UFO Abduction: A True Story (1991)

Posted on Apr 03, 2002 under Documentary |

Written and directed by Lee Elders, based on the book Contact from Reticulum by Wendelle C. Stevens and William J. Herrmann
Produced by UFO Photo Archive

In the middle of the night in 1978, a disoriented Bill Herrmann stumbled into a road near Charleston, South Carolina. He flagged down a driver and pleaded for him to get to a phone and call the sheriff’s office. The last thing Bill had known, he had been in his own backyard, looking at one of the not-uncommon mysterious lights in the sky; now, four hours later, he was miles from home with no memory of the intervening time.

He was… ABDUCTED.

Bill Herrmann: Man Among the Aliens.

This documentary was probably taped not long thereafter, though the final production date given is 1991; the hair and clothing styles support a date no later than the very early ’80s. UFO researcher Wendelle Stevens, along with Japanese reporter Jun-Ichi Yaoi and his camera crew, interviewed Herrmann on events leading up to the abduction.

It may surprise you to know that the area around Charleston Air Force Base is (or was, anyway) a hotbed of flying saucer activity; Herrmann, an unassuming “country boy,” had photos he had previously snapped in broad daylight from the road, showing UFO’s flying in erratic patterns in the restricted airspace. Probably everyone assumed what he did — that it was secret military testing. (Though the idea that any branch of the military would be stupid enough to test “secret” stuff right in the middle of suburbia should have been his first clue.) He duly contacted base personnel, where a Captain King had one of his prints examined and tried to tell him it was an F-4 Phantom. When that explanation didn’t wash, he was told to “just forget it.”

And they say men don’t ask for directions.

But naturally, Herrmann wasn’t given an opportunity to forget. He was contacted by a man identifying himself as “Tom Olsen,” who visited the siting areas with Herrmann and then took him back to his hotel, where Olsen and two others persuaded Herrmann to take a polygraph test under the influence of “relaxing” drugs. Several weeks later, when Herrmann tried to contact Olsen about the polygraph results, he found out that, while there was a man named Tom Olsen who was a UFO investigator, the real Tom Olsen had never contacted Herrmann in any way.

Most of this so far has been relayed to us through on-screen interviews (apparently Nippon Television couldn’t afford better than a consumer-grade videocamera for their international crew) and some low-key re-enactments accompanying Herrmann’s interviews. Then we get a few more local people — some acquaintances of Herrmann’s, some not — who had seen silvery craft themselves. (One fellow, who insisted that his face be digitally obscured, had photographs taken by a famous but unnamed friend of his. I hope that the investigators immediately noticed, as I did, that the flying saucers in each shot were artfully and clearly framed by tree limbs, etc., despite the fact that they were supposed to have been snapped during erratic movement. But if they noticed anything, they kept it to themselves.)

“My friends, you have seen this incident, based on sworn testimony. Can you prove that it didn’t happen?”

So far, all of the proceedings have seemed pretty much in line with “old-school” UFOlogy — the mysterious machinations of the John Keel era, in which there were contactees instead of abductees, saucer occupants were as likely to be free-love Aryans as little green men, and there was apparently a secret pseudo-governmental organization whose entire purpose was to be vaguely unsettling and annoying to witnesses.

But it takes a sharp turn into the post-Betty-and-Barney-Hill era when Herrmann undergoes hypnotic regression to find out what happened during those four missing hours. A full half hour of the program is video footage of that session, with only a few minor edits; it’s largely presented to us as it spills from his mouth, complete with emotions that are very convincing. Remember, these were the days before Alien Greys entered pop-cultural consciousness and were displayed on keychains and dorm-room posters all over the world. So Herrmann’s confusion and agitation at what he encounters when he comes to himself inside an alien craft and finds himself restrained are palpable, and his uncomprehending protestations hold an uncanny poignancy: “They’re bald… they look like fetuses!”

Feh. I’d recognize those hands anywhere.

Once hypnosis has broken the memory block, Herrmann has many more details which he can volunteer, including the revelation that the aliens are from Zeta Reticuli. (I have no idea when this home system became de rigeur in UFO lore, as a quick Internet survey will confirm.) He claims that his experience here was generally positive, although he does mention at least the possibility that They aren’t being completely honest. And, according to the afterward, he went on to have a second saucer-board encounter after the time-frame depicted here, one that was completely voluntary.

The documentary as a whole almost seems more a home-grown manifestation of the UFO subculture than a serious examination. The footage here was apparently first shot as raw documentation of the case, without any intent to make a narrative documentary out of it, which would account for the generally uncritical tenor of the interviews and other footage (objectivity is especially lacking because it declares itself to be based on a book written by the investigator and the abductee in collaboration); narrative continuity is provided by sporadic third-person narration long after the fact. Its greatest contribution to UFO history is the long section of regressive hypnosis; too bad that’s marred by some post-production fanciness, including superimposition of bad video-effect “UFO flights” and amateur-quality artist’s conceptions of what Herrmann’s describing. I’d much rather hear his uncolored stream-of-consciousness account without having the standard interpretation thrust upon me concurrently.

“I close my eyes, but I can still see the damned couch!”

I’ve got some very definite ideas about the UFO phenomenon, largely thanks to my early familiarity with John Keel, and the events portrayed here don’t change my opinions much one way or another. In fact, thanks to the illogical or counterintuitive parts of the story, they only reinforce my main thesis: that whatever the UFO phenomenon is, it’s not any of the neat little theories that have been propounded so far, be they alien visitors, time-traveling future humans, or earth spirits clothing themselves in the metaphors of the technological era. Herrmann was right in showing some suspicions about the Greys’ trustworthiness, because the one thing that has been consistent in a century’s worth of contact and abduction is the untrustworthiness of the experiences themselves. Our westernized instincts toward classification and explanation work against us in reaching an understanding of this whole phenomenon, because most theorists, guided more by emotional conviction than rational study, are more than willing to stop at whatever obvious explanation is being indicated, despite contraindications. In other words, while I have little doubt that Bill Herrmann “experienced” (in all its subjective shades of meaning) what he claims to have, the video’s subtitle, “A True Story,” is only accurate on certain levels.

October 2005 Update: I received an email from Bill Herrmann, subject of this documentary, in which he states in part:

I have destroyed everything connected with my UFO experience because I believe that the entire Phenomena is based on Satanic deception. I have had absolutely nothing to do with the Phenomena for over 25 Years of my life.

Bill now considers the time of his life covered in the documentary to be a huge mistake. I didn’t feel that that warranted taking down the review, but I do agree that such disclaimers are a necessary piece of context.