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" For an alien-abduction movie, there are surprisingly few aliens in The Fourth Kind. In fact, there are none. There are alarming bursts of the ancient Sumerian language, either rumbling away on a microcassette or spat out by humans videotaped while under hypnosis. And something, some shadow rolling across the sky, can be seen in footage recorded by a police car&amp;#039;s dashboard camera, before that tape becomes hopelessly scrambled. But no aliens. Why are the aliens so shy? Because The Fourth Kind is a movie that mixes archival audio and video with dramatizations. While it&amp;#039;s one thing to capture the psychological aftermath of alien abduction and possibly a glimpse of a real-life UFO, to find any video of actual extra-terrestrials would be a bombshell that no director or movie studio could sit on.  That&amp;#039;s one possibility. The other is that The Fourth Kind is a colossal blunder of a hoax--an attempt to capitalize on widespread UFO belief that&amp;#039;s cynical even by Hollywood&amp;#039;s standards. In claiming its fact-based bona fides, the movie isn&amp;#039;t winking knowingly at the audience, adopting the found-footage style of The Blair Witch Project or Paranormal Activity. This movie means it. It opens with actress Milla Jovovich explaining that the movie is about events that occurred between Oct. 1 through 9, 2000, that she&amp;#039;s portraying Dr. Abigail Tyler, a &amp;quot;renowned psychologist,&amp;quot; and that &amp;quot;every dramatized scene in this movie is supported by either archived audio, video,&amp;quot; or is based on Dr. Tyler&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;extensive interviews with the director.&amp;quot; In the world of UFOlogy, aliens don&amp;#039;t show up on camera. Witnesses, abductees and investigators all find threads of evidence, but there&amp;#039;s nothing cohesively tying them together. For The Fourth Kind to appear real, it can&amp;#039;t give us extraterrestrials, just the wreckage in their wake. The result is a movie terrified of ever delivering its own payoff. But its failure as a film is less about bad acting and clumsy direction; it&amp;#039;s that it inhabits its demographic too well. Silly as it is, The Fourth Kind stumbles onto some of the biggest problems facing the discussion and investigation of UFOs, alien abductions and every other suspected act of interplanetary aggression.  The Dumbness of Aliens Assume, for a moment, that the filmmakers are not lying; that the production notes released by the studio describing the chance discovery of psychologist Abigail Tyler by a relatively unknown horror-movie director are sincere. If we are to take the video and audio evidence from The Fourth Kind at face value, believers must acknowledge that it&amp;#039;s steeped in coincidence. At one point in the archival footage, a hypnotized patient begins to levitate. But just then, the videotape distorts. Later, during that dashboard footage of the UFO, the video cuts out while the audio continues to roll, as the officer describes something taking someone from the house with a beam of light. And even the climactic hypnosis session, where an alien seems to speak to Tyler through her own convulsing body, is too scrambled to serve as evidence of the levitating, vertebrae-crushing nature of body hijacking.  Allowing the victimized protagonist to be victimized even further by skeptical authority figures is a standard horror-movie plot device. But it&amp;#039;s also a hallmark of UFOlogy and paranormal investigation: The orbs of light that show up in one digital photo and disappear in the next. The ghost hunters who detect a spike in electromagnetic activity, but the accompanying otherwordly laughter doesn&amp;#039;t show up on audio recordings. As the internet is flooded with snapshots and video clips of unexplained lights in the sky, none of them is ever conclusive. They always fall short. There&amp;#039;s no UFO equivalent of the Rodney King beating.  There&amp;#039;s also no consistency. Some abductees have reported being picked up by big-eyed, big-headed aliens; others by furry dwarves or reptile men. Some videos show a trio of lights wobbling in the distance, while others show a single, blinking orb not going anywhere. In The Fourth Kind, the implication is that the recurring distortion is related to the presence of the aliens--whether it&amp;#039;s intentional jamming or some sort of radiation, when the bad guys show up either psychically or in person, our video cameras can&amp;#039;t handle it. Luckily, our trusty human-built microphones are unaffected. So there&amp;#039;s evidence, but like all UFO-related evidence, it&amp;#039;s incomplete, inadmissible, and just eerie enough for some to accept as fact.  The so-called evidence--or, in the more cautious language of the onscreen titles that appear during various scenes, &amp;quot;actual audio&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;actual video&amp;quot;--in The Fourth Kind is also devoid of reason. Sometimes, the aliens physically walk into victims&amp;#039; bedrooms and manhandle them into spaceships. But later, as though to prove a point, they use a tractor beam to pull a victim right through the ceiling. This is done in full view of a police officer, even though the aliens have also gone to great pains to suppress their abductees&amp;#039; memories. They&amp;#039;re an intimidating sort of nonhuman mafia, delivering garbled warnings on tape and through psychic control to back off, before resorting to kidnapping. They&amp;#039;re also a little stupid--at one point, they scoop up an entire room full of people, presumably to scare them into ending their investigation, but they don&amp;#039;t bother to grab the audio evidence of their own threats. The unseen aliens in The Fourth Kind aren&amp;#039;t the clumsiest thing about the movie--that would be the viral marketing campaign. The trailer shows a snippet of Jovovich&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;this is all true&amp;quot; preamble, and anyone Googling &amp;quot;alien abductions in Nome Alaska&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Abigail Tyler&amp;quot; would find themselves in UFO-related online forums where users wondered about the facts behind the movie, or at one of a handful of sites with names like, &amp;quot;Alaska Psychiatry Journal,&amp;quot; verifying the existence of Tyler or examining theories of alien involvement in Nome&amp;#039;s high rate of disappearances. That last fact is completely true--a surprising number of people disappear in Nome, a problem that law enforcement, including agents from the FBI, have attributed to a combination of heavy drinking and harsh Alaskan winters. The families of some of the victims have theorized that a serial killer is at work. No one appears to have blamed aliens. As for the websites that referenced Tyler; they are now gone, pulled offline when users posted publicly available registration records showing the sites launched in August of 2009. Those records don&amp;#039;t identify Universal (which released the movie) as the site&amp;#039;s owners, but for multiple sites to show up in the same month, just as promotion for the movie was getting started, is as circumstantial as it is damning. The studio has stayed silent on the movie and its factual claims. And while the director, Olatunde Osunsanmi, is vested enough in this case to have personally interviewed Tyler, with clips of their conversation showing up throughout the movie, he hasn&amp;#039;t talked to anyone about the movie. No one is admitting anything, but all signs point to a hoax that backfired. That Hollywood deals in fiction, and the fact that producers boldly turn messy, anticlimactic true stories into tidier, by-the-numbers drama, isn&amp;#039;t a revelation. But the extent of The Fourth Kind&amp;#039;s flub is impressive. To borrow Stephen Colbert&amp;#039;s all-but-retired term, the movie is drowning in its own truthiness. To believe this film is real, you must believe that someone murdered his family and himself, in full view of a police car&amp;#039;s dashboard camera, and it never made CNN. You must also believe that the most damning video evidence--distorted or not--of alien abduction the world has ever seen was kept off of the message boards and out of the UFO rumor mill for nine years, jealously hidden until a director asked nicely for it. This, too, is true to the movie&amp;#039;s UFOlogy roots. Hoaxes are regularly exposed by UFO investigators, and brushed away just as quickly. There are too many reports, too many abductees. The truth is still out there. For the believers, even self-proclaimed skeptics like the Mutual UFO Network, or MUFON, nothing can ever be ruled out. And hoaxes like The Fourth Kind are just proof that this movement is onto something.  &amp;quot;Even though this movie is written in Hollywood, and it&amp;#039;s sketchy, and has fake websites to promote it, people want to know about the phenomenon,&amp;quot; says Mark Easter, International Director of Public Relations for MUFON. There&amp;#039;s no sense of anger over a subculture exploited for profit, no professional resentment over Hollywood&amp;#039;s straight-faced fabrication of a series of incidents. &amp;quot;MUFON sees it not as a half-empty cup. We look at it as half-full, and full to the point of overflowing,&amp;quot; Easter says. &amp;quot;All we want is people to come out of the movie, and instead of looking at the sidewalk, and worrying about how their mortgage is going to get paid, they&amp;#039;re looking up at the sky. If we can get more people looking up at the sky, hopefully something will be seen, and they can get it into our database and let MUFON do our job.&amp;quot; And that, possibly, is why the business of investigating UFOs has never left the spooky, intellectual ghetto of conspiracy theory. There&amp;#039;s no real accountability, just one big, open-ended rumination. In this global neighborhood watch, everything is evidence, whether it&amp;#039;s an abductee&amp;#039;s unsubstantiated story or an arbitrary smear of light on a random snapshot. Like the hoaxers with their elaborate models, and the wild speculators with their screeds about alternate dimensions and dark-energy drives, The Fourth Kind is forgiven its eccentricities. The movie might be lying, but it kind of sounds right, and in horseshoes, hand grenades and UFOlogy, close is close enough. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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