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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A well-made documentary, but the footage is highly suspect, 18 April 2004
My favorable rating of this particular video reflects my opinion that this is a well-made documentary; it does not mean that I believe the "alien interview" (which amounts to only three minutes of silent footage in this hour-long program) is authentic. Even though I am what you would call a "believer" (for lack of a better term) in the existence of UFOs and alien beings, my own opinion is that this footage is fake. Fake or not, though, the makers of this documentary did some good things in terms of framing the story. The documentary begins with a quick description of Area 51, the world-famous super-secret military facility in Nevada that, up until a few years ago, the government insisted, quite incredibly, did not exist. I don't think anyone can deny the fact that very sensitive things are going on inside Area 51, especially in terms of the military testing of top-secret aircraft such as the U-2 spy plane and the Stealth Bomber. A number of individuals have come forth in recent years to make incredible claims as to what is really going on inside Area 51, work classified up to 36 levels above top secret. The most famous Area 51 whistleblower is Bob Lazar, who claimed he performed reverse engineering work on an alien ship. This video refers to Lazar's story and then proceeds to mention a number of claims regarding living aliens being interviewed and/or working at Area 51 over the last forty years. This quite naturally leads into the matter of the Majestic-12 documents made public in the 1990s; this video seems to assume that the MJ-12 documents are real, and this is a problem because I and many ufologists do not put any faith in these documents. In a sense, this extended section of the videotape does a disservice to the alien interview tape because all of these claims are highly suspect. No serious ufologists put much stock in these claims of previous alien interviews, and Bob Lazar himself has some very real credibility problems. One's assessment of the actual alien interview's believability should not hinge on such questionable background material. One must forget the assumptions made by the documentary writers and study the alien interview tape in an intellectual vacuum in order to form an opinion of its authenticity. There is not much to go on here; to many, including myself, the alien appears to be a puppet, and the darkness of the interview setting serves to hide all but the alien's face. Toward the end of the three-minute footage, the alien begins moving its head erratically, and doctors rush in to "treat" the creature - many of the alien's movements are quite jerky and unnatural, I would argue. What do we know of the origins of this tape? Not much. A mysterious man calling himself "Victor" insists he smuggled the tape out of Area 51, but he refuses to reveal his identity and agrees to be interviewed only if his face is hidden and his voice distorted. This in itself does not mean he is lying; if the tape were real, the man who went public with it would definitely find himself in mortal danger. The interview we see with "Victor," however, seems staged and unreal to me. The interviewer's voice does not reflect the seriousness of the subject matter, and "Victor" insists several times that he will end the interview if he is asked more questions than those he approved of before the meeting. The interviewer does ask some smart questions, though, such as why "Victor" sold the video instead of releasing it to the news media, what he really knows about Area 51, why he removed the audio portion of the tape, etc. "Victor" gives some good answers, but I'm just not buying what he is selling here. A series of "experts" voice their opinions on the alien interview footage, and, to the video's credit, there are as many doubters as believers - but that does not mean this is real. Let me repeat the fact that the video of the alien interview in question lasts only three minutes and has no audio ("Victor" removed the audio in order to protect the identities of the humans appearing in it). I could swear there is a microphone in front of the alien, though, even though he is said to communicate telepathically. Even though I think the video is clearly a hoax, I did enjoy the documentary quite a bit. I would just caution viewers not to believe all of the background information they are presented with here, as much of it is highly questionable. As for the alien interview itself, that is something you should watch and judge for yourself.
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