Prophet Billy Meier's somewhat suspect UFO photos are examined in this dull paranormal documentary. After an assassination attempt and walking away from the French Foreign Legion, Billy Meier claims to have been visiting by extraterrestrials and mentored by an alien named Sfath. Featuring talking head interviews and photos of UFOs dangling suspiciously close to trees, The Billy Meier Story rambles on and on about UFOs and some sort of barely touched upon prophecies. Here's a not-especially compelling clip of a too-good-to-be-true UFO dangling near a tree.
I don't know an awful lot about the motivations of supposed extraterrestrials, but if I was piloting a UFO, I probably wouldn't dangle right there by the one lone tree for miles around because it would certainly look suspicious. I do know a bit about boring movies, and UFOs and Prophecies From Outer Space is as boring as a five minute clip of two pie plates hot glued together and suspended from a string.
People do some vaguely science-fiction-y stuff in this largely incoherent, but fascinating, experimental short film. Featuring a screenplay written by a piece of artificial intelligence named Benjamin, the film is simultaneously self-conscious, humorous, somber, and accidentally poetic, as if Tristan Tzara used predictive text instead of cut-up newspaper to write it. The actors act their lines in earnest, but since the dialogue doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense, the words and emotions clash, giving a baffling, dada-esque aura to the film. It's a well-shot and fascinating bit of cinema, mostly due to a sense of surprise to what the program could possibly say next. Sunspring is funny, surreal, and thankfully, brief.
A point-by-point rebuttal of Erich Von Daniken's book about UFOs is incoherently presented in this rambling speculative documentary. From the Nazca Lines, geopolymerization, Cargo Cults, standing stones, Crystal Skulls, Nephilim, Dropa Stones, and Timewavezero, and amidst repetitive music, endless narration, wipes, and unimpressive CGI images, suspect evidence proving the ancient colonization of Earth from extraterrestrials is examined, jumping from one example to the next with little framework other than Von Daniken's book Chariots Of The Gods, and it would be extremely helpful to have the tome in hand to follow along. Lots of questions are asked, but I'm not entirely sure what the questions are or if they're thoroughly answered, although a few are half-heartedly debunked. There's an explosion of some sort at the 33-minute mark, but even that manages to bore.
Did aliens come to Earth and build the pyramids? I don't know, I wasn't there. Maybe, just maybe, the people of the time built the structures they did with the technology they had and the tools and raw materials available to them. Or not. I mean, we have evidence that the pyramids were built, because they're like right there, yet little to no actual evidence of flying saucers. Therefore, it was probably definitely aliens. I mean, they scratched easily-found, way-out-in-the-middle-of-nowhere selfies into the Earth in Nazca, and that sounds like solid proof of alien visitation to me.
If I was an ancient alien visiting Earth, with untold futuristic and science-y knowledge, I would probably build something a little more useful than a pyramid or a circle of stones, like a Costco, or an International House Of Pancakes, but what do I know? Aliens didn't have Facebook or LinkedIn back then, so a crystal skull as self-promotion was the next best and logical step. Duh. Call me conceited, but if I built a mindbogglingly impressive structure like the pyramids, everyone would know about it. I'd be flying past in my flying saucer with one of those signs fluttering behind it, and it would say, "Visit Stabford's Pyramid. It's sweet. $25 admission, half-price for puny earthlings.", and everybody would be tweeting, "Yeah, we know about your freakin' pyramid already. Shut up about it."
