By
Tara Bennett | August 5, 2021 | 11:28amPhoto Courtesy of Showtime
Phoenix Lights. Tic Tac crafts. Robert Bigelow. AATIP.
If that collection of words and terminology means something to you, then Showtime’s four-part docuseries UFO is going to be of interest. Well-produced by J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot and Glen Zipper, UFO is a serious exploration of where we are, in 2021, when it comes to being any closer to the truths around unidentified flying objects and extraterrestrial phenomena.
For hardcore enthusiasts of UFOlogy, the last decade in particular has churned out a plethora of fascinating docuseries, from History’s Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation to Discovery’s UFO Witness, along with documentaries like Bob Lazar: Area 51 & Flying Saucers (2018), all of which are hyper-focused on seriously dissecting seminal cases and first-person accounts for their legitimacy. Further, all of this recent output has been bolstered by the
December 2017 New York Times exposรฉ on the U.S. government’s secret UFO program that confirmed what both armchair researchers and professional journalists had already surmised.
Because of the deluge of information already out there (and freely available for a YouTube rabbit hole binge), UFO is in the unenviable position of having to work twice as hard to prove why it should exist. Does it try to cater to everyone with a UFO 101 approach, or to those in the know? Surprisingly, it manages to acquit itself well to both the noobs and those who keep up with daily UFO Reddit threads.