UFO documentaries: from a Pentagon secret to a Congress hearing

A UFO documentary is a film that investigates sightings of unidentified flying objects, usually through the people who say they saw something. The official term is now UAP, for unidentified aerial phenomena, and the change in language followed a change in the record.

For decades the subject was easy to laugh off. Then the record shifted. In December 2017 the Pentagon confirmed it had run a secret UFO program, started with over $20 million that Harry Reid, the Nevada senator and former Senate majority leader, earmarked in the defense budget. The money ran through 2012. In June 2021 the US Director of National Intelligence released a report covering 144 incidents between 2004 and 2021. Only 1, a large deflating balloon, was identified with high confidence, which left 143 unexplained.

On July 26, 2023, a House subcommittee held a public hearing at which David Grusch, a former intelligence official, said he had learned from others of a covert program to recover crashed craft. The Pentagon said it had found no verifiable information to substantiate the claims.

The films below follow that arc, from 2003 to 2024, and they do not agree with each other. Some take the witnesses at their word, one argues the sightings have ordinary explanations, and together they show how the question moved from the fringe into Congress. More than 400 documentaries on Relay carry UFO, alien or extraterrestrial tags. These are the ones that explain how the subject got here.

What makes a UFO documentary

• Testimony. Most are built on people who say they saw something: pilots, officials, scientists, ordinary witnesses. The strength of the film is usually the strength of the person on camera.
• The official record. The best recent ones are anchored in government programs, reports and hearings, which can be checked against news coverage.
• A skeptic's case. A few argue that sightings have conventional explanations. They are part of the genre, and they make the others easier to judge.

8 UFO documentaries to watch

Out Of The Blue (2003)

James Fox, a San Francisco-based journalist and filmmaker, made this for the Sci Fi Channel, which aired it on June 24, 2003. He returns later in this list with The Phenomenon and The Program.

An Associated Press report from the time says Fox had heard that former President Jimmy Carter once saw a UFO. Carter's representatives declined an interview, so Fox approached him with a camera at a book signing, and Carter confirmed it on film. Fox told the AP he considers about 95 percent of reported UFO incidents to be hoaxes or conventional phenomena.

Documentary

---

Montauk Chronicles (2015)

This film follows four men who say they survived the Montauk Project, an alleged secret government mind-control program tied to Camp Hero in Montauk, New York. The researcher Jacques Vallee has traced the stories, which have circulated since the early 1980s, to Preston Nichols and Al Bielek, who each said they had recovered repressed memories of taking part.

Director Christopher Garetano says he began exploring the Camp Hero legends on film before Stranger Things: a website in March 2010, an early screening in May 2012, and the final version in 2015. The Netflix series was reportedly inspired by Montauk stories and was once titled Montauk. Garetano does not claim his film inspired it. It won Best Feature Documentary in the Singularity and Beyond category at the 2015 Philip K. Dick Film Festival in New York.

Documentary

---

Hunt for the Skinwalker (2018)

Director Jeremy Corbell adapted a 2005 book by Colm Kelleher, who led a team of scientists at a remote ranch in Utah, and George Knapp, an investigative reporter and the only journalist allowed to witness the team's work.

The ranch matters beyond the film. Robert Bigelow, a billionaire whose aerospace company won many of the early contracts for the Pentagon program, owned it from 1996 to 2016. In 2007 he approached Reid about a Defense Intelligence Agency official's interest in visiting it, and Reid went on to earmark the funding. Skeptics note that Bigelow's own research group monitored the ranch for several years and found no proof.

Documentary

---

The Phenomenon (2020)

Fox's 2020 film, narrated by the actor Peter Coyote, was planned for a wide theatrical release by 1091 Pictures. The COVID-19 pandemic moved it to digital platforms worldwide on October 6, 2020.

It retells famous cases, including Roswell, Rendlesham Forest and the Ariel School, through the people involved, and it interviews Reid and Christopher Mellon, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence. Roger's Movie Nation argued that retelling well-known cases adds no new proof, though the witnesses are compelling.

Documentary

---

Accidental Truth: UFO Revelations (2023)

Ron James, media relations director of the UFO organization MUFON, wrote and directed this film, which the actor Matthew Modine narrates. It was released digitally on April 18, 2023.

Its interviewees include Congressman Tim Burchett, the physicist Michio Kaku, Luis Elizondo, who headed the Pentagon program, and Mellon. It reads as a survey of the people who pushed the subject toward Washington.

Documentary

---

The UFO Movie THEY Don't Want You to See (2023)

Brian Dunning, host of the Skeptoid science podcast, produced, wrote and directed this as the counterweight. It sets out the science behind the current phenomenon: what is in our skies, what we know and how we know it, and whether we are being visited.

Psychology Today's reviewer called it a master class in critical thinking and summarised its argument that every verifiable sighting has turned out to be a misidentified object. It won Best Documentary at the Brooklyn SciFi Film Festival in 2023, and Best Documentary and Best Science Film at GeekFestToronto in 2024.

Documentary

---

The Program (2024)

Fox's follow-up, released in December 2024, covers the bipartisan push in Congress to learn what intelligence agencies know, and the first public congressional hearings on the subject in more than 50 years. Witnesses there alleged secret programs studying recovered materials.

Mellon appears again, along with Gary Nolan, a Stanford professor. Fox, in an interview, said he tried to condense an unprecedented few years into one watch, and that "extraordinary claims do require extraordinary evidence."

Documentary

---

Battle For Disclosure (2024)

Directed by Blake Cousins and Brent Cousins, this film features Steven Greer, director of the Disclosure Project. Greer organized an event at the National Press Club in Washington on May 9, 2001, where about 20 former government workers, many of them military or security officials, spoke about what they said they had seen and called for congressional hearings.

Greer said some 400 witnesses claimed firsthand experience and were willing to testify before Congress. That figure is his own and has not been independently verified. The event came years before the Pentagon program became public, which is why it is the oldest thread in this story.

Documentary

Where to go next

• For witness accounts told by the people who lived them, see Four UFO Witnesses Who Had Everything to Lose.
• For the hidden-face television interview that started one of the best-known UFO legends, see Bob Lazar and the hidden-face TV interview.