ALIEN ABDUCTION ANSWERS REVIEW
Alien Abduction: Answers doesn’t waste time throwing viewers into the world of high strangeness.
The film opens with an otherworldly encounter as glowing lights streak about in the darkness. A bug-eyed creature flashes on the screen, and the camera cuts to a man jolting awake in bed. That man is the film’s director, narrator, and star, John Yost, who we watch reenacting an alien abduction memory.
Yost, sweaty and distraught, looks on in fear as his bathroom door creaks open, revealing the shadowy outline of an alien home invader.
We could be watching a horror-thriller movie as Yost narrates, “I started lying almost 50 years ago about what they did to me. The government knows who they are. It’s time for both of us to tell the truth.”
These chilling opening moments set an ominous tone. And that’s a strange filmmaking choice for a movie ultimately preaching peace, love, and enlightenment.
THE PREMISE
Yost’s 83-minute alien abduction documentary offers a broad examination of the UFO phenomenon. The film examines the last 75 years of reported close encounters and seeks answers from people claiming to have made contact.
Yost travels to Big Arb, Wisconsin, to meet with alleged alien abductees willing to share their experiences on camera. Needless to say, the cast of interviewees make some out of this world claims.
The media is taking the topic seriously for the first time in decades. So, in theory, the recent barrage of press coverage removes the stigma around this fringe topic.
The film uses news clips of UFO community staples like Luis Elizondo, Nick Pope, Christopher Mellon, George Knapp, and Jeremy Corbell.
Seeing these folks featured on CNN and Fox News proves the subject is gaining traction in the media. And even hardcore skeptics must pay attention when former president Barack Obama and former director of national intelligence John Ratcliffe go on the record about government policy on UAPs.
However, aside from trash TV programs like Maury and The Jerry Springer Show, the media won’t touch the alien abduction topic with a hundred-foot pole.
So even though CNN and Fox News run UAP stories, they won’t discuss who’s flying the craft. Instead, the media implies UAPs are advanced drone technology as they refuse to acknowledge cases occurring before the 2004 Tic Tac incident. So, it’s misleading when Yost uses mainstream news coverage to validate the abduction accounts in Alien Abduction: Answers.
THE WORLD’S MOST FAMOUS ABDUCTEE: WHITLEY STRIEBER
Alien Abduction: Answers features several interview subjects who claim to have made contact with alien visitors. The interviewees each share a unique story, and the only common thread between them is their extraordinary claims.
The doc’s most prominent addition is the world’s most famous abductee, Whitley Strieber. Yost calls the Communion author a philosopher and thought leader and credits him with bringing the alien abduction conversation to the mainstream.
Although Strieber has a reputation for making extraordinary claims, yet he’s the film’s most grounded, insightful, and compelling interviewee. He asks viewers to think about the performative nature of the nonhuman intelligence he calls “the visitors.”
Strieber states, “What is actually there and what you’re seeing may be two entirely different things.” He compares abduction encounters to folklore in that they both manifest from “perceptions we can’t understand.”
Alien abduction encounters and European fairy lore have many parallels. They both involve little beings from alternate realms creeping into our reality to steal people away.
Could fairies, leprechauns, and ufonauts be humanity’s way of comprehending a multiverse before we developed a concept of the multiverse? It’s a fascinating line of thought Jacques Vallée covers in depth in Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers.
I wish the film had spent more time exploring the relationship between the modern abduction phenomenon and historical accounts of supernatural beings. The connection is either a significant clue or an insight into the human psyche and our innate desire to see magic in the mundane.
FAMOUS ABDUCTION CASES
The film runs viewers through famous abduction stories like Antônio Vilas-Boas, Betty and Barney Hill, the Pascagoula encounters, and the incident at Devil’s Den. These brisk references don’t offer much in the way of details. Instead, they offer loose context to the stories provided by the film’s interviewees.
The stories shared by the doc’s group of abductees are out of step with the famous cases listed above. The experiencers in Alien Abduction: Answers don’t see themselves as lab rats. In fact, the film posits most experiencers find their abductions enlightening.
Classic abduction cases offer chilling accounts of terrified humans kidnapped and experimented on against their will. That’s far from the case here.
One woman in the doc fondly remembers her existence before she was born and having a telepathic conversation with a talking fish.
Structurally and tonally, Alien Abductions: Answers is all over the map. It covers everything from schoolyard UFO landings in Ruwa Zimbabwe (1994), Voronezh Soviet Union (1989), and Glasgow Scotland (1978) to an alternative form of memory retrieval called quantum hypnosis. Whether you’re a diehard ufologist or new to the field, it’s a lot to unpack.
HERE’S WHERE ALIEN ABDUCTION: ANSWERS GOES OFF THE RAILS
Alien Abduction: Answers spews out fountains of new-age gobbledygook about elevating earth’s frequency and a war for humanity’s souls. The film hits its low point when Yost settles in for a hypnosis session to recover buried memories from his abduction encounters.
I’ve lost track of how many UFO docs I’ve watched in my lifetime, and I’ve seen dozens (maybe hundreds) of hypnotic regression sessions. And I didn’t buy a second of Yost’s regression. Watching it feels as phony as staged events on terrible reality TV shows. Best case scenario, we’re watching Yost reenact an experience he had off camera. But the film showcases the sequence like it’s authentic. It feels scripted and performative, and it’s too on the nose.
Early on in the film, Yost features the results of a 1991 Roper poll claiming one in every fifty people has been abducted by aliens. The poll suggests aliens abducted 6.6 million Americans. That’s a staggering assertion capable of breaking a believer’s brain. The way Yost handles this statement is emblematic of why this film doesn’t work.
How does a filmmaker make such a fantastic claim and immediately drop that thread? The film is in such a rush to get to the next issue that it doesn’t slow down to let the weight of that statistic sink in. Does Yost believe that number? Is six million American abductees too high? Too low? Is the Roper poll even credible?
The doc operates as though listing that sourced claim is enough to lend credibility to the abduction phenomenon. Alien Abduction: Answers doesn’t care about proof, evidence, and scientific rigor because it’s hellbent on validating its own preconceptions.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Getting through Alien Abduction: Answers is a slog. It’s shallow, unfocused, and has the style, pace, and production values of a political campaign video.
The film covers a lot of material but rarely gives any in-depth analysis. It features plenty of anecdotes and opinions instead of a scientific investigation and alternative points of view.
A film called Alien Abduction: Answers must present an unimpeachable case. It needs to make a strong argument and then lay down a series of facts backing it up. This film doesn’t even pretend to offer proof and objectivity.
Yost should have left “answers” out of his film’s title. But I understand that Alien Abduction: Theories doesn’t have the same ring to it.
Alien Abduction: Answers is currently available to stream on Google Play, YouTube, iTunes, and tubi.
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