This movie scared the shit right out of me back in junior high, without ever even having seen it. I was watching some daytime show, Jerry Springer or Montell Jordan or who knows what, and they were talking about alien abductions. In between the commercial segments they showed clips from this movie, in particular, there was a scene where a guy had his eye held open while an alien drilled some fucking drill or whatever into it. Scary stuff! For as much as I loved The X Files when it was on, aliens scared the shit out of me. I remember that for my birthday one year I had gotten a lot more money than anticipated and needed to blow it on garbage, so I bought this weird little alien statue that held shiny blue marble in it’s hand. I kept it on my windowsill, but some nights I got scared that aliens could see it from space and would abduct me, so I moved it away from the window. I partially blame this movie for those fears. Oh, and me being a pussy.

Reminds me of my weekend.

A group of guys are all trying to clarify a “story” at a bar of things that took place that night. When local authorities show up and they start telling their story, it sounds questionable, at best. These men were all in the woods chopping down trees when they saw a “fire in the sky”, which they obviously investigated. One of the guys got out of the car and was struck by some bright light that threw him back a ways and apparently killed him. The guys freak out and drive back into town, and surprisingly, no one believes them. Authorities search the woods and find no sign of the supposed dead guy. Everyone goes through lie detector tests, and there’s no proof of these guys lying. One night, one of the men gets a call in the middle of the night, and it’s the guy who they left in the woods. He recounts the events of what happened, which mostly involved being on a spaceship, being held captive and tortured. He eventually made his way back to Earth, and tried to put it all behind him. That’s basically it. The end!

It looked like all the aliens were played by weird old men.

There wasn’t really much to this movie, it was more like an episode of Law & Order. It was almost like that episode of The X Files called “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space”, but not even. That episode was about two people interpreting the same event in different ways. Authorities were implying that things didn’t happen the way they claimed to have happened, but the audience knew there were aliens and that the guy was obviously shot with a laser beam from the sky. And then when he finally showed up and we learned what happened, it was just, “Oh okay, the aliens were jerks who were mean to you, but now you are home”, so who cares? This was a movie based on a book that was supposedly based on a true story. I have really lost a lot of faith in anything based on real events, so I also wasn’t really sure how much of that stuff I could be interested in. I believe that a guy existed, and he either was, or thinks he was abducted, but he is home now, so who cares? There are plenty of people out there who think they have been abducted, but I guess if you think it happened in the 70’s, they’ll make a movie about it.

Wolfman Moon Scale