The U.F.O. phenomenon has never been more important than it is now, in 1976, and this documentary will endeavour to inform the viewers of just how convincing the evidence is. Here to present us with these facts is W. Gordon Allen, whose credentials as a journalist are without question: as he says, he has been reporting on national American news stories for quite some time, and that includes the subject of so-called flying saucers which he has extensively studied. With a variety of photographs, witness testimonies and film footage, here any uncertainties will be laid to rest...
Usually this kind of thing was created by one Sunn Classics, an independent movie company who cornered the market in weird stuff posing as actual fact, but Overlords of the U.F.O. was an even cheaper production than what audiences had been used to from them. For a start, you could tell this was rather more impoverished when there was no celebrity endoresement via the providing of narration, so sadly no Orson Welles here, just Mr Allen droning on at great length about his pet subject. And as if that were not pointer enough, much of this consisted of either stock footage or photographs - lots and lots of photographs.
So the rostrum camera operator got a major workout as the image panned over a selection of landscapes or, if you were lucky, a hubcap tossed into the air to be snapped as if what we were seeing here was yer actual spacecraft from another world arriving to greet us. Mr Allen informs the viewer of the amount of alien abductions in recent years, and namechecks various cases, but that was the thing, in spite of what many watching this would have thought, he and his director G. Brook Stanford were not plucking these "facts" out of the air, as they had been part of space visitor theorising for some time. The business about the Ummo, for example, was well documented elsewhere.
Whether it was documented in an genuine text you could give much credence to was a different matter, but this puttered along quite happily regurgitating the tales of the Pascagoula abduction (a really scary story, true or otherwise, not that it comes across here), Betty and Barney Hill's encounter (the one which kicked off the whole abduction craze, if you can call it that), and the old seventies favourite, the Travis Walton yarn as embellished by nineties movie Fire in the Sky where he had been missing for five whole days thanks to the aliens taking an interest in him. All very well, but with no interviews with anyone completely central to the stories (though Travis's brother gets a minute or two to put his case) it's hard to see what the worth would be.
After a while, the photographs are not enough, and the tone, still presented in matter of fact manner, grows weirder as speculation about beings from another dimension alternate with the filmmakers' frustration that nobody from NASA or the airline adminstration will "admit" what this lot are claiming is the honest truth. So it turns more conspiratorial, as would be the case with much of ufology in the following years, as if nobody was happy with simply hearing a strange story and there had to be some kind of sinister machinations behind that light you saw zigzagging across the sky one night when you were on holiday. Rather shooting itself in the foot, however, was the footage of UFOs included nearer the end, claiming to be the real deal and patently tinfoil plates jerking around on fishing lines which is highly laughable, even if they did show the classic George Adamski saucer - you know, the one which was revealed to be a chicken feeder. Throw in Uri Geller offering his views to a rapt audience then inevitably bending their keys, and you had a mishmash at best.
