About the UFO Movie Trailer
How I hope to win the hearts and minds of the UFOlogists — and spread a little science literacy while we're at it
Wow! Looks like some Jerry Bruckheimer movie or something.
When I make one of these documentary films (like Science Friction, Principles of Curiosity, or this new UFO movie) I have one thing in mind: Promote the cause of science literacy and critical thinking. It’s the opposite of get-rich-quick Hollywood filmmaking, but it’s what I feel best about doing.
So when you watch Trailer #1 for The UFO Movie THEY Don’t Want You to See, you may wonder whether I’ve lost my marbles.
Here is the quickest way to fail at accomplishing my goal:
Preach to the choir. Make an overtly skeptical film that’s inherently negative toward UFOlogists. The skeptics will love it and high-five one another, but not a single UFOlogist will watch it, and you’ll have no opportunity to reach them and will not change a single mind.
So you can be assured that I did not do that. But there is also a second, slower way to fail:
Appeal to the UFOlogists with a trailer that appears to confirm their beliefs, but then give them a bait-and-switch with an overtly skeptical film that’s inherently negative toward them.
I don’t want to do that either. So what am I left with? Making a film that caters to the UFOlogists’ preferred view, confirming that aliens are visiting us and every UFO is an alien spaceship? I think not. There is a much better way, and it’s what I’ve used all my experience to try and do to the best of my ability with this film. Here is the basic outline:
Make a series of trailers that present the film in different ways, then test them all to see which perform the best. (This is how all movie trailers are marketed, in case you didn’t know that already. If you’ve ever watched a movie trailer, you were a data point in a test.) This trailer is the first of several, and it is, quite obviously, one that’s intended to appeal to the most conspiratorial of UFOlogists.
Open the movie with the ideas that we all share. We want there to be aliens. We really want to meet them. Our astrobiologists are looking for them, and here’s how we do it; hypothetically the aliens have astrobiologists too, and here’s why the Earth looks like such an amazing and enticing target. There is real science there. Keep in mind that we want everyone to embrace this movie’s content.
Unfortunately there’s also bad news, in the form of the physics involved that make visitation by either party virtually impossible, and here is a rundown of the various problems. Everyone agrees that this is bad news that sucks.
In light of that, if we wish to conclude that a given UFO is an alien visitor, we have to meet a very high standard of evidence. Here’s how you do that and here’s why it’s important.
Here are several high-profile UFO cases that many claim are the best proof that aliens actively visit us. Here’s why the evidence supporting them is actually terrible, and why we have to do a lot better with where we set that bar for evidence.
And finally, here are the ways that neighboring civilizations might actually be able to get in touch with each other. Here’s how we’re trying to do that, and here are some reasons to be super hopeful. It’s all real science. And we end on the same positive notes of mutual agreement that we opened with.
That’s what The UFO Movie THEY Don’t Want You to See is. How successful I have been at doing this will be for you to decide. Keep an eye out, at theufo.movie.