UFO Storage Wars: Hangar 18

Now Playing: Hangar 18 (1980)

Pros: Leverages UFO and government conspiracy lore to concoct a reasonably decent sci-fi thriller; Notable performances by Robert Vaughn and Darren McGavin
Cons: Has the look and feel of a TV movie; Woefully inept alien spacecraft exterior

There’s been a lot of interesting news on the UFO/UAP front since we last checked in on UFO cinema here at Films From Beyond. 

Following up the release of eye-opening footage of U.S. military encounters with UFOs, an honest-to-goodness government whistleblower, former Air Force intelligence officer David Grusch, has testified before Congress that the federal government maintains a secret alien craft recovery program, and that we’re in possession of the remains of crashed vehicles and the bodies of non-human occupants.

To make things even more interesting, at least one element of the federal bureaucracy, The Office of the Intelligence Community Inspector General, found Grusch’s complaints credible, which paved the way for his going public.

The mainstream media’s general disinterest in this astounding story, and the various attempts to impugn Grusch’s character, makes me think there is really something there.

Of course, ever since the incident in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, tales of crashed spaceships and recovered alien pilots have occupied the outer edges of UFO lore and challenged investigators to come up with hard evidence.

Okay, so this isn't real, but the Truth, and real preserved alien bodies, are out there... maybe.

Some researchers, citing reports from military personnel involved in the incident, maintain that pieces of the Roswell spacecraft, along with the bodies of its occupants, were transported to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton Ohio, where they allegedly ended up in a top secret location, Hangar 18.

Not long after Steven Spielberg turned UFOs into box office gold with Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), the people at Sunn Classic Pictures decided to hop aboard the interstellar gravy train with a UFO epic of their own.

Sunn Classic, known at the time for cheesy Biblical and paranormal documentaries (more on that later), wisely leveraged Hangar 18’s notoriety for their film, but instead of making another documentary, they went the dramatic route, relocating the infamous hangar to a remote Air Force Base in Texas.

Hangar 18 tries to set up a documentary feel with an opening title card, but what follows is pure B drama (don't get me wrong, that's not a bad thing).

The film opens with a space shuttle mission that is preparing to launch a satellite out of the cargo bay. One astronaut is in the bay attending to last minute details, while two others, Bancroft (Gary Collins) and Price (James Hampton) are driving the spacecraft.

Right before the launch, instruments show a large, mysterious craft taking up station next to the space shuttle, and Bancroft confirms with Mission Control that they can see the strange object.

The satellite’s engines fire, sending it straight into the UFO, resulting in an enormous explosion that **GULP!** decapitates the astronaut doing the EVA. The surviving astronauts execute an emergency re-entry while Mission Control tries to figure out what happened.

In space, no one can hear you lose your head.

Mission Control tracks the mystery object, which hasn’t been destroyed in the explosion and appears to be under intelligent control, to a landing site in the Arizona desert. The Air Force sends in a team to secure the area and whisk the craft to Hangar 18, which in Sunn Classic’s universe is located on a base in the middle of Nowhere, Texas.

At this point the film alternates between two plot lines. One features a conspiracy by Washington higher-ups to blame Bancroft and Price for the satellite disaster, while the astronauts in turn try to track down the recovered alien craft in order to clear their names. The other plot line dives into the minutia of ancient astronaut theories as a team of NASA experts examines the intact craft stored in the hangar.

The first storyline seems to have been inspired by Capricorn One (1977), in which an unscrupulous NASA administrator, fearing a budget-crippling mission failure, fakes a Mars landing for public consumption, but then must deal with the astronauts who, fearing for their lives, threaten to spill the beans.

Robert Vaughn plays Gordon Cain, an assistant to the President of the United States, who, in collaboration with the Air Force, is trying to cover up the existence of the recovered UFO. The President is a known UFO skeptic, and Cain figures that if word got out, somehow his boss’ re-election chances would be damaged (as if the government had no other reason to keep something like that secret).

In the '70s, Napoleon Solo quit the spy game and got a Washington, D.C. desk job.

The Capricorn One vibe is strong in scenes where Bancroft and Price discover unaltered NASA telemetry data showing the presence of the UFO during the mission, and are shadowed by federal agents in black suits (Men in Black?) as they check out the Arizona crash site. As the astronauts get closer to discovering the recovered spacecraft’s location, the stakes get higher and they realize the fight is not only for the Truth, but for their very lives.

CAUTION: CAN YOU HANDLE THE SECRETS OF HANGAR 18?

Erich von Däniken and his best-selling book Chariots of the Gods? hover over the parallel storyline of the examination of the captured alien craft. NASA administrator Harry Forbes (Darren McGavin), is tasked by the Air Force to assemble a crack team to investigate the alien technology.

Unaware of the trouble Bancroft and Price are in, Forbes hops to it. The scene in which the scientists first set eyes on the craft is clearly meant to evoke a Close Encounters-type sense of awe and wonder, but unfortunately Hangar 18 only evokes wonderment that the filmmakers thought they could get away with such an uninspired design.

As Forbes and a couple of scientists in hazmat suits approach the thing, it looks like nothing more than a large, industrial grade HVAC unit with flashing lights at the base. Considering the force of the explosion that tore the satellite apart and took out the unlucky spacewalking astronaut, there is hardly a scratch on the alien furnace, er, spacecraft.

"Gentlemen, behold the Sunn Classic 3000, the most powerful heating and air conditioning unit in the galaxy!"

Fortunately for the team the thing opens up on its own, and they’re able to marvel at advanced alien heating and cooling, er, space technology. I won’t get into too many spoilers, except to say that at least the craft’s interior and instruments are better conceived and are a couple of grades above the usual low-budget spaceship that looks like it was outfitted by Radio Shack.

Also, the team’s linguist, Neal Kelso (Andrew Bloch) is able to decode the alien language incredibly quickly, and his discoveries are pretty much a laundry list of von Däniken’s ancient astronaut theories.

Coming at the end of the turbulent ‘70s, Hangar 18 is an encapsulation of the post-Vietnam/Watergate distrust of government and the surge of interest in UFOs, the paranormal and assorted alternate “realities.”

The company behind Hangar 18, Sunn Classic Pictures, had already established a reputation for sensationalistic documentaries such as The Mysterious Monsters (1975; a survey of a whole range of paranormal creatures and topics), The Outer Space Connection (1975; more ancient astronauts), In Search of Noah's Ark (1976), and The Bermuda Triangle (1979).

During that period, Sunn Classic interspersed the documentaries with family-friendly, rural-oriented dramas like The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams (1974) and The Adventures of Frontier Fremont (1976), but after the company was bought by Taft Enterprises in 1980, the theatrical output turned almost exclusively to sci-fi and horror, with such notable releases as The Boogens (1981), Cujo (1983) and The Running Man (1987) following on the heels of Hangar 18.

Hangar 18 is the ultimate Sunn Classic picture, combining Watergate-style conspiracies, Roswell rumors, alien autopsies and speculation about ancient alien visitations into one dramatic package (although how well the parts fit together is open to debate).

Marveling at the alien viewscreen's crispness and clarity, Phil suddenly realized he would need to upgrade his TV before the Big Game.

The film’s ending is abrupt and violent, yet a radio broadcast voice over as the end credits roll strikes a note of cautious optimism. Hangar 18 seems like a pop culture bridge between the pessimism and cynicism of the ‘70s and Reagan’s Morning in America which was just dawning (and which itself turned out to be as phony as a Sunn Classic documentary, but that’s a discussion for another time).

Speaking of ‘70s signifiers, Hangar 18’s acting leads exemplify the decade as well as anyone. In the ‘60s, Robert Vaughn vaulted to fame as the suave spy Napoleon Solo in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. After that stint, he shed the action star veneer for character roles, especially authority figures. Perusing his IMDb resume for just the '70s alone, he portrayed two U.S. presidents along with a multitude of senators, military officers and corporate executives, many of them corrupt like his character in Hangar 18.

On the flip side, one of the highlights of Darren McGavin’s career came in the early to mid-’70s with his portrayal of bedraggled newshound Carl Kolchak in two Night Stalker TV movies and a short-lived series. Kolchak was the paranormal world’s answer to Woodward and Bernstein, constantly fighting to unearth stories of strange creatures and supernatural forces that the authorities preferred to keep under wraps (the X-Files’ Mulder and Scully would take up the cause in the ‘90s). Unlike Vaughn, who had a facility for portraying human snakes, McGavin was naturally cheerful and gregarious, so he was almost always cast as a reliable, if somewhat put upon, good guy.

Harry Forbes (Darren McGavin, right) channels the inquisitive spirit of Carl Kolchak in Hangar 18.

Astronauts Bancroft and Price were played by two solid character actors, both of whose career heydays were in the ‘70s. Gary Collins guested on some of the decade’s most iconic TV shows, including Hawaii 5-0, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman, The Love Boat and Charlie’s Angels (he also starred as a paranormal investigator in the short-lived series The Sixth Sense).

Similarly, James Hampton was all over TV and low-budget movies, but scored a couple of memorable supporting roles in two big hits, The Longest Yard (1974, with Burt Reynolds) and The China Syndrome (1979, with Jane Fonda, Michael Douglas and Jack Lemmon).

Hangar 18 tries valiantly to be a taut sci-fi thriller, but the effort is hampered by TV movie-grade chase scenes, the prosaic-looking alien craft, and some dull stretches. 

Bancroft and Price take a breather between encounters with Men in Black.

Vaughn and McGavin give it their all playing the impassioned bureaucrats (is that an oxymoron?). They each have their moments, but too much dialog and too many close-ups of furrowed brows slows down the middle part of the movie considerably. 

Perhaps the most fun to be had with Hangar 18 is counting the various homages and references to UFO lore. Additionally, it’s a great artifact of late-'70s paranoia (some would say sober realism). Maybe that’s enough to recommend it.

Where to find it: DVD | Streaming

Time-release Capsule Reviews, Part Two: Unidentified Flying Horrors

Forget Covid-19. Forget the latest mud-slinging in Washington, D.C. Forget the NBA and NHL playoffs. I’ll tell you what’s really on people’s minds these days: UFOs.

After Luis Elizondo, former head of a Defense Intelligence Agency program to study unidentified aerial phenomena, released videos of the Navy’s encounters with the strange Tic-Tac UFOs (or should I say UAPs) in 2017, the topic went mainstream in a hurry.

It certainly helped that, after some dithering, the Pentagon confirmed the videos as authentic. Suddenly, such sober, authoritative media outlets as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal were treating UFOs seriously instead of poking fun at the credulous rubes. And interviews with rock-solid military pilots who had witnessed the incredible flying whatsits were popping up all over the news.

The dam has broken, and it seems like we’re being treated to a near-constant flood of new videos and images, witness testimonies and Pentagon acknowledgements that there may really be something to this UFO thing after all (but whatever it is, it’s not our secret stuff). 

"Mr. President, the aliens are here and they're wondering if they can
get a copy of the UAP Task Force Report."

Just recently, 60 Minutes, the soberest, most sclerotic mainstream news program of them all, devoted its first ever segment to UFOs, including a very serious interview with Luis Elizondo. And there’s potentially another big shoe to be dropped with the release of the UAP Task Force report to Congress this summer.

As all the revelations have been piling up, I’ve had my own interesting encounters -- not with aliens, but with regular, down-to-earth people who are intrigued by the serious attention UFOs are getting. My go-to ball cap for protecting my balding head from the sun features a classic grey alien whose bulbous forehead is stitched like a baseball -- one of the logos of the now defunct minor league baseball team the Las Vegas 51s (named of course after southern Nevada’s notorious Area 51).

When I first started wearing the cap, no one, except for the occasional baseball fan, noticed the damned thing. But as more and more UFO stories hit the mainstream news, my cap became a wonderful conversation starter. Now, it’s almost routine when I’m out in public for perfect strangers to spot it and start talking about aliens and government cover-ups and the possibility that not only are we not alone, they’re actually here!

According to my sources, there is no truth to the rumor that aliens use
Spider Tack to get a better grip on their abductees. 

So, in honor of all those curious, somewhat freaked out people and the ongoing UFO/UAP revolution, I’m devoting this installment of capsule reviews to a triptych of “up close and personal” film encounters with aliens and UFOs, from the 1990s to the not-quite present.

The films below are not about epic alien invasions. Invasion flicks are a lot of fun too, and I plan to do a post or two on that subgenre in the near future. So stay tuned, and in the meantime, keep watching the skies!

Fire in the Sky (1993)

The alleged alien abduction of forest worker Travis Walton in eastern Arizona’s Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest on November 5, 1975 is one of the most celebrated and controversial accounts in all of UFO lore.

Supposedly, Walton and six other workers were heading home from a hard day of forest thinning when they spotted a saucer-shaped craft hovering near the road. When Walton got out to get a better look, he was enveloped in a bright light and knocked to the ground, unconscious. The rest of the panicked crew hightailed it out of there. After extensive searches, Walton showed up five days later in a nearby town, with a story that he had been abducted and examined by two different species of aliens.

Believers point to the fact that Walton and his co-workers passed polygraph examinations, and have stood by the story for 45+ years (although recently crew chief Mike Rogers has wavered somewhat). Skeptics point out that the polygraph tests, sponsored by The National Enquirer (not the Sheriff’s office as depicted in the movie), were poorly administered, and that Walton and several family members and friends had previously been infatuated with UFOs. 

Whatever your take on it, watching Fire in the Sky will enthrall you and possibly make you a believer, if only for an hour or two. This is not so much Travis Walton’s movie (played by D.B. Sweeney) as it is friend and fellow forester Mike Rogers’ (Robert Patrick). After the shaken crew returns to town without Travis and tells its incredible story to the sheriff, tensions run high for days afterwards as most of the townspeople have concluded that Rogers and the others are hiding something, quite possibly Travis’ murder.

Even Travis’ reappearance and the vindication of the polygraph exams can’t redeem Rogers, who gets divorced and, at the end of the movie, has become a recluse who hasn’t seen his daughters or former friend Travis in years. Patrick is very good as a flawed, but nonetheless stand-up guy who lives constantly on the edge, taking seasonal forestry work to keep the bill collectors at bay and his rusty old truck running. He passionately stands his ground, even in the face of withering skepticism from his family, neighbors, and hotshot criminal investigator Frank Watters (James Garner).

And then there’s the justifiably famous sequence with Walton aboard the alien craft. The film’s IMDb trivia page relates that studio execs found the real Walton’s abduction account too mundane, and had screenwriter Tracy Tormé (son of jazz singer Mel Tormé) jazz it up (pun intended). He and director Robert Lieberman succeeded spectacularly.

I watched Fire in the Sky with some friends a few years after its video release. Two of them reported not being able to sleep that night. I am (ahem) made of somewhat sterner stuff, but there’s no doubt that Fire in the Sky’s depiction of Walton’s close encounter remains to this day the wildest and scariest ever committed to film.

Night Skies (2007)

Night Skies is a typical representative of the subgenre of alien siege movies involving small groups of travelers, vacationers and/or locals who, while trying to commune with nature, end up being stalked by scary aliens bent on abducting or dissecting them. (For other examples, see Alien Abduction or Extraterrestrial, both released in 2014).

The movie strains credulity at the outset by asking us to believe that a group of oversexed twenty-somethings on their way to Las Vegas in a humongous rattletrap RV are lost because one of them wanted to take the scenic route... at night.

Rattling down a bumpy sideroad, the driver (Matt, played by George Stults) is distracted by weird lights in the sky, sideswipes a broken down truck in the middle of the road, and careens into a tree. Matt is the movie’s requisite hothead, and deals with the situation by punching the owner of the truck, ex-soldier Richard (Jason Connery) in the mouth.

A bad move, since Matt’s friend Joe (Joseph Sikora) has ended up with a kitchen knife in his back as a result of the crash, and Richard is the only one of the group with medical training (courtesy of the Army). Of course, neither vehicle is in shape to drive, and there’s no cell signal. Unfortunately for the stranded group, Joe’s injuries are just a precursor of what’s to come, as it soon becomes evident that they are not alone in the dark woods.

To its credit, Night Skies tries to add depth to its characters with various backstories: Matt’s girlfriend Lilly (A.J. Cook) is reluctant to tell him she’s pregnant (at least in part because he’s an immature dolt); Richard confides to Matt’s sister Molly (Ashley Peldon) that he was tortured by the Iraqis as a POW in Desert Storm, and his life has been on hold ever since.

The problem is that some of the backstory development slows things at crucial junctures and doesn’t really add anything substantive or explain why the characters act the way they do. However, patient viewers will be rewarded with some effective jump scares, a couple of good effects on what I assume was a shoestring budget (especially the fate of an old cabin), and aliens that won’t scare anybody, but that are pretty well-designed. (The score and the sound design are particularly outstanding, with the subtle, ominous music underscoring the aliens’ skittering and trilling as they pursue their prey.)

Night Skies’ climactic pièce de résistance is a scene that, to be charitable, is very reminiscent of Travis Walton’s abduction experience in Fire in the Sky (some might say it’s a blatant rip-off). The original scene is uniquely terrifying, and those who haven't seen Fire in the Sky may be impressed by Night Skies’ version. But the Night Skies people might have been better advised to come up with something more original.

The Fourth Kind (2009)

This strange film goes all out in pretending to be a documentary drama, to the point that at the beginning, it presents lead actress Milla Jovovich as herself, grimly intoning, Dragnet style, that the following story is true and only the names have been changed to protect the innocent. And before the end credits, It throws up blurbs about what happened to the principal characters after the events of the movie transpired.

The title refers to one of the categories of UFO encounters that researcher J. Allen Hynek developed in the early ‘70s, famously popularized by Steven Spielberg in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. (Actually, Hynek only described 3 types of close encounters; UFO researchers have since expanded the list to seven. A close encounter of the fourth kind is abduction by aliens.) 

Jovovich plays Dr. Abbey Tyler, a clinical psychologist and mother of two young children, whose husband was recently murdered in a horrific home invasion. In the course of counseling patients in the remote town of Nome, Alaska, she is intrigued and baffled when a number of them independently tell her the same story of being awakened night after night by an owl that sits outside the bedroom window and stares at them.

When she decides to hypnotize one of her patients to try to figure out what the strange owl is all about, the session reveals a terrifying underlying reality, and unleashes a series of bizarre events that sweeps up Tyler herself and threatens her children. (Believe it or not, the owl-alien connection is a real thing in UFO circles; read all about it: “The Owl-UFO Connection Continues,” Nick Redfern, Mysterious Universe.)

As Tyler delves more deeply into the mystery and conducts more hypnosis sessions, the film frequently employs a split screen to show the supposed “actual” taped footage side by side with the “recreated” scenes involving Jovovich and her fellow actors. Interspersed throughout are segments from an interview conducted years after the events in Nome, in which the “real” Dr. Tyler (played by Charlotte Milchard) defends her interpretation of what happened.

It’s all very meta, but surprisingly effective. For a film about alien abduction that neither shows an alien or a UFO, it still manages to generate a good deal of suspense and dread, especially in the hypnosis scenes. It even manages to insert such concepts as ancient astronauts and Sumerian demons at various points without completely blowing the viewer’s suspension of disbelief.

Milla Jovovich took a break from being an action heroine in the Resident Evil movies to emote as the “recreated” Dr. Tyler, and she’s very good -- including the ability to let loose with a very creditable scream when the scene calls for it.

Perusing the IMDb user reviews, the residents of Nome, Alaska aren’t happy with the way The Fourth Kind depicted their town, but if you can get past that and the film’s cheesy “this is a true story, wink, wink” set-up, there are some legitimate thrills in store for you.