WATCH THE SKIES!.........BQ SIGHTS 'UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECTS' BUZZING D.C.!!

Unidentified Flying Objects: The True Story Of Flying Saucers (1956)   Attention all you Baby Boomers.....(and you know who you are).......remember this one from 'The Late, Late Movie Show'??

             We had to watch it with the sound turned way, way down so Mom 'n Dad wouldn't catch us with the TV on at 2 'O Clock in the morning........

              But damn, how could we not?  Motherfreakin' UFOs!  With actual, we kid you not,  real live hand held crappy camera footage of flying  saucers streakin' through the sky!

               Lucky thing the subject matter, all by itself, was inherently sensational........since the movie was a bottom-of-the-low-budget-barrel documentary that played like a training film for people newly awakened from a coma........

                The 'cast' (and we use that term lightly) consisted of an odd assortment of real folks who encountered saucers, non-actors badly pretending they could act.......and a few professional Hollywood character actors thrown into the mix.....(Bert Freed, Olan Soule, Harry Morgan, Les Tremayne).....

              There's no thrilling recreations of alien encounters here.........just the facts, Ma'am (as Dragnet's Joe Friday used to say).......and a whole lot of talking heads explaining things.......

               But for a few minutes, the movie finally remembers it's a movie and comes alive with a chilling little claustrophobic scene that has our Air Force bigwigs huddled around a radar monitor.......

               The scene replicates one of the most famous, early UFO incidents...... when a contingent of 14  saucers decided to take a joyride over Washington, D.C.......confounding and unnerving the Air Force pilots who made futile attempts to chase after them......

               And yep, that Harry ('MASH) Morgan's voice on the intercom as the pilot who finds himself close to a head on collision with something not of this earth.......

                Even in the hands of this film's clumsy, amateur-night documentarians, that scene still maintains a raw power.......(and Steven Spielberg more or less remade that scene in the air-traffic control sequence from "Close Encounters Of The Third Kind".....)

                After a painstaking breakdown of those two 16mm film clips of UFOs, the movie ends with an ominous written scroll.......if the incidents can't be explained away rationally.......then what are the UFOs?  What do they want?  And where did they come from?

                Even after the movie ended, followed by an avalanche of used car salesmen and vegetable chopper ads, chances are we Baby Boomers were still wide awake.........

                  .........and watching the skies. 2 & 1/2 stars (**1/2)