“A Hollywood actor walks into a UFO conference—hey, stop me if you’ve heard this one before…”
Well, chances are you haven’t. And that’s because You Are Not Alone—the brainchild of comedian Steve Berg and Kendall Goldberg—was a pilot show produced in 2019, that unfortunately hasn’t found a home in mainstream television… yet.
In retrospect, I kind of understand why: Prior to 2017, UFO-related reality television was only interested in ‘hunting down’ the phenomenon—which roughly translated to interviewing witnesses for the uptenth time, CGI recreations of varying quality depending on their budget, and running around the outdoors at night with IR goggles shouting “WHAT THE F*%K WAS THAT” before a commercial break. After 2017, the focus shifted to the ‘whistle-blowers’, and how they were trying to fight down the official cover-up of the UFO presence—basically a real-life(ish) version of The X Files… sans the cool trenchcoats of the 1990s.
Berg and Co. were clearly aiming for something different: Steve visits the ‘Visions of the Future’ conference in Nevada at the request of organizer Paola Harris. Between his gigs as Emcee of the event, he takes time to meet and have a chat with some of the attendees, in order to learn about their stories of contact with the Other.
Those of us who have attended these kind of conferences recognize immediately the atmosphere: mostly elderly people (and Yes, mostly white as well) walking through the cheap hotel carpet flooring, meandering through the New Age paraphernalia offered at vendors tables, while sharing personal stories that often strain credulity. To an outside viewer that might almost feel exploitative—and maybe that’s a fear studio execs had when considering to green-light the show—but knowing Steve’s genuine passion for the subject, which he injects to his audience every time he invites a new guest to his podcast Hi, Strangeness, I can tell that the amazement in his eyes when he’s listening to those folks is not an act. He’s totally enthralled and begging to hear more; and if you had been there with him, chances are you would have felt the same, too!
People attend these events not because of the lodging or the food (which are never great) or even because of the quality of the speakers. They attend because it is a safe space where they can openly share the weirder, out-of-place aspects of their lives; knowing they will not be dismissed or laughed at by the other attendees, because many of them have gone through something similar. They indeed discover, as the title of the show suggested, that they are many others like them out there; and since our culture still has no better ways to accommodate those experiences at the margins of consensus reality, the cheap carpet floors will have to do… for the time being.
If that sounds an awful lot like a religious ceremony, it is because in many ways UFO conferences fulfill that hunger for meaning for a particular demographic (which might actually be bigger if the events weren’t so expensive to attend!).
And even if you scoff at that comparison, I can tell you that one of the best ways to approach these events is not unlike a Lucha Libre show: you gotta suspend your disbelief and just go with the vibe—and yes, I do consider wrestling to be another form of religious ceremony; why do you think one of the most famous Mexican wrestlers was also a priest?
If You Are Not Alone would have been able to capture some of that spark, in the right balance between entertainment and suspension of disbelief, it would have been a great show. Alas, for now we can only content ourselves with the pilot in the hope that the public soon get tired of how serious the Disclosure activists take themselves; when we can all turn our collective gaze away from the dull Congressional hearings—and laugh once again at the ludicrous immensity of the night sky.
