Screen Slate Presents Watch the Skies: Ufology on Film at Anthology Film Archives
Nov. 4-15, 2022

Since the “flying saucer craze” of summer 1947, in which hundreds of reports of strange aerial discs flourished across the United States, UFO culture has occupied a peculiar and constant place in American life. Like many of this country’s favorite pastimes, ufology thrived first as an iconoclastic subculture, and its participants – many of them “experiencers”, dilettante investigators, and truth-seekers, made to look silly by mainstream media – fashioned fringe networks through DIY or less-than-venerable avenues such as Xerox newsletters, tabloid reports, AM radio shows, drugstore paperbacks, motel room conferences, and Usenet forums. WATCH THE SKIES considers an array of films and videos that have emerged from this subterranean movement, ranging from underground videotapes to Hollywood blockbusters, and encompassing the stories of motley characters from contactees, renegade scientists, and New Age mystics to conspiracy cranks and shifty opportunists.