Netflix’s newest Steven Spielberg-produced series, Encounters, opens with Eddy Weiss, a UFO witness and Homeland Security consultant, discussing biblical scripture with his four children. “And the star they had seen,” Weiss reads from his Bible, “guided them to Bethlehem.” The family sits around a western kitchen table, hanging on his words. “And it guided them, so it knew where it was going, right?” Weiss stares at one of his daughters, expectantly. He waits a moment before continuing, “That means it was…” His daughter almost yells, “A UFO!” He smiles, palms open in a gesture towards the obvious, and replies plainly, “A UFO.”
The UFO subject has no bigger shadow than that of Spielberg and his first groundbreaking alien film, 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (released the same year as one of the featured cases), which premiered and brought the flying saucers into American homes, pentatonic scale and all. The mere mention of his name continues to grant credence to the subject.
Encounters, a production by Spielberg’s Amblin Television (in collaboration with Boardwalk Pictures and Vice Studios) and directed by Yon Motskin of “Generation Hustle,” tries to distinguish itself from other Roswellian unsolved mysteries that came before in two miniscule aspects: its international lens and its begrudging engagement with some of the more absurd aspects of UFOs. But is that enough? In the final hour of the series, when we have been thoroughly bludgeoned by indistinct photos of blurry lights, endless grade school drawings pulled straight out of the worst horror movies, and a fifth replaying of the same UFO clip (a common sin by UFO documentaries), Motskin eventually delivers the interesting high strangeness other major productions fear—we must only slog through the intervening three hours to get there.
In an interview with the Netflix run media news site, Tudum, Motskin acknowledged that he never used to believe in UFOs, but he’s now changed his mind. “It’s out there,” he said, quite ominously.
One wonders what made Motskin change his mind considering most of what is covered in his series is old hat: cases endlessly investigated, books already tirelessly researched, journalists assigned and dismissed, one case featured even having a fantastic documentary dedicated to it without an utterance of conclusion anywhere to be found. So why now? What changed? If Encounters is to be believed, nothing has changed. Almost all the evidence presented in the four-part miniseries is at least a decade old, most of it far, far older. But Moskin and Amblin appear to be making a bet that while these cases haven’t changed, maybe you have.
You wouldn’t be wrong in suspecting Encounters of being a shameless cash grab. The series lands at ground-zero before the inevitable explosion of alien-tinged media sparked by The New York Times 2017 exposé on the governmental acknowledgement of UAPs and UFOs, discs and triangles, unexplainable lights descending from the heavens. Motskin isn’t the first to harmonize with Spielberg’s alien tunes here, just the first of this next blast due to arrive after the subject has been reignited. But unlike the inciting New York Times article, Encounters misfires at the point of impact and has little to say about it.
Throughout the four-hour miniseries we must excuse Motskin for seeming to have copied off another student’s homework. Everything here is easy on the eyes and expertly crafted, but nothing is added to the UFO media cosmos that hasn’t been well documented before. The first episode, “Messengers,” investigates 2008 Texas red orbs and radar data—Lenord Nimoy’s series, “In Search Of,” had orbs and radar…forty years ago. A pilot, Steve Allen, is our main character during the first hour episode, which tracks his initial sighting (described as a religious event), his subsequent obsessed investigation, and ending with his eventual divorce at the hands of zipping crafts and lights—hell, that is the plot to Spielberg’s Close Encounters, only here we get Richard Dreyfuss riding a Harley, wearing aviators and a Texas mustache. Even the government conspiracy is along for the ride when the episode ends by informing us that radar data is no longer handed out to the public. Why? We are left assuming UFOs, because, apparently, nobody asked the FAA.
It gets worse before it gets better. What was a rehash of a rehash in the first episode, now becomes outright documentary déjà vu. The proceeding hours after the red dirt UFOs are a reiteration of two past documentaries, Randall Nickerson’s “Ariel Phenomenon” (2011) and National Geographic’s 2016 “The Welsh Triangle.” In the second episode titled, “Believers,” some sixty Zimbabwean grade schoolers, running around their private, Christian school, see a craft with alien beings scurrying around it. Kids and staff interviewed, then reinterviewed, the same witnesses, in fact, from the Nickerson documentary. The same footage replayed, the same Harvard hypnotherapist explored using the same institutional themes, and the same African sunset b-roll paraded around for an hour. A true cut and paste job, even going so far as to include the same lack of conclusion.
In the third episode titled, “The Broad Haven Triangle,” we investigate a slew of 1977 sightings in and around Broad Haven, West Wales: grade schoolers who see a craft (I know, I know, we did, indeed, just discuss this sort of thing), reports of a seven-foot being wearing a motorcycle helmet (locals go on to name the monster, “the Ripperston Silver Giant,” a discussion which Motskin purposely omits for reasons that have nothing to do with trying to keep the episode exciting), and a nod to the sinister Men in Black (yes, looking just as you imagine), who terrifyingly stalk the night asking for interviews with witnesses but never returning to conduct them—it’s no wonder Will Smith was hired to spice it up when Hollywood heard the stories. When the third episode’s closing credits run, they should’ve read: a BBC production of The Broad Haven Triangle sightings. As almost all the footage presented comes from their archives and reporting, hardly reimagined, remixed, or rehashed. Why do something different? Wouldn’t want to spoil the obvious ending, it seems.
In both episodes, skeptics and experts are interviewed for possible alternatives to space visitors. David Clarke, a journalist and author, gives us a rundown on fairy folklore as a possible culprit (a theory pioneered by legendary UFO researcher Jaques Vallee in the 90s, an expert consultant on, you guessed it, Spielberg’s Close Encounters, and the inspiration for the film’s dynamo investigator, Claude Lacombe.) Mythic imps and fairies with the power to do just as the aliens do, E.T.’s glowing finger, notwithstanding. A local Welsh store is featured which somehow sold shiny, reflective boiler gear for work at a nearby power plant, posited as the costume of a prankster scaring children and headmasters alike. How does that solve reports of that same silver figure floating in the air for long stretches of time as attested in Randall Pugh and F.W. Holiday’s investigative report, The Dyfed Enigma? The earlier mass reports of a hovering Marian figure and power outages? What about the “humanoids” climbing out of rock formations in front of numerous witnesses, glowing “whitish silver”? The prankster, apparently, wasn’t specific, as the episode remains frustratingly impartial to the outcome.
In Zimbabwe, the smoking gun is a former student, Dallyn, who had an interesting event of his own regarding the backyard UFO: he recants. “I do apologize for calling you guys out on your bullshit,” he says in his recent Encounters interview. “I made the whole thing up.” He goes on to claim wanting to get out of class that day in ’94, so he picks out a nearby “shiny” rock, calls it a UFO, and then eternal mass hysteria is somehow born among the populace. “‘That means you’re saying sixty people lied?’” he asks himself in the same interview. “Yeah, sixty people lied.”
The Encounters interview follows a previous interview by Dallyn, recorded in 2010 for Nickerson’s documentary, where Dallyn states, “Although we do not fully understand what happened, there was something definite, definite, definite that did occur there that was out of the ordinary.” Why wasn’t this included in Encounters with the rest of the lifted research? All we can say for certain is that Motskin missed an opportunity to answer the question of why his series needs to exist at all, a possible answer for us, the viewer, by posing a question for Dallyn: Why did he change his story? What does that mean for the entire Zimbabwean tale? Mass hysteria? Did the Men in Black come at night knocking on Dallyn’s door? Was an envelope of cash delivered? What is the point of UFO documentaries such as Encounters if they don’t ask new questions, if they don’t follow-up, poke and pry at the unexplainable? If there is a point, Motskin fails to find it (the series was number one in viewership on Netflix’s charts days after release, maybe that was the sole point). Encounters mistakenly hopes sterile, hostless objectivity will lead to ardent answers, overlooking that objectivity rarely walks hand in hand with little green men, and answers less so, all the while Motskin forgetting that little green men is precisely what brought us here in the first place.
The series’s final episode is the best of the four. The weirdness has finally arrived, and it’s got spirit to boot. We are treated to a contested dance between experts and the true believers, hoping the former can balance the scales against the latter. The screen centers on a drama teacher who introduces herself with the claim that she is, in fact, the alien we have been looking for over the past three hours. She is shown conducting a class of students, all meditating, instructing them to remember why they came to Earth in the first place. Are these students’s aliens, too? Nobody seems to ask. Instead Motskin sandwiches the drama teacher’s revelations between cultural critic, and author of Japanamerica, Roland Kelts’s breakdown of Japanese religious history, working overtime to offer terrestrial reasons we should take a bite.
Another couple, Jiyo and Yuko, discuss a life changing encounter post tsunami where they awoke at 2 a.m. to see a golden UFO hovering outside their apartment building. The UFO approaches the building. Jiyo begins speaking to the UFO and the object flashes in response. They claim that they believe in the UFO and so the UFO was watching over them. Flying saucer as totem. Finally, it’s here that we get CGI and full reenactments—the goods—shy as they are in displaying UFOs and their occupants.
Episode four commences a rousing analysis of Japanese folklore, Christian Stigmata, and various anime productions. Ultraman as philosophy? Pile it on top, there’s always room for more. It’s fun stuff, filmed and presented expertly throughout. All participants are going full tilt from here on out, uncensored, laying it on the line. Those glowing orbs many witnessed? The possible lingering souls of those who died in the tsunami. An Enmyoin priest asserts the UFOs might have saved his temple from the tsunami. Even a UFO that allegedly hovered over the Fukushima plant and reduced the radiation levels by shining a beam of light in one of the collapsed units, saving the day. “I try not to talk too much about aliens,” the drama teacher says, “people think I’m crazy enough.” As she hints, if we’re going to start talking about aliens, then we must allow people to talk about aliens.
The final minutes of Encounters are a perfect display of what always seems to accompany UFO cases, what is often called, “high strangeness” or “woo,” the more absurd aspects related to the phenomenon that would make any scientist or congress member blush, and which is seldom covered, even by Hollywood and its Spielbergs. Drill-handed aliens. Tiny blue floating aliens. Aliens that make pancakes, and aliens that travel faster than light but which do not understand human teeth and their function. Even aliens that kill people. All the stories that don’t align with blurry polaroids, Pentagon white paper, and radar data points.
But Encounters biggest strength might also be its biggest weakness. Rather, Netflix’s miniseries is hampered by the subject itself. To go all in is to risk something. Every decade a rise in the popularity of UFOs begets new iterations of the old movies and documentaries preciously taped, episodes hosted by b-movie stars out of work since the previous decades’ spike in interest. All alike in their non-hazardous portrayals of the phenomenon.
But for all his newfound belief in UFOs, Motskin vacillates. He hesitates. He settles for disappointingly safe and quiet investigations. He is not alone. Unsolved Mysteries—both Robert Stack’s shadow and the resurrected corpse currently shuffling around on Netflix—has always hesitated to display the UFO subject in its entirety, weirdness included. Ancient Aliens, in all of its coarse xenophobic sand, flinches at platforming the drama teacher first. And I’m confident the upcoming Barack and Michelle Obama produced film, White Mountains, recounting America’s first popular abduction story involving Barney and Betty Hill, will leave out the hundreds of abductions later reported by Betty after Barney’s death and all the high strangeness that filled her life. For this reason, Encounters is not that different from the past, but it could have been. Had Amblin and crew started from episode four and journeyed forward, my oh my, what they might have uncovered.
Motskin is not Spielberg’s assured and peerless researcher, Claude Lacombe, cracking the alien code with French panache, his four-part Netflix miniseries a stand-in for the intergalactic scales. And he’s not the David Laughlin character from the film either, wrong guy in the wrong place, saving the scene by interpreting alien coordinates, pointing us in the direction of monumental answers. No. In Close Encounters, Motskin and his series might make an appearance for a moment as a nightly news talking head, regurgitating previously written scripts, or as the movie’s airline pilot, Air East 31, who sees something in the skies, but when asked if he wants to file a report, responds, “I wouldn’t know what kind of report to file.” And that’s the rub isn’t it.
Motskin’s miniseries struggles to understand what questions to even ask, what evidence to gather, and what kind of report it, ultimately, wants to make to its audience. For most of its runtime, we sadly get a dispassionate summary of incidents. Instead, what Encounters should have been doing all along was demonstrating why Motskin changed his mind in the first place. What evidence or testimonial was so strong that all his former doubt was shattered, and a true believer was born. That would have been interesting. But Motskin was on a press tour when he said that, and if his series is any indication, belief might only be a buzzword, an antacid to help us binge more empty calories Netflix serves up. Less alien advent and more apocryphal advertisement.
For all its faults—the plodding pace, the basic presentation, and most egregiously, its low expectation of itself—Encounters should still be mildly applauded for its quarter-hearted acknowledgement of the absolute strange which is as mortally bound to the UFO phenomenon as the prosaic saucers themselves. Though Motskin presents most of the bizarre aspects last, a begrudging afterthought, a cringing hail-Mary to some meaning that the director failed to unearth, Encounters still satisfies in its gesture toward the whole, which is the bare minimum we demand from such past documentary efforts.
“I think that talking about UFOs with my kids,” Weiss says as he stands on his front porch in the final minutes of the first episode, “even the littlest ones, is making scripture a lot more real for them than just a bunch of stories.” He leans with one hand of his porch and looks up toward the distance, looking for answers. Past belief in saucers and their metallic rivets, past Spielberg’s uncanny Americana, past Motskin’s shy camera lens, Weiss seems to be scanning the Texas sky for gods.
I cannot wait for a future moment when UFO documentaries do more than what Encounters settles for. Where the opening minutes begin with the sexual exploitation of the abductee with their alien captor, as is so often reported. Or the lobster men who are concerned with sperm counts arrive in the first act, as they did in Pascagoula, MS. Or the catalyst of growth is extraterrestrial induced soul transferences where victims report living lives of other humans. I can’t wait to see filmmakers leave Spielberg’s suburban ethos behind and truly embrace the facts of the matter, in all its impassioned subjective strangeness. But, even as I yearn for the next chapter of UFO documentaries, I can applaud Motskin’s Encounters, and the minimum it contains.
David Riedel 
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