phenomenon, for greater public understanding of it, and for an end to official secrecy.

Reid goes so far as to say that the years of secrecy have been “bad for the American people.”

As “The Phenomenon” shows, though, there are now some people in high places interested in challenging that secrecy by supplying evidence.

Mellon, for instance, reveals that he was the one who received video from an anonymous government employee of Navy pilots pursuing an unidentified aerial phenomenon on their jet radars and gave it to The New York Times.

The video accompanied the publication of a December story in the Times detailing the history of the Defense Department’s secret Advance Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which, the paper said, investigated reports of UFOs for years. The story, and the video, went viral .

Fox has similar hopes for the “The Phenomenon’s” impact.

“Our intention in making this documentary was to create the seminal feature that would treat this subject in the manner it deserves with great intellectual integrity, and in doing so transcend the UFO community and reach a much broader audience,” he said.

The movie, narrated by actor Peter Coyote, starts out with a review of the history of the UFO phenomenon in modern times using hard-to-find archival footage, including a series of sightings in Washington, D.C., in July 1952.

“We recognize a lot of people don’t know how extensive this parallel history really is, and we need to know about that,” Barasch said.

The film also features footage of children at the Ariel School, an elementary school outside Harare, Zimbabwe, taken during a visit to the school by the late Dr. John Mack of Harvard University. They testified to seeing a small, ovoid craft land in 1994 near their playground.

In the footage, the children describe a small, manlike being who emerged from the craft and stood before them for quite some time — after which some of them said they saw images in their minds of a dying Earth and felt the being was trying to give them a warning.

Fox took his own camera crew to the school to interview the students, now adults, about how their experiences had affected them.

“As we were working, I was surprised that the headmistress, who had given us clear permission to work on the campus, came out of her office and said she wanted to go on camera,” Fox said. “She apologized to the students for not believing their stories when they were children and for forcing them to stop talking about them. When I asked her what happened, she said simply, ‘We were visited by aliens.’”

Barasch said he hopes “The Phenomenon” will spark a new “Copernican revolution.”

“We have been using, at best, siege engines against the fortress of today’s geocentric worldview,” he said. “Maybe ‘The Phenomenon’ can be the battering ram.”

Ed Conroy, a freelance writer in San Antonio, is author of “Report on Communion.”

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