Aliens are Friend and Foe in ‘The Experiencers: Full Disclosure’ [Review]

Aliens are a curious thing, no? There are the spindly, acidic variants of Ridley Scott’s Alien universe, stark contrasts to the silly “banana” obsessed variety of Dandadan. They’re envisioned as little gray men who kidnap adults (see: The Forgotten, The Fourth Kind), or temporal goobs with the power to bring Amy Adams to tears (Arrival). They’re also Dean Alito’s bread and butter. While his career is largely on the tube, directing and producing innumerable true-crime documentaries and extraterrestrial series, horror fans likely know him best for the one-two punch of The McPherson Tape in 1989 and Incident in Lake County a decade later. Both are hallmarks of the found-footage horror genre (eat your heart out, The Blair Witch Project), and now, Alito is back in space with a more straightforward documentary: The Experiencers: Full Disclosure.

It’s fortuitous timing. The Experiencers, now available to rent on Amazon Prime Video and other platforms, was released just two weeks before Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day (which I’ve heard is pretty good). Spielberg undoubtedly popularized a specific brand of extraterrestrial, the cinematically ambiguous, sometimes friendly, space traveler more interested in questions than, say, outright annihilation. And The Experiencers, largely, culls from that crop with its rotation of talking heads relaying their own alleged experiences of alien abduction and encounters.

Alito and his crew treat their subjects with respect, rarely doubting the sundry experiences recounted, whether that’s stories of alien implants (tracking devices installed to monitor humans) or shared dreams that, really, are abductions in disguise. The subjects are almost revered, and there’s little doubt as to the veracity of their stories, and that’s likely intended to be the audience’s domain; Namely, it’s up to us to believe them or not.