“If you’re seeing this,” warns Steven Greer within the first two minutes of his sort-of-documentary, “it’s because I’m either dead, or have been entrapped, or have disappeared.”
Or, perhaps, because I want to hook your attention.
In Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind, we quickly learn that Greer is neither dead nor disappeared. But he does appear to be trapped in Batman’s garage from the Dark Knight movie series. And it is from that stale bunker-like locale that he preaches to us, with interlude narrations from Jeremy Piven, for the next two hours.
A medical doctor turned UFO researcher, Greer claims that a great global conspiracy is concealing evidence of extraterrestrial visitation to Earth. Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind is designed to deconstruct that conspiracy, and it enjoins viewers to join Greer in meditation-like conferencing with aliens aboard orbiting UFOs.
His case doesn’t convince.
Don’t misunderstand me, the UFO topic is both serious and seriously under-examined by the media and scientific community. The U.S. military does not know the origin of numerous UFOs that have been tracked by expert military observers by sight, on camera, on radar, on sonar, and on an array of other sensor platforms. And while many UFOs are weather phenomenon or human machines misidentified as extraordinary, some are not. And those craft can perform in ways that no known Earth machine can. In its top-secret briefings, the Pentagon has very high confidence that these things are not from Area 51, China, Russia, or Elon Musk. To be clear, I would stake my journalistic credibility on saying that some UFOs are intelligently controlled machines not of this Earth.
But if the issue is this important, scrutiny of it deserves equal care.
Too often than not, Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind detaches from that imperative.
For one, it is highly political. The civil rights lawyer and left-wing political activist Daniel Sheehan features prominently. Among a long litany of complaints ranging from Ronald Reagan’s intellect to other issues, Sheehan is upset that the U.S. Air Force protects U.S. airspace against potentially hostile intruders. This contrarian take is bold, seeing as national air defense is the primary reason the USAF was established in the first place. On that note, the Air Force does not feature positively in this movie. We are later told that the Air Force has a program to abduct members of the public in order to trick them into thinking aliens have abducted them. This is because the government wants us to be scared of aliens, even though Greer says all of them are our friends.
For that matter, Sheehan and Greer aren’t too favorable toward many humans.
We learn that the entirety of the media is either bought by the Pentagon, delusional, or simply determined to feed the military industrial complex. This hits at Greer’s sustaining theme: I’m the oracle, and most others are, at best, useful idiots.
Greer does make a few legitimate points.
His identifying of a synergy between UFO sightings and nuclear-related facilities is an accurate one, but he wrongly takes credit for identifying that connection (it was Robert Hastings’s scholarship). Greer’s claim that UFOs sometimes produce consciousness-related effects with witnesses, whether via telepathy or otherwise, is also accurate and well-documented in respected literature. But even when he’s onto something, Greer’s bias towards conspiracy lets him down.
The doctor laments, for example, that when UFOs have temporarily deactivated or activated nuclear missile platforms, as Hastings and military witnesses have documented, the government has responded by defining UFOs as a national security concern. Considering that we are talking about the most lethal weapons on Earth, I would think most people would welcome that government assessment as quite logical.
The movie’s repeated attacks on the To the Stars Academy research and investment group also raise eyebrows. While it has some issues, that group has done much to drive forward public awareness of the UFO issue and access to relevant information. It is hard, here, to detach Greer’s hostility from the perception that he is jealous of his competitor’s presence.
As the movie goes on, it becomes increasingly tiresome.
The constant Transformers-style background music adds to the tediousness here. Some of Greer’s collected UFO videos are interesting, but his claims portend a moment of proof that is never delivered. Instead, Greer doubles down on going too far outside the box.
Offering no evidence, he insists that many on his team have been assassinated. Even more surreal is Greer’s claim of a warning given to him by the former crown prince of Liechtenstein. It’s something along the lines of deep state conspirators seeking a war that will see the return of Jesus Christ. Even if the crown prince said such things, it seems more likely to have been a consequence of the European aristocracy’s penchant for inbreeding rather than access to hidden truths.
By the time our passage down Greer’s long and winding road is over, we’re quite lost. It’s not clear what Greer wants from us except to join his “CE5” network of UFO communicators. But like this movie, that comes with a price tag. The CE5 app costs $10.
I’m not buying it.
