Mark Pilkington, author of the UFO meta-conspiracy classic Mirage Men, presents a curated selection of his favourite filmic artefacts from the flying saucer era and beyond. Against the backdrop of the longest sustained wave of UFO coverage in the United States since the 1940s—culminating in a series of inconclusive congressional hearings—this lecture examines how moving images shape belief, doubt, and wonder.

As UFOs have re-entered public discourse, Hollywood and the Military Entertainment Complex have responded in kind, with Steven Spielberg’s ‘Disclosure Day’ functioning as a religious epic for our age of Big Tech Conspirituality, offering cosmic truths that can supposedly only be communicated through fiction.

Yet the most compelling UFO films are not blockbuster spectacles but accidental documents. Shot by startled witnesses with whatever recording technology happened to be at hand—8mm film, VHS camcorders, digital smartphones, night-vision equipment—these fragments form a kind of “UFO vérité.” Spanning more than eighty years, they constitute a parallel history of both the UFO phenomenon and domestic media technologies, capturing fleeting moments of ambiguity and awe.

These artefacts occupy a liminal space between evidence and illusion. For viewers, their impact can range from mild ontological unease to life-altering revelation. For believers, UFOs function like dust on celluloid or glitches in digital images: unintended artefacts that rupture the medium’s spell and expose the fragility of consensus reality. Paired with a persuasive witness narrative, even the blurriest image can destabilise certainty, provoking a deeper and more unsettling question—if this is real, what else are we not being told? 

Mark also runs Strange Attractor Press where you can find great books on all kinds of weird and wonderful topics: https://www.strangeattractor.co.uk