Review of Alien Encounters: Fact or Fiction S01E01 "You Saw a UFO"

​We don’t get as many alien-themed cable quasi-documentaries as we used to. Part of it is the shifting taste of the public, which prefers to freebase its conspiracy theories straight from the internet’s darkest corners. Part of it is due to the collapse of the cable TV industry, which has dramatically slashed programming. And part of it is due to the cyclical nature of kooky programming, which toggles between the paranormal, the extraterrestrial, and ancient mysteries with a numbing regularity. Alien Encounters: Fact or Fiction probably wasn’t destined to dethrone The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch as the top paranormal program, but it’s a pretty dire affair for a supposedly professional production from one of Warner Bros. Discovery’s crown jewel networks.

​Alien Encounters: Fact of Fiction, not to be confused with Alien Encounters: Declassified from 2021, is a new magazine-style “investigative” show in which two dubiously credentialed “experts” sit in a bar nodding sympathetically to befuddled regular folk who think they’ve encountered aliens. Borrowing from The Maury Povich Show’s infamous “You are the father!” paternity reveals, the segments lead up to a supposedly scientific evaluation of evidence to reveal whether the hosts believe the guests did indeed encounter aliens.
 
Our hosts for this exploitative circus are names familiar to regular readers. Mitch Horowitz is an author of studies of the occult and a book editor. He’s also a believer in sympathetic magic and follows New Thought, better known as “The Secret,” which alleges that fantasizing really hard about something will cause gremlins in the fabric of the universe to make it happen. New Thought does not explain what happens when two people wish for opposite outcomes. Horowitz wrote a book a few years ago about how the 1% are superior beings who have mastered the art of wishing for wealth and power and were thus rewarded by the universe, and you would have money, too, if you only wished correctly: “You must write down a certain amount of money that you want to make by a certain date in connection with your aim—and be deadly serious about it.” Chrissy Newton works in public relations but is probably best known for rewriting wire copy to post on The Debrief and for hosting a podcast about the same. The stentorian narrator grandly declares them to be “authorities” and deeply credentialed experts on the paranormal and the extraterrestrial. Look, I’m not saying that’s a complete lie, but Giorgio Tsoukalos has done more real on-site alien investigation than either of them, and he barely understands anything.

Horowitz and Newton examine "evidence" of aliens in a Roswell bar.

​The pilot opens in media res with Horowitz and Newton sitting side by side at a table in the Variety bar in Roswell, New Mexico, with some badly scripted expository dialog that their stiff delivery suggests they practiced too much. They tell us they are in Roswell for a reason but don’t say what it is. Like most latter-day cable shows, producers pay precious little attention to coherence, storytelling, or the fundamentals of setting up a segment, so two people we don’t know plop down and our hosts immediately launch in to talking about their “testimonies” and “evidence.” “OK, cool,” a man in a pink shirt says before we cut to a reality-show style confessional in which the man, Indy Riggs of Stafford, California--not Roswell, New Mexico—and his wife Rachel tell us the story of a supernatural encounter with Indy’s dead father in 2019 and witnessing a light in the sky in 2021. Like a bad reality show host slowly teasing an elimination, Newton pauses between every word to drag out revealing that they actually saw the International Space Station. Indy Riggs seems ready to scream or cry because the light wasn’t an alien. He had made being a UFO witness part of his personality. Shattering a man’s self-image in an on-camera reality show reveal is just cruel. “What just happened here?” Indy Riggs gasps in the confessional like a spurned Bachelorette suitor. In the bar, he becomes confrontational, like a Real Housewives star on her third glass of rosé.
 
It's interesting that this half-assed show doesn’t bother to show us the supposed investigation but flutters some paper around and says “NORAD data” unavailable to the public proved the case. A better documentary would actually follow the investigation to explain how it’s done, but this isn’t really a documentary. It’s a talk show. Indy and Rachel shuffle off and our hosts introduce the next contestant who emerges from a door to the side of the bar like a Maury guest bounding on stage.
 
I frankly was getting bored by this point—the show drags out every two-minute story immensely—and watching on Discovery’s website (it wasn’t on Max as of this writing), the burden of endless commercial breaks made this a deeply unpleasant experience. Anyway, we hear about some guy in Roswell—aha, the reason we are here!—who found a 5 mm by 8 mm fragment of some white metallic substance he’s convinced is part of a crashed alien spacecraft. The show’s analysis, conducted by Cerium Labs of Austin, Texas, found the substance was “pure” aluminum. The owner of the aluminum seems to orgasm on camera when “testing” (of what?) revealed “evidence of a crash or ground-based explosion.” How? We never hear. Pure aluminum is used in many industrial processes and galvanization, but the show pretends that it simply does not exist on Earth. Newton drags out still more “revelations,” saying that a source formerly with AATIP (gee—who could that be?!?) “confirmed” that “pure aluminum” is “connected” to other UFO crashes. Everyone then orgasms again.
 
The final third of the show involves Jessica Blunt, a woman who claim that a UFO damaged her health in April 2019. She has a cellphone video of a light in the sky and a medical report of inflammation. Newton’s “team” was “unable to draw any definitive conclusions” about Blunt’s story (having conducted no original research, merely reading a brief 2019 medical report), so instead Newton and Horowitz blather about “declassified Pentagon reports” of UFO injuries and praise her for being a “teacher” and a “mom,” implying she must be correct about space aliens because she is a good person.
 
There is an ugly cheapness to Alien Encounters. At heart, it’s little more than a revival of ’90s-style talk shows with a gloss of dramatic lighting. If it took place on a soundstage set with a studio audience, it could easily be an episode of Sally Jessy Raphael from 1992. But a set costs money, as does a professional host, so instead we get the rock-bottom dollar-bin version with amateur hosts filming in a bar like it’s a YouTube video. But that ugliness extends to the way the show exploits its guests, people who range from the confused to the deluded to the fantasy-prone, none of whom deserve to either have their fantasies shattered on television or their paranoia confirmed by television.
 
But, if you’re going to make a bottom-feeding show like this, there is probably no more honest setting than to have everyone sitting in a bar boasting, bullshitting, and becoming emotional. On the other hand, I can hear the same stories at my local bar, and there you can also get beer.