The UFO Incident | Blu-ray Review
Estelle Parsons in The UFO Incident
Undetected Feelings Obtained: Colla’s Bizarre Television Film Tackles the Paranormal Through the Psychological
By Nicholas Bell | Published on January 6, 2023
On paper, it sounds like an obscured gem too good to be true - one of those forgotten cult classics ripe for rediscovery. But Richard A. Colla’s 1975 television film The UFO Incident, starring James Earl Jones and Estelle Parsons as a married couple who were purportedly abducted by aliens in the early 1960s, plays more like a musty time capsule. Just dignified enough to explore a sensationalized story through the respectable lens of psychology, this television treatment also doesn’t have the essential acumen to delve into significant racial cultural traumas potentially underlying the traumatic incident unearthed through the hypnosis of Barney and Betty Hill. Based on a 1966 book by John G. Fuller, an author who explored his fascination and interest in the subject of UFOs over several publications, it was directed by sci-fi notable Colla (1978's Battlestar Galactica) and the text was adapted by Hesper Anderson (Oscar nominated for adapting Children of a Lesser God, 1986) and S. Lee Pogostin (Hard Contract, 1970), who took significant pains to humanize the central couple's emotional expiation and catharsis through divulging an experience both had blocked from conscious memory. Unfortunately, it’s a rather sluggish affair accelerating warp speed into camp territory once the principals finally unleash their trauma in the doctor’s office.
On September 19th, 1961, Barney and Betty Hill (Jones and Parsons) claim they were taken aboard an alien spacecraft after running into curious extraterrestrials while driving through the White Mountains of New Hampshire. However, they both suffered amnesia following the incident, and upon being plagued by nightmares and social isolation (after making the faux pas of attempting to discuss aliens with their friends), they consult a psychiatrist (Bernard Hughes), who believes hypnosis is required to unlock the memories of a strange event they both seem fuzzy about. Treating them both separately, their narratives intersect in interesting ways, with Betty drawing a map of a solar system she’d seen while under medical observations with the aliens (which, apparently, has eerily similar dimensions to computations later calculated by astronomers). Though no actual evidence exists proving the claims of the Hills, their hypnosis allowed them to relieve the anxiety hobbling them.
As much as The UFO Incident remains trapped in the cultural amber of 1970s reticent racial perceptions (from a white perspective), it’s also a somewhat troubling metaphor regarding interracial romantic relationships, where a lack of cultural support or outright opposition leads to unforeseen vulnerabilities, here potentially as a shared psychic discord spinning itself into the realm of the paranormal as a way to tackle a minefield of microaggressions. Parsons, an Academy Award Winner as Best Supporting Actress for Bonnie & Clyde (1967) had already appeared in another title highlighting the disparities inherent in heterosexual interracial relationships, Melvin Van Peebles’ classic Watermelon Man (1970), as a white woman who despairs when her white husband suddenly wakes up Black (featuring Godfrey Cambridge in prime comedic form). Likewise, James Earl Jones headlined Martin Ritt’s The Great White Hope (also 1970), as a boxer whose relationship with the white Jane Alexander causes considerable discord, so the pairing of Jones and Parsons is already of signifying interest by the time we get to The UFO Incident. While Jones doesn’t share the same electric chemistry with Parsons as he did with, say, Diahann Carroll in the previous year’s Claudine (1974), there are small moments of unexpected kindness shared between them. Most surprisingly is a teary conversation about the fears they both felt for one another prior to marriage, with Betty worrying Barney was only attracted to her whiteness. Barney responds by assuaging her, admitting he also had to consider she might be fetishizing his Black body. While the film isn’t allowed to, or wasn’t capable of really delving into either of their experiences, most notably lacking for Barney, it’s a rare example of realistic intimations still shared by interracial couples, exploring concerns we’ve only barely started to acknowledge nearly fifty years later. The film comes close in a flashback of Barney joking about “you white people” in front of company, which sends Betty into an emotional tailspin. Distressingly, Barney is cowed into subservience, the film’s diegesis siding with Betty’s outburst rather than exploring the conditioned baggage both of them carry but neither are able to articulate. The narration of the psychiatrist dismissively sums up Barney as man who “suffers from childhood racial strife.”
Where its po-faced energies falter significantly is in the shared information of Barney’s ‘warts,’ which appeared around his genitals around the time of the ‘incident,’ priming more contemporary audiences to surmise this was all a hoax orchestrated by an adulterous husband desperate to conceal the infidelity which instigated a viral STI. But the kindly psychiatrist played by Bernard Hughes (the grandfather from The Lost Boys who was also an Emmy Winner for a guest spot on “Lou Grant”) hardly bats an eye about these mysterious warts. Hughes’ real task is holding it together through the garbled screams of Estelle Parsons and the teary bellowing of James Earl Jones as they recount the harrowing abduction locked in their subconscious (it doesn’t help we get get literal visualizations of little green men with eyes made large by the nifty trick of a magnifying glass). The hour leading up to the hysterics might be dry enough to appreciate these outbursts of over-the-top anguish, but it becomes uncomfortable for all the wrong reasons.
Disc Review:
Kino Lorber digs deep into the archives for this brand new 2K master of The UFO Incident, presented in 1.33:1. An audio commentary track from filmmaker and film historian Gary Gerani (screenwriter of Pumpkinhead, 1988) is an extra feature, but more interesting is a bonus feature on the film’s composer with the 2022 documentary Romantic Mysticism: The Music of Billy Goldenberg from Gerani, which explores the career of Goldenberg, who composed scores for hundred of (mostly) television films, including Spielberg’s 1971 classic, Duel.
★1/2☆☆☆☆ (Movie)
★★★☆☆ (Disc)