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Greetings, and welcome to VIEWING THE CLASSICS. Here you'll find capsule reviews of vintage movies from the early days of cinema through the 1970s, with a special emphasis on sci-fi, horror, and mystery movies. Be sure to check out the Pages links, where you can find a Film Index of all my reviews, links to the reviews organized by cast members, directors, and other contributors, and links to my reviews of the films of talented young director Joshua Kennedy.

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Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Unidentified Flying Objects (1956)

Starring Tom Towers, Floyd Burton, Marie Kenna, Robert Phillips, Gene Coughlan
Directed by Winston Jones
(actor & director credits courtesy IMDB.com)

This documentary examines the evidence of UFO sightings and eyewitness accounts collected by the Air Force, and presents the sightings they have been able to explain and the ones they have not.

Combining a docudrama approach with actual filmed testimony from UFO witnesses, this documentary is unabashedly presented from the Air Force's perspective, with Towers portraying a former journalist who goes to work for the agency's press corps, and learns about the sightings and their investigations first hand.  Don't expect much revelatory footage, for while there a couple of unexplained films of possible flying saucers presented, they're shot from a great distance and only show some white dots in the sky.  The most effective sequence is a recreation of a UFO encounter tracked on an airport radar screen, which features the voice of a jet pilot coming over the intercom which is indisputably actor Harry Morgan, who went on to TV fame in the series Dragnet and M*A*S*H.  Although much of the film is highly technical, it's entertaining in its own right.

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