Saucers, Spooks, and Synchronicity
The Road to making a UFO Movie
Winter 2021, Nagoya, Japan. Covid lockdown. Between Japanese game shows and the internet gone mad, I decided to make a UFO movie.
It wasn’t a random impulse. I’d been circling this idea for over a decade, ever since the 2006 UFO Congress, when Greg Bishop was speaking. It was the first time I heard a UFO talk that made sense. Also floating around the convention were some British filmmakers documenting the event that would later be Mirage Men. By 2020, the UFO topic had crept into the mainstream: Bob Lazar on Joe Rogan, co-workers talking about TTSA, and The New York Times treating UFOs as something more than tabloid fodder.
The Japanese algorithm began to find a steady stream of Nippon TV UFO documentaries from the ’80s and ’90s. They featured all the old players — Bill Moore, Linda Howe, Bill Cooper, Lazar — characters who seemed equal parts earnest seeker and professional huckster. I found the producer of these films Junichi Yaoi and we did an exhaustive interview about his UFO adventures from that time.
Shortly after this, a friend recommended Adam Gorightly’s Saucers, Spooks and Kooks. It was a surprising coincidence since the book felt like a mirror to the Yaoisan documentaries, but with the kind of humor usually missing from the genre. Where most UFO books are portrayed as very serious and cloak themselves in mystery, Gorightly's approach feels like absurdist theater but with rigorous research to back up the story.
One chapter in particular stuck with me: Gorightly sitting in a greasy spoon getting pummeled by conspiracy theories from Tal Levesque and John Rhodes while a toy train circled overhead. The scene read like something from Unsolved Mysteries directed by Mel Brooks — exactly the kind of chicanery that begged to be filmed.
What stood out the most for me was how the book tied the old cast of UFO characters to more recent dramas: Skinwalker Ranch, Elizondo, TTSA, congressional hearings, and crash retrieval rumors. It placed all of this in the longer history of disinformation and opportunism.
So I tracked Adam down, we outlined a story, and in May 2022, we started filming.