The film is a dramatization of the experiences of Albert Chop, a journalist who became a civilian press officer for The US Air Force and was responsible for dealing with the reports and became convinced there was ‘something’ there. The film dramatizes his story, where he is played by reporter Tom Towers, mixing it with interviews and actual saucer film footage. Dramatically the documentary approach makes for a rather dull film. Sometimes it is too documentary-like, even going so far as to detail mundane details such as Chop’s son’s visits to the doctor. Moreover all that the UFO encounters consist of is people in radar control towers having conversations with pilots who are only describing what they seeing. With everything of interest that happens actually taking place offscreen and intercut with a lot of control tower doubletalk, the dramatic effect is rather stultifying. Indeed all the drama is something only ever carried by the voice-over narration, never the accompanying visuals. And the dialogue is forced – it doesn’t feel naturalistic and like something a person would ever say. Even the people in the interview scenes seem awkward and ill at ease.

That said it’s an awkwardness that nobody could ever fake. In both the plodding dramaticism and its amateurishness, the film actually makes a stronger case for something there than many more polished later documentaries do. The dramatic dullness of it aside, the documentary does keep to the facts, rather than leap off into the melodramatic sensationalism of much of the media articles and public hysteria that the media coverage it quotes does. It doesn’t add any wild stories about Little Green Men, it just charts a phenomena with a patient rationalism and an adherence to the strict facts and admits it has no solutions. That alone gives it a sober groundednss that is welcoming amid the nonsense that would come later and push the study of UFO phenomena into a fringe ‘science’. The film does screen two pieces of film reportedly of UFOs, although these are disappointingly brief (a matter of seconds long) and unremarkable.