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May 14, 2018 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:09:15
Edition 346 - Dean Alioto

Without meaning to, film-maker Dean Alioto believes he created one of the biggest UFOcontroversies ever...

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world, on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Return of the Unexplained.
Thank you very much, as ever, for keeping the faith with my show.
And as I said those words, maybe it's an omen, a shaft of sunlight hit my face here where I'm recording this, and that is very gratefully received.
Hope the weather's good where you are, and I hope life is good too.
Now, let me just explain, before I go any further with this edition, this is recorded about 10 days or so, maybe a little more before you hear it.
And as I'm recording, I've got a little bit of a bug at the moment.
It's almost like a kind of strange fluish type thing that's affected my throat and my voice.
So if I'm not entirely sounding like I normally sound, that is the explanation for that.
I guess these things are sent to try us.
Periodically, they hit all of us, and it put me out of action for a couple of days this week, and I'm trying right now to get back into the swing of things.
But that's why I don't entirely sound like myself.
But, you know, I'm going to use microphone technique to try and sound like me, if that's possible, if that's a good thing.
I'm going to do a lot of shout-outs on this edition.
Let me apologize if I can't get to yours.
And let me say straight away, there is one person who specifically asked for a shout-out.
And he asked me to use not a pseudonym, but it looked a little bit like a radio hand law.
Now, you know who you are.
I've gone and lost that email, because I had it in my mind for the last week to do this.
And now, when I come to doing the shout-outs, I've lost it.
So, look, if you were looking for a shout-out, you know who you are.
You told me not to use your name, but to use this pseudonym, which was like a radio call sign.
Let me know, and I will do it as soon as I can.
And I'm really sorry that I lost your email.
I've searched the inbox up and down and in every direction in the last hour to try and find it.
Thank you very much to Adam at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool for his hard work on this show.
The guest on this edition is a man recommended to me by my friend Anthony in California, who's an old radio colleague.
He said, you've got to get this guy on the show.
His name is Dean Aliotto, and we'll be kind of talking about UFO and abduction type things, but we'll find out more when we get him on here from the United States.
Let's do those shout-outs now.
Vic in Pimlico, thank you very much for your email.
Alan, who's a fellow scouser near Glandidno, North Wales.
Many of us have origins in North Wales.
Part of my family does.
And a lot of Liverpool people go to North Wales and vice versa.
You know, I didn't realise until recently, fairly recently anyway, that Liverpool was built by Welsh people.
And many of the streets there, I mean, I've got a Welsh name, Hughes, but many of the streets are named after Welsh people who built the city.
And of course, if you stand on the beach in Crosby, where I grew up, you can look out and on a clear day you can see almost as far as Anglesey.
But you can certainly see the Great Orme and Landidno, where I used to go on days out with my dear late dad when I was a kid, including one on a ferry that was fantastic.
There used to be a boat.
I think it still runs occasionally that would take you from Liverpool all round the North Wales coast to Llandidmo.
But that's another story.
Stephanie in Columbus, Ohio, thank you for all the communication, Stephanie.
Good to hear from you.
Tom in Houston, Texas.
Thank you for your very valid thoughts, Tom.
Roger in Brighton, good to hear from you.
Danny Moyer, who I think is in Liverpool.
Danny, thank you.
Keith Dulley, nice to hear from you again, Keith.
Jorge Estrada in Mexico, thank you for making me smile, Jorge, with your email.
Heidi Grady, great name, Heidi, who started listening to Art Bell just like I did in the 90s on a 28K dial-up modem.
Those were the days.
Jeff, and they were surprisingly good too.
Jeff in Fernandina Beach, Florida.
Great location says, Howard You Rock.
Thank you, Jeff.
Jason has been listening since I was on Talk Sport doing a show like this one in 2004.
Jason, thank you.
Stuart in the Vale of Glamorgan, South Wales.
Good to hear from you.
Amanda in BC, Canada.
Useful thoughts on NDEs.
Thank you, Amanda.
Kerry in New Zealand, thank you.
I'm glad the show helped you, and you know what I mean when I say that.
Martin in Thailand, thank you very much for your email, Martin.
Good to hear from you.
James in Rus, not far from Cardiff, where I studied for a year, journalism years and years ago.
Good luck with your masters.
You're studying.
Thank you, James.
in Rus'.
Didn't they used to be Isn't the airport at Rus?
In Cardiff?
Got to go back and refresh my memory.
George Papadakis, thank you for your suggestion.
Roy Walsh, good to hear from you.
CJ Mapp on the subject of some Russian deep drilling into the Earth's crust and strange events that happened around that, apparently.
Thank you for that.
Mike in Oroville, Northern California, thank you for your email.
Andy in North Wales wants a Berin Mountains UFO special.
A Beryn Mountains case has been called by some people anyway, the Roswell of the UK.
We need to be doing that.
I've just got to find some experts to talk about it.
David Watkins says, keep pushing that stone up the hill and thank you for all you do.
Thank you, David.
Steve, who listens while driving one of those iconic London institutions, the famous taxis.
Thank you, Steve.
Keith Murkelt, who listens on his long commute.
Thank you, Keith.
Peter in Swansea.
Mike Lazorczak, Adam Duke, Steve Hare, and some kind words from David in Cambridge, USA.
Thanks, David.
Rusty, who lives in Australia and in Guernsey, liked Howard Storm.
Thank you, Rusty.
Linda in Vancouver, kind words, Linda.
Thank you.
Dan Love in Indianapolis.
Many thanks for your email.
Nick near Bar Harbour in lovely Maine, USA.
Nice to hear from you.
I remember going on the Down Easter from Boston all the way up the coast through New Hampshire and into Maine.
And that was a great trip in the snow.
Bob in Gildedyke, Yorkshire, thank you for your email.
Andy, who's on Indian Rocks Beach, Florida?
Wow.
A shout out for Ben and Ratty Sue in Manchester.
Nice to hear from you.
Glenn in Dublin, thank you for your email.
Doug, thank you for the email about consciousness.
Frank in wonderful Perth, Western Australia.
Home of the Burswood Resort Hotel and Rottnest Island, I remember.
He wants me to cover the Australian crypto phenomenon, the yowie.
We'll get round to it.
Terry in Tasmania, further down and across and along in Australia, says, I listened to your show via podcast.
I was very impressed by the man from the Australian Skeptic.
So was I, Tim.
It was a show that's brought a lot of positive feedback, that one.
Amy, good to hear from you again, Amy.
And here's proof for you that I do read all the email.
Adam in Missouri says about the Australian Skeptic show, I had a lot of problems with Tim's approach to proving phenomena.
My first problem was that he was limiting himself to 0.32% of the world's population.
I'm accepting your figure there, Adam.
That means that 99.68 of possible cases are eliminated.
And that is a point I think I did put to him, but thank you, Adam.
Terry in Preston, Lancashire, says, finally, just listen to your interview with Jamie Anderson, son of the creator of Thunderbirds and many other fine series.
Terry says it was great and brought back a lot of memories.
I remember how to make all the models from Lego Bricks.
I'm assuming you have Lego bricks in America and other places.
You know, those little building bricks for kids, I loved them.
Any chance of getting the backroom boys on from Doctor Who?
I'll try.
I did have one of Doctor Who's assistants on, didn't I?
Katie Manning, a little while back.
That was a little treat for Christmas a couple of years ago.
Terry, I hope you recover soon from the hip operation.
You know, it takes a period of months, and you just have to be patient from what I'm told.
Right, thank you very much for your emails.
If you want to send me an email or a donation, if you've made one of those recently, thank you very much indeed.
They're vital for this show.
Please go to my website, theunexplained.tv, designed and created by Adam from Creative Hotspot, and you can send me feedback on the show, ideas and suggestions, or a donation.
And if you are that person who sent me the email asking for a shout-out, I'm really sorry.
I'm sure I will locate as soon as I've recorded this your email.
But if you can just let me know again, and I promise I will definitely do it.
You know, I hate letting people down.
All right, let's get on now to the guest on this edition in the USA, suggested by my friend Anthony Davis, Dean Aleotto, the creator of the mysterious and enigmatic UPN TV special Alien Abduction Incident in Lake County.
If that isn't a great teaser for the whole thing, I don't know what is.
Dean Aliotto, thanks for coming on the show.
Thank you.
Now, Dean, listen, it's not the first time I've done the show not knowing very much about the person I'm speaking with, but I'm taking our mutual friend Anthony Davis, who used to be on air in London doing a talk show on LBC radio.
I'm taking his steer on this.
He said, get this man on your show.
He is very good.
So not that you've got a lot to live up to or anything like that.
No, apparently not.
Okay.
All right.
Let's wind it back then to the start, because you've got a long history, it appears to me, in independent filmmaking, right?
Yes, but I thought we were going to talk about the Beatles.
You're from Liverpool, right?
Well, yes, we can talk about the Beatles.
This isn't a Beatles show.
We can talk about them if you want to.
You know, do you know Ringo?
Because he spends a lot of his time in the U.S. these days.
He does.
My daughter, she's a huge Beatles fan.
I don't know why.
Her middle name is Lane for Penny Lane.
Maybe that's it.
Hardcore.
When I would drive her to school, we would sing Beatles songs, and I would try to do my Liverpudlian accent, and I would do Ringo.
How's it going, love?
And she'd go, stop.
She'd scream at me.
And adults still do that.
Well, because it's not authentic.
Yeah.
Oh, she used to be talking to me there because Ringo talks like that.
Hey, you know.
There we go.
Yeah, you should have been in the car with me.
Yeah, we always used to say the term.
Yeah, huge Liverpool fan.
Okay.
Well, that's good.
Well, I am from Liverpool, so we have something in common there, I think.
Yeah, and my daughter eventually wants to move there.
I took her there when she was 16 and just loves it.
But getting back to filmmaking.
Yeah, so yeah, it all started when I was actually a young kid who was interested in anything that had to do with the esoteric, from Loch Ness Monster to Bigfoot.
I remember watching Outer Limits on TV when I was a kid and then In Search of and seeing all these shows and just being amazed at the fact that no one else knew about this.
It wasn't like, you know, high on the list of topics amongst my friends.
So I was considered kind of that weird kid.
And so from there, it just kind of spun into wanting to make movies and create stuff and kind of recreate what I wanted to see.
And what I wanted to see was aliens and UFOs.
And so when I saw Close Encounters of the Third Kind, that knocked me on my ass because it was kind of like, oh my God, this isn't just about aliens and UFOs.
It's this spiritual journey.
And so I realized that looking back after I saw that film, I kind of flashed back to my childhood and thought, wow, I was trying to escape.
I was trying to escape my divorce, that, you know, my parents' divorce and all that that was going on.
Not to mention that my father had me, or my father's doctor had me on Ridland because I had a lot of energy as a kid.
I was very creative.
And so usually you give your kid 10 milligrams.
Well, they doubled that to 20.
That didn't work, so they gave me 30.
And that kind of created this dynamic where I was a zombie during the day.
And then at night when the Ridland wore off, I had abundance of energy.
And so my father put a black and white TV in my room, and I would just watch all sci-fi stuff that I can get my hands on.
And I also spent a good amount of time staring out the window, trying to kind of, I guess, project myself out there.
So when I became a filmmaker, it made sense that I would go back to that kind of, you know, escapism.
And so from there, it was just kind of like, all right, what is my first movie going to be?
And then, how much money do I have to do it?
And I had a friend who said, Look, I've got 6,500 bucks.
And I said, Okay, that's not a budget.
I don't know what that is.
But I can, I don't know, I can make a home video.
That's as much as I can do with that.
And then I read Communion.
And after reading Whitley Striever's book, I was like, okay, there's got to be a way to show this because this book's more terrifying than any Stephen King novel I've ever read.
So I started looking into what if I did a home video, but a home video where something interesting happens, where maybe a family gets abducted by extraterrestrials.
So we're talking 1989 here.
And so I went and hired improvisational actors.
And the whole script was basically a beat sheet.
And so we shot it one night up in Northern California, all in one take.
Starts out being this little girl's five-year-old birthday party.
And then there's a blackout, and they see a light in the sky.
They go to investigate, and they see a shift.
And aliens, and they race back, and one by one, they get abducted.
And it's all done real time, shot through the lens of a 16-year-old's new home video camera.
And so, sorry, I can just keep going and going.
No, I'm just, I'm fascinated by this, but you know, there is an area that is an overlap between fiction and actual fact.
And sometimes people who make fiction find themselves, as indeed recently, and we'll get into that, find themselves inadvertently creating something that becomes a bit of a cult, which is something that you did.
This is a genre then that you were involved in, maybe before people like the makers of the Blair Witch Project, who created something that was allegedly for real and looks like it might be for real, but actually wasn't.
Yeah, exactly.
What happened was, for me, I was turning 25, which as a filmmaker, that's a critical number because that's where Spielberg, Orson Welles, you know, Coppola, Martin Scorsese, all of them had made their first films by 25.
So really out of kind of desperation to get my first film done and be taken serious as a filmmaker, I only had, you know, I used what I had, which was the $6,500 budget and made this thing that was more of kind of, you know, initially the intention was to show what a UFO experience would be like first person.
What I didn't know is that I created inadvertently a whole new narrative in filmmaking.
And so No, and there's a danger if you're too early.
You know, you want to be right on the curve.
I was too early.
I was literally a decade too early.
Blurwich came out in 99.
So we're talking 89.
So I had made this thing, and it was this weird kind of anomaly that found its legs later on.
But in 1989, when I went out pitching this, trying to sell the finished movie to Los Angeles, it was looked upon as being the worst type of amateurish filmmaking on the planet.
I had people yell at me, tell them to get out of my office.
It was pretty brutal.
However, the last person we met with took a chance and said, you know, I want to run with this.
And so that was the beginning of this strange journey.
From there, the distributor picked up the film and then I reached out to him a few months later and I said, hey, how's it going?
And he goes, hey, not too well.
The warehouse burned to the ground.
Will I?
We call that bad luck over here, I think.
In some places, they might call that other things, but bad luck, I think.
Biblical bad luck.
And so I thought, well, you know, it's my first feature.
Anyway, that's it.
Moving on, getting on with my life.
I start doing crime reenactments in Los Angeles.
And then I get a call from this character.
His name is Sean David Morton.
And yes.
So Sean reaches out to me and he says, hey, do you know anything about this footage that was found?
And I said, I have no idea what you're talking about.
And then he tells me some more.
And I said, well, that wasn't found.
It was made.
And he goes, oh, okay.
Do you know what's going on with this film?
I go, dude, I have zero idea what you're talking about.
He says, okay, let me back up.
Someone apparently got an advanced screener of your film before the warehouse burned in the ground and they edited off the credits and they injected it into the UFO community where for the past three years, it's worked its way up until it got to the International UFO Congress Convention.
And I'm just listening to this dumbfounded and I'm going, okay, what does that mean?
And he says, well, Lieutenant Colonel Don Ware claims it's authentic and believes it's authentic and researcher Tom Dongo also does.
So Unsolved Mysteries, Hard Copy, and this Fox show called Encounters all want to feature you.
And I made the joke, well, I guess Unsolved Mysteries is out.
And David Sean said, not necessarily, which was my first indicator that, you know, that was a precursor to the Sean that we all know.
Well, I mean, look, these things happen, don't they?
We had a thing over here, not that it's analogous or comparable in any way, but there was a thing called the Hitler Diaries over here that were, you know, delivered to a newspaper and published as being the real deal, and of course, weren't.
And of course, in your own country, my namesake, Howard Hughes, there was the famous book by Howard Hughes that had to be denied by Howard Hughes himself, thereby adding to the entire mystery.
So these things happen.
There is the famous, as you know, the alien autopsy movie that was outed to be a fake.
So you were kind of there before all of that.
And you found yourself, and you're seriously telling me that, I mean, we have to say, Sean David Morton, serious researcher, regular guest on shows like Coast to Coast AM, that's how I became aware of him.
You had convinced, without even trying to convince everybody, that this was the real deal.
No, and I really want to underscore that, bold it, and italicize it.
This was just meant as my first film.
It was meant for me to artistically express myself and have my first film done.
And I took, if anything, I borrowed a note, you know, from Orson Welles, War of the Worlds.
That's as far as I went with that.
But seriously, my only goal was to, I wanted to experience what it would be like to be abducted.
I'm not an experiencer, so I have no experience with that.
You must have done some research then, because the result convinced an awful lot of people without you intending it to.
What research did you do?
Bud Hopkins Intruder's book.
I actually got a chance to meet Jacques Vallais, who came to my screening.
And you went right to the top then.
I mean, you were very lucky to connect with him.
Yeah, well, I had read Dimensions, and we had a mutual friend, and he came out to see it.
He had no idea.
His friend said, hey, you have to come.
My buddy made a UFO film.
I'm sure he was expecting to see the usual documentaries.
He left after, and he was like, that was great.
I totally enjoyed it.
And then we had dinner a few times.
And the irony is, all I want to do was talk to him about UFOs and aliens, and all he wanted to talk to me about was filmmaking.
So we kind of met in the middle.
But literally, that was it.
I mean, I mean, you know, Jacques got it.
He knew the spirit.
He's from France.
You know, Cinema Verite.
And this was Cinema Verite at its best, just introducing sci-fi elements into it.
And so my research was calculated in the sense that I wanted this to be authentic because I thought that there might be people who would see it who read Communion and read these other books.
And I felt like I wanted to adhere to that truth, if you will.
And you have less than fully professional equipment.
You have a budget of $6,500, which is not very much money.
Not even then was a lot of money to do something.
So you came up with what was a brilliant, brilliant concept.
The idea of actually you could do it one of two ways.
You could try and do it as a real serious movie, in which case you would be shot down in flames because everybody would say, isn't the quality of this terrible?
Or you turn it into something that actually looks like a documentary.
Right.
Well, something that makes sense where it could only be done with a budget for $6,500.
Fair play to you because that was so far ahead of its time.
I mean, all right, we know about cinema verte in France and that sort of thing.
But in terms of the modern generation and modern equipment, that's pretty far-sighted, but it had consequences for you that you couldn't have anticipated.
Good and bad, yeah.
I mean, the kind of entertaining part of it for me was here was something that was, you know, one could argue it's very gimmicky that I had done as a way to be able to tell a story, you know, on eight millimeter video.
And I couldn't even afford 16 millimeter film at the time.
It's not like the DSLR cameras that they have now.
This was real, you know, ghetto equipment, if you will.
And so it was just this thing that, you know, had a life of its own.
It was almost like it had its own destiny separate from me.
And so at first I was pleased because I was like, wow, the work's getting out.
And then my biggest concern was that already the UFO and alien phenomenon is already stretching people's minds to begin with.
The last thing that I would want to do is detract or to distract people from a legitimate phenomenon, like the Northern Lights.
And so to do that, that kind of sucked.
And so I felt like, all right, I want to go out and say, hey, here's what happened so it doesn't get any further.
So I decided to go on the Fox show Encounters.
And they did a segment on the film and on me.
And I provided them with behind the scenes pictures and everything else so this didn't get, you know, even more out of hand.
And so ironically, the producer of my segment for the encounters was a gentleman by the name of Bob Kiviat.
Bob Kivia called me after we did the segment and maybe a year later and he said, hey, Dane, it's Bob.
So I got this footage by this guy.
He's from the UK.
He says it's a alien.
He's got footage of an alien autopsy.
And I said, uh-huh, go tell me more.
And he's telling me and I go, yeah, Bob, that's BS.
And he says, I think you're right, but I also think I can make a lot of money at it.
And I said, yeah, you probably will, but this sounds ridiculous.
And he goes, well, let me, you know, I'm going to follow this.
I'll let you know how it goes.
Next thing I know, there's alien autopsy factor fiction.
I backed into this.
And, you know, again, my goal was just to get, you know, my first feature done.
And so I thought once I came out and said, hey, here's what this thing, it was this experiment that we did, et cetera, it would die.
Well, it didn't.
As soon as the segment aired, I got calls from all over the world.
This is really before the internet here was in its full bloom.
I got calls from Japan, Brazil, all these people wanting copies of it and wanting to talk to me about it under the guise that this might be real.
In fact, the Japanese paid me for a few minutes of footage for it, and they brought out one of my actors and they wanted to kind of continue the storyline, which I found out after when my actor said, hey, I just did this interview with these guys.
So there's a lot of hands in how things get built and the truth gets misconstrued.
A lot of education.
Things seem to be happening, don't they?
This material that you produced was so realistic, and fair play to you for that, that people believed that it was the real thing when you took the credits off it.
And when you took the window dressing off it that said this is fiction, and it was presented as fact, they bought it, which is incredible.
And people might do that with the Blair Witch Project, but this was well before the Blair Witch Project.
So it says one of two things.
You're a great maker of films in that style, or, or possibly, and or, the UFO community is easily misled.
Wow.
Well, that's a big...
Well, if we're going to go down that rabbit hole.
I, for the first time, had gone to my UFO convention, gone to My first UFO convention, which was just this last February for the 25th anniversary of my film.
I had never done that before because, to be honest, I was nervous how the film was going to be received.
And if you type in my name, Dean Aliotto, Aliens or UFOs, you'll see hundreds of pages.
A lot of them are fan pages that are excited about it and everything.
And some have whipped me up into the conspiracy stew.
And what made matters a little bit worse for me was that I remade my movie.
I remade it for UPN.
It was their first TV movie.
This is in 97 that I made this.
And the idea here was to do the same thing.
This time, though, the budget was $1.25 million.
We shot up in Vancouver, so the budget was actually $1.5 million, which I had a full-blown anxiety attack about because I'm like, I'm a $6,500 filmmaker.
How am I going to spend this money?
And so I thought, well, I'll get the guys from the X-Files to do the ship and aliens.
And so we did.
Ultimately, we came in $500,000 under budget, which was the first time Dick Clark Productions had ever done that.
And so we shot this thing.
And again, everyone had credits at the end of it.
It was aired with credits.
And so we thought, well, that'll be great.
And so while we're up shooting this thing, everyone at UPN gets fired.
So I come back, not knowing what that means.
All I know is I finished my movie.
Yay, I've now made, you know, I'm now in the director's guild.
This is terrific.
I'm living the dream.
And so they request a full cut in two weeks with visual effects.
So I work around the clock, get it there.
They go to show it in the executive screening.
And the only person who remained at the network was a gentleman by the name of John Levoff, who was the head of TV movies.
He said it was the worst screening of his career, that they were actually throwing food at the screen.
They said, who let these guys make a handheld movie, 20-minute takes, no-name actors, shot on digital?
What the hell is that?
So this, again, even though it was a year and a half before Blair Witch, it was still considered this strange, you know, ugly stepchild that people just, either they got 100% or they didn't.
So they fired me.
They brought this woman in to cut it down to an hour and add a few extra interviews.
Now, we had fictional interviews all going along with, you know, here's this, you know, realistic portrayal, like a big reenactment.
But when they brought in the extra interviews, this woman brought in Yvonne Smith, Dr. Stanton Friedman, Daryl Sims, a few other people.
And so when it aired, it was the first time I had seen it.
So after that, I thought, wow, well, that's a horrible experience for my first professional film.
And so they aired it.
And so the first time I saw it was the first time that everyone else saw it.
I think we just need to be very clear about this.
You're saying that people who are credible within the field, were they duped into doing interviews?
Did they voluntarily give interviews knowing this was a work of fiction?
How did that work?
I think that they were brought in to just talk about UFOs in general.
And so they spoke about that and spoke about the abduction experience.
And then that was intercut.
So it looked like they were referencing that.
And I do remember Stanton being on Coast to Coast talking to George Nuri about it.
And people were calling in saying, hey, did you see this thing?
And, you know, Stanton does so many interviews on so many shows.
You can't keep track of that.
So he was like, what are you talking about?
And they told him.
And there was talk of, you know, what does this mean?
And when I heard that, it broke my heart.
And I actually tried to reach out to Stanton then.
And so it was something that had been kind of perverted into this thing.
And that's where I checked out completely and was like, all right, I'm done.
So after that, I kind of went on with my life.
And then a year and a half later, Blair Witch came out.
And word got back to me that the head of the network, UPN, who had basically engineered us getting the boot, said, wow, maybe these guys were onto something.
Well, the foreign version, which played on Sky Network and it was the two-hour version, that was playing nonstop for many years.
In fact, Joe Cornish, who did Attack the Block and several other films, it was one of his favorite films.
There were a few other up-and-coming filmmakers who had seen it when they were younger, who loved it and inspired them.
So that goes into the plus box.
But I thought, well, you know, that's it.
I'm never going to work in that medium again.
This is just too volatile.
So again, I continued working in different genres.
And crucially, Dean, were people still believing that the remade version was describing something real?
Exactly.
In fact, UPN did the first ever online poll of a TV show before anyone else had ever done it.
And they asked, do you believe it's real or not?
And somewhere I have a printout of this, 49% of the people who watched it believe it was real.
Now, this is after it said Alien 1 played by so-and-so, Alien 2 played by Tommy, played by so-and-so.
So it was all there.
So getting back to your point of how the community, the UFO community, sometimes will grab onto something and dig in their roots.
And I always say something, Alejandro Rojas is a good friend of mine.
I always say to him, I go, yeah, it's like we have to, if we go down a rabbit hole, we have to leave breadcrumbs so we can leave at any time.
You know, you don't want to go fully down there.
And so I didn't realize how in a way it's, I don't want to say precious, but it's a serious, well, it's a serious, it's not a hobby.
It's something more than that.
It's a serious, almost lifestyle where when you work in that arena, you have to be careful because there are so many charlatans and carpetbaggers that are selling stuff.
The last thing I want to do is contribute to that.
Yeah, but of course the answer to all of this, both for the first movie and the second one, and you tell me you did some of this, is for you to come out and very clearly say, whatever you may have been told or whatever you may have seen or believed, this is a work of fiction.
Yes.
And in fact, I finally started going online to all the websites where people were saying that this was a work of fiction, a work of nonfiction, and addressing that.
And why I addressed it because people started reaching out to me and saying, hey, have you heard this conspiracy?
Have you heard that?
And all of them were, there were a couple conspiracies.
One was that I was taking credit for films that I had nothing to do with.
The second one was that the first one, which was called UFO Abduction, was real.
And the second one was engineered by the government who hired me to do the remake to throw people off of the original one.
Well, I mean, look, we can't honestly say with our hands on our hearts that such things never happen, do they?
So the conspiracy theory, I'm sorry, I'm laughing here and I shouldn't be.
The conspiracy theory was that the first movie was actually the real deal, which you're saying, no, it was fiction, but it was just ahead of its time.
And the second one was officially inspired in order to debunk the first one.
Correct.
Correct.
And then I was part of some disinformation campaign.
You do sound a lot like an innocent victim here.
But you're not entirely, are you?
Because you're the man behind this.
You're in control.
Yeah, I'm in control up to the point that once distribution happens, people are free to cut off and edit anything they want and grab clips and throw them online.
In fact, YouTube Infringement Department and I have a really great relationship because every month I go and I shut down plenty of sites that are still sending, you know, promoting my stuff as being real.
So I take this very serious and I feel like because I created this, this is my Frankenstein.
I have to kind of, in a way, clean up after it.
Well, you know, apart from being an embarrassment and something that's caused you a deal of hassle by the sounds of it in your life, actually, in some ways, and I should really have made this connection earlier when you said War of the Worlds and, you know, the Orson Welles connection here.
I mean, in a way, in the modern media, you were an Orson Welles for this generation.
Yes.
Yeah.
Which, you know, I have a lot of filmmaker friends of mine who say, you know, and these are people who have had films, you know, in theaters and one of them had won an Oscar.
And I pine over their careers and they pine over mine in the fact that they say, you created a new narrative of filmmaking that hasn't been done since the advent of editing.
And so while that's great and I think overinflated, I still feel like to have a hand in doing that and telling stories in a new way, I'm very proud of that.
What I'm not proud of is that I took something that I loved, which was the UFO phenomenon, and worked it into something that was meant to be this artistic expression.
And that it got, you know, twisted like everything good seems to, you know.
So what did this do for your career then, Dean?
Well, what it did was I was able to get a lot of meetings out of it and have other projects get developments, development deals, and kind of continue going.
There are filmmakers out there who I'm in the process of hopefully working with that were inspired by the film way back in the day.
So it's done well in that regard.
It's also kind of, you know, when you make a film, each time you go out there, hopefully you learn from what you did.
When I saw Blair Witch, I'm like, oh, that's great.
I wish I had done this.
Or I wish I had submitted it to Sundance.
I never would have thought of doing that.
And that's just to explain to people on this side of the Atlantic, who I'm sure most of us will know, but the Sundance Festival is a big film festival there.
It's almost a little bit like Cannes over here.
You know, it's a way to get noticed.
Exactly.
Robert Redford's film festival.
And so, you know, again, to be a part of that was great, was wonderful.
And so I've kind of had this love-hate relationship with it in the sense that, you know, when I go on, you know, certain websites and I'm telling them, hey, here's the real story.
Here are pictures.
And I'm debunking myself, which I think is the first time I've heard of someone doing that.
I did this for a while and I saw some people still believed it.
And I didn't want to kind of, you know, if that's where they want to go and they want to hold on to that belief system, you know, who am I?
All I can do is present the evidence.
It's up to them what they do with it.
Look, I can't see you.
We're not doing this in video.
And I think in many ways the human voice is more expressive anyway.
I'd rather do stuff in sound.
Part of me feels like you've enjoyed this.
Enjoyed it.
Well, you've enjoyed being at the center of the arc of a storm here about your work.
What you're hearing is kind of a detached wonderment.
When everyone was saying, you created the first Blair Witch, you did this, you did that.
I looked at it.
In fact, when I did the remake, the only way that I did the remake was this person that I worked with, who was the head writer on this crime show.
He kept begging me to see the movie.
I refused to show it to him because I said, look, it's a gimmick.
It's rough.
It's handheld.
I don't, you know, it's not polished.
Finally, I showed it to him and he said, this is great.
I can get a TV movie deal from this.
And I thought he was kidding.
And so I've never been able to really fully appreciate the power of this.
Even now, I feel like I'm in an alternate universe where I have this kind of successful bit of a following that I still don't fully appreciate.
So are you telling me, Dean, that there are people who still won't buy, that you went into this with the intention to make fiction and you've simply been misinterpreted?
Sometimes your work has been pirated or hijacked and it's turned out that some people actually believe that there's more to this than meets the eye.
And what You've been trying to tell them for all of these years, is it is what it appears to be.
To give you an example, how this works, and I don't know if you've had any conspiracies on you, but once a conspiracy, once you're attached to a conspiracy, that conspiracy blossoms out into other flowers.
One of the flowers that I heard recently was that because there was a mayor Aliotto in San Francisco, that I must be his son.
Well, first of all, he would be my grandfather.
Second of all, we're not really related at all.
I've never met the man.
He was the rich generation.
I was the, or the rich Aliotos.
We were the poor Aliottos.
Okay.
I mean, that's almost like people saying, you know, my name is Howard Hughes, and actually I'm some kind of recreation of the, God, here I am starting one, you know, some kind of recreation of the eccentric American multi-billionaire, who in fact I have a lot of respect for because of what he achieved.
But there is no connection other than my name, which I was christened with, you know, between the two of us.
I'm starting that conspiracy right now online as we talk.
So I think there are things to be learned here, and that's one of the reasons why I think this is turning into an important conversation, really, because you may not know this, but there was a great movie that I still love, and I've watched it many times.
Catch Me If You Can.
You know the Leo DiCaprio movie?
I love it.
About the paper hanger, the counterfeiter, and General Fake, who was, what was that guy's name?
Why have I forgotten his name?
Frank Abignale.
Yeah, Frank Abignale was his name.
Now, it was a remarkable movie, and this guy, we kind of came to love him in the end because he perpetrated this.
But in the end, he went to work for the good guys.
So the point that I'm making here is that you could actually have vital information for the UFO community on how to spot stuff that is not genuine.
It is so funny that you say this, Howard, because that's kind of actually what I do.
I have, well, everything kind of changed within the last six months.
Rojas, Alejandro Rojas invited me to come and, for the 25th anniversary of my film, show it at the International UFO Congress.
And so I digitally remastered the film.
I had to go back to my original tapes because my edited master had burnt down in the warehouse.
And so I went back, redid it, and cleaned it up, and then also put in the behind the scenes footage to kind of cement that, you know, here it is.
Here's the whole story all encompassing.
And so Alejandro said, well, I don't want you just to show it.
I want you to give a lecture.
Now, I've never given a lecture before.
I've spoken at plenty film festivals after and done Q ⁇ As, but I've never literally prepared and spoken for 75 minutes.
So I had to put together a presentation walking people through what my journey had been.
And part of that journey was me saying, and here's what I've been doing, not to make atonement, but to kind of get people grounded with this.
It's okay to believe in this and want to see the footage.
And it's okay to even want to recreate it because that's what artists do.
They recreate things that they enjoy or that they're interested in, and then it branches from there.
So I decided that I would do that, but I told him, I said, look, I'm really nervous because I don't know how I'm going to be received because there's still plenty of conspiracies out there and I'm only able to knock down so many.
And he says, I think you need to have more faith in the UFO community.
And so I said, all right, I'm putting my faith in you.
So I put together this presentation with behind the scenes clips and everything.
I went out there and I said, the only way that I'm going to do this is if I bring levity to this, because while I take it really serious, I don't want people to feel like they were fooled and that they should feel bad about that.
And so he said, fine, do whatever you want to do.
So I went out there and laid it all out.
And as I was showing clips and showing how things happened, the audiences were laughing.
They enjoyed it.
They got the spirit of it.
And it was taken under the guise of here was this strange journey that this guy was through when he happened to be kind of the force gump of this strange new narrative.
And it was kind of afterward, there were a lot of people who came up to me and they said, it was so cool that the first found footage film was a UFO film.
And they started to kind of take pride in that.
And so after I did that, I was on another panel.
And on that panel, I was with Bryce Zabel and Bill Burns.
And we had a fun time.
It was really great.
And so I and Alejandra moderated it.
And Alejandro said, now, a lot of you people heard Dean's lecture and you saw the film after.
How many of you people still believe that the movie is real?
Dead silence.
And then from the back of the room, there's like 800 people, three people raised their hands.
Now, these are people that were willing to raise their hands.
Still, after I showed them the kids and the alien costumes and the behind the scenes, everything else.
You know, if I was in the audience, I might have raised my hand too, just to have a joke with you.
Well, I said, when we're done with the panel, come up to me and I'm going to give you free copies of my films.
No one collected it.
You might have been the first to collect it.
Okay, so they actually ended up appreciating you for this.
But we come back to this point of Frank Abignale.
You know, talk to me technically then about how to spot footage that has been touted as being genuine and actually isn't.
How do you do that?
I mean, look, the alien autopsy stuff, as soon as I saw it, I thought that's probably a fake.
But there was about 5 or 10% of my head that was saying, God, if that's real, that's a game changer.
But 90% of it said, that's a fake.
So how do you spot a fake?
All right.
So the first thing you have to do is you have to see if the person who is showing it to you and presenting it, if they're willing to go on camera and if they're willing to use their real name.
I'm Dean Alieto.
I'm on camera while I'm on Skype.
That is very telling because a lot of this footage that's interjected out there, injected out there, is done anonymously.
That's your first tip that it's BS.
Of course, it could be.
I mean, let's be fair, you know, because that's what we Brits are supposed to be.
Somebody could be so scared that they wouldn't want to put their I would have to think twice or thrice about whether I would put my name to it for fear of getting a knock on my door.
All right.
So that's the other myth.
If someone's got footage that they shot and they didn't get it in unscrupulous ways, it's just footage that they happen to capture.
Usually these people, they're excited about it.
They go, I want to share this with you and let's open up to a debate.
In fact, I had my own experience where this is where two weeks after I got invited to the festival or to the convention, my girlfriend Allie and I were walking the reservoir and we looked up and saw something in the sky moving around and it looked like it was a drone and I videotaped it and there was no sound to it and I went, well, this looks like, you know, this could be something.
I bet someone would, you know, think that this is real.
And I brought it with me to the UFO convention and I showed it to a group of people on a podcast.
And who was on that podcast?
But Dr. Stanton Friedman.
So I got a chance to not only show him and say, look, here's something that, you know, that is, that I videotape.
And they all looked at it.
And I swear to God, we had Nick Pope, we had Travis Walton on that panel.
We had Yvonne Smith.
And half the people thought this could be real.
Now, I couldn't get close enough to this thing.
So it's just this shiny thing that's zigzagging.
So I couldn't give them, well, it's birds, which it could be.
It could be a drone.
I think it's terrestrial more than anything else.
But it was far enough that it looked like it could be something.
And so half of them said, it looks like it could be bona fide, you know, in experience.
And then the other half were like, no, it's this or that.
And so that to me was kind of like a test of here is how things get misconstrued.
So it was a way to say, this is how easy this thing happens and how we have to gird ourselves and protect ourselves from this.
But you didn't know whether that thing you videoed on that night with your girlfriend, you didn't know what that was.
You still don't, do you?
No, but I tend to believe that it is a drone because there's a lot of filmmakers in the area that I live and they're up there shooting.
So it was just moving in a weird way.
But I'm very practical as much as I want to see a UFO and have experiences and stuff.
Until I see it clearly, I'm going to go with Akma's Razor theory.
The most practical theory is probably what it is.
And I sure aspect didn't want to create a whole new conspiracy.
So anonymous, I don't buy that.
I feel like people, if you have something that's special, you're going to put it out there because you're going to want to open up discussion to this.
The second thing is I look at the footage.
And if we're talking UFOs and stuff, because I've done special effect sci-fi movies, I can tell that the frame rate that you have on your camera is going to be different than the frame rate of that special effect that's moving.
I don't know if you remember seeing that footage.
I think it was in Israel and it was at night and they had two different angles and it was like this dome and it hovered for a little bit, then it shot up.
Yeah, I think it was maybe in Israel, maybe it was in Turkey or somewhere like that.
I saw that.
Yeah.
Okay.
So I looked at that and right away I discounted it because the movement of it didn't have proper motion blur to it.
It moved at a different frame rate and it felt I could tell that it was composited on that.
So there's a whole new career for you then here.
And I'm sorry to interrupt you, but there is a whole new career because, look, there are plenty of videos out there that keep popping up on my phone.
And I watch them just, you know, for a laugh sometimes.
Some of them are mysterious.
Most of them are certainly not.
But there's one that you might have seen that a lot of people seem to believe that is of a UFO skimming, an apparent UFO, skimming across some trees.
The only problem is there is an enormous anomaly with the shadow effect from this thing.
There's something wrong with it.
And you can see that this is not what it's cracked up to be, as we say here in the UK.
I think you have a whole new career there doing exactly what you've just been talking about.
Well, I would donate my time for this.
So I wouldn't full-on do that because I'm, you know, my first love is to get it out there.
I know that like Bruce McAbee, who is hardcore, he really analyzes, you know, material and does that.
And my own friend Jason Gleaves over here in the UK is making a reputation for himself by analyzing people's video and photographs.
So it is, it's definitely, it's a new science that is developing out there.
Yeah, well, we do need it.
What about the possible conspiracy theory that there might be, and there probably is, that you've actually been put out there to muddy the waters and make a laughing stock out of the UFO community, to put so much doubt in there that actually there might be very real phenomena, but you're going to dissuade a lot of ordinary people from believing it because of your two productions.
This is, okay, let me put it in perspective here.
You remember, heard of the legendary magician Howard, not Howard, Harry Houdini.
Oh, yes.
Another HH.
So Harry Houdini made a living at creating illusions and fooling people into believing that he had superpowers.
So he did this.
And then at some point in his career, when his mother passed away, who he was very, very close with, he started reaching out to mediums.
And he did some of this through Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was born on my same day, May 22nd.
And Sir Arthur Conan Doyle really believed in.
He was part of the theologians and everything else.
And Houdini is like, all right, well, let's do this.
And he goes to these mediums who would do all these crazy things, like have curtains move, have sound of a recording, the table would shake.
Now, because Harry Houdini is a magician and an illusionist, he caught all these things.
And so he spent the latter half of his career, the twilight years of it, debunking it.
And so he was someone that came out against it.
And so Harry Houdini, because when I was a kid, I was a magician as well.
And so that was something that I really admired that he had done.
And so I find it ironic that here I am having to do the same thing.
And I don't think that Harry Houdini is making atonement for the illusions and the entertainment that he created, just like I don't need to do atonement for the cinema that I created.
Well, you didn't go out there intending to do that, did you?
That wasn't your intention.
You tell me.
I did not.
Absolutely did not, 100%.
All of my versions had credits where it said the aliens, this and that, et cetera.
And so, and the UPN still retained that, even after everything.
And so all I can do is, you know, show them behind the scenes pictures and everything else.
And that's it.
And so the fact is you've got other people and, you know, there's that footage of the alien in the window.
When I saw that, it's like, oh, I had that in my movie, in my original.
And here I am telling you that it's fake.
And here this guy is, I won't say his name, but he's purporting to say this is real.
I captured it, blah, blah, blah.
So my feeling is, I'm sorry, shame on you.
I'm going to ouch you.
But of course, there is that gray area in between.
You know, he may truly believe that it is the real deal.
And, you know, it's just a confluence of circumstances.
Look, in your career to date, have you ever come across any footage of purported UFOs that there's a 90% chance, an 80% chance of them being the real deal?
I'm thinking here about the video that was released last Christmas.
The fighter pilots, the military jet pilots, made the New York Times, all the rest of it, you'll be aware of that.
What about the Chicago airport case?
Was that 1996 where something was hovering over the airport and people videoed it and photographed it and everything?
So in your mind, and in the cases that you've known, which are the ones, are there any ones that stand out to you as being genuine?
Four of them.
Four of them.
In order.
We've got the, in order of how they were released, the O'Hara airport.
Okay, that's Chicago, right?
Yeah.
Chicago.
And then we have Mexico, where we have the pilots who saw the 11 objects that were tracking, going behind the clouds, the flur footage of that.
That to me seems pretty credible.
They're not moving in anything other than this like really tight formation, but the shapes of them, they're balls of light.
And they're at a certain level where you've got the clouds and everything else where you, and they're going behind the clouds, that you know that the perspective of this is something that is telling because you see the scope of it, you see the movement of it, the trajectory of it.
That to me was, I tripped it on that for a long time.
That was great.
Then I saw the footage, like everyone else did, in December, of the gimbal, what they call the gimbal footage.
That blew me away.
That to me was the game changer.
The fact that that came out through the New York Times, Leslie Keene reported, as well as a Pulitzer Prize winning, I believe, reporter who came on board.
It was presented in the proper way.
It wasn't done through something that was injected into the online community.
It was presented as here is this thing.
The fact that you can hear the pilot communicating with a traffic controller.
And you can hear genuine astonishment in the sounds.
Genuine astonishment.
I didn't know these guys would say, dude, check that out.
Oh, man, dude, that cracked me up.
If you're going to fake this, it's going to be, oh, we have a special there's something.
None of that.
It was just this complete glee, this, like you said, astonishment.
And then I looked at the footage and it's like, okay, that's, I'm hearing the audio and I'm experiencing the presentation.
Let's look at that.
And then I started going through online and looking for all of the skeptics and what they were saying about it.
And what they were saying was, that's a jet.
If you take it like an F-16 or F-18 and you're looking at it from behind, you've got the wings on the left and right-hand side.
So that could look like if it was a saucer.
That's kind of part of the saucer aspect.
And then the middle of it kind of goes up where it's the body.
And so again, from behind, it looks like it is that.
And I'm like, that's a really good point.
And I go back to watching the footage.
Now I'm applying that onto this.
And I'm looking at it and I'm going, oh, that doesn't work because of two reasons.
One is it would have to be flying sideways because it's flying parallel with the pilot.
I don't think F-18, F-16, whatever, I don't think they fly sideways.
Then it does the gimbal move, which is it rotates.
And they said, yeah, well, it's, you know, it's doing its rotation like a jet would do that.
And I said, okay, I don't know how many times I've seen Top Gun.
I'm embarrassed to say.
So I'm willing to admit that here on air.
When a jet rotates like that and turns upside down or does a 360, it kind of goes up and does a little bit of a loop.
That's just the physics of it.
It doesn't stay in its place and turn.
This did that.
When that happened, it was the mic drop.
So when I was at the podcast talking with Stanton and everyone, I said, because Stanton and a few of the other people were upset that it came, the story came really hard for about three weeks, I'm going to say.
If you pay attention to this and you're looking for it, maybe you saw that it lasted a month and then it went away.
And their feeling was that the media didn't hit it hard enough.
This wasn't presented in a big enough way.
And I went the other way with it.
I said, this is awesome.
CNN, Fox, everyone, BBC, everyone is showing this.
They're presenting it without queuing the X-Files pokey music in the background.
That was a huge win for us.
And the second thing is that it came and went because people already know that this is most likely happening.
The polls are that 83% of the population believes that we are being visited by extraterrestrials.
83%, 3% believe that they've actually seen UFOs before.
We have 7 billion people on the planet.
I'm not too good with math, but that's a lot of people who have had their own experiences.
So it was kind of like, oh, look, there it is.
The government had a program.
Okay, I'm going to go back to work now.
There weren't people jumping out of buildings.
There weren't people freaking out.
There was more freaking out when the battle over LA in 1942, I believe, occurred, where you had nine searchlights pointing up at a ship and they were all firing artillery out there.
This was nothing like that.
This was kind of like, yeah, duh.
So you're basically saying what a lot of us believe, that if there is a truth out there, we're ready for it.
Yes.
Okay, you said there were four cases.
You've given me three.
What's the fourth?
Okay, the fourth is not UFO footage related.
It is Zimbabwe.
This is the school.
Yes.
Okay, just for people who haven't heard my recent podcasts, and no reason why you should, but I always recommend them.
This is a schoolyard where supposedly, I think it was back in the 1970s, a bunch of kids playing in the schoolyard, a rural area of Zimbabwe, Southern Africa, and something lands with a couple of silver creatures, I think.
Yes, it was 1994 in Zimbabwe.
1994, wasn't it?
Of course it was.
Yeah, yeah.
There were 62 students and this ship came down.
This creature got up and walked on the top of it, and another one walked over to them.
62 kids that were black, white, all different mixes were Christian, Muslims.
The teachers were all sequestered inside having a teacher conference meeting.
So the kids were all out there.
There was this barrier, which really wasn't a barrier.
It wasn't a fence.
It was they had laid these logs down.
And the kids were disciplined enough that they knew that you just don't walk over this log, that that's where the school grounds end.
This creature came up, and they said, by the way, that when it came up, it was kind of almost floating, like it was almost imitating how we walk.
It came up and it met him, and people were standing as close as three feet away from.
And as we revealed with one of the experiences of that, who now lives in America, the fact of the matter is that the world's media carried this story.
The BBC did.
American media, Zimbabwe television, Zim TV, they covered it.
SABC in South Africa covered it.
It was taken very, very seriously.
So I can understand why that's at your number four.
So here we are at the back end of our conversation then, Dean.
In terms of the pantheon, the history of ufology and all the rest of it, where are you?
What's your position in all of this?
Where do we leave you in history?
Well, it's funny.
I've been doing a lot of self-reflection after doing this UFO convention.
I've realized a few things looking back on my career as I'm kind of bookending it here in a way.
And I realized that a third of the projects that I've created have been UFO alien sci-fi based.
And so I've actually started a new venture called Alien Content.
You can go to aliencontent.com and see what I'm all about.
And I'm now going to be doing documentaries.
I am going to be looking at this in a much serious tone in the sense of is I'm going to take what I've been kind of doing as a hobbyist, you know, debunking stuff, and I'm going to tackle this phenomenon in the most serious way by bringing in experts, not just, you know, the people that are in the UFO community or UFO researchers, but I want to bring in people like Ray Kurzweil, who, you know, created Coin Singularity, people who are coming at it from, you know, paleontologists, linguists.
I want to look at this in a way that this is a legit phenomenon.
Well, I think what you want to do, but it's not for me to advise you, but I recently had, for the second time, Travis Walton on my show.
And I always find Travis Walton both very personable and very credible in what he says.
I think, although Travis has his own movie and productions, but you could almost start with a reanalysis of that.
You're so funny.
You're dead on.
I'm doing that.
Travis and I hit it off.
You're getting ahead of me.
You got all my secrets.
Travis and I hit it off at the UFO convention.
He's a great guy.
He would sit there playing guitars and stuff.
He's so much fun.
He's going to be part of this documentary.
I haven't officially locked start locking people.
Nick Pope is someone else that I'm going to be pulling in.
He and I hung out.
Great guy.
In fact, he and I are going to be at the Alien Con, which is a new convention here in Pasadena.
And so, yeah, the Travis Walton story goes up there along with the Zimbabwe story.
I mean, it's amazing, especially when you meet Travis as you've spoken with him on your show.
Highly credible, down to earth.
And when you talk to him, and I've never met him face to face, so you're one up on me, but when you talk to him, the question that comes to you is, why would somebody, if he was faking it, if it was all a hoax, why would somebody spend 43 years of their life and have to go through all that you have to go through perpetuating that?
Well, you know, I'm sure there are people who will email me who will have the answer to that one way or the other.
But, you know, I find that one thing very much in his favor.
But the fact is he comes across not as somebody who's trying to push or sell something.
He's somebody who's just trying to tell a story of something that happened.
And in my head, I'm 70% sure that something happened, maybe 65%, but it's pretty high there.
So I think that that would be good for you.
And I think you are, in the light of the story that you just told me, I think you are uniquely positioned to do these documentaries.
What I can bring to this again is I can bring a certain level of expertise, a certain level of quality that I can take from the feature films that I've done and all of the discovery historical documentaries that I've done and apply it to doing documentaries in this field.
And so there's a few of us that really want to bring our game up there and bring the game up of documentaries in this genre.
Jeremy Corbella is one, James Fox, who's working on something really special.
Can't wait to see what that is.
And I'm hoping to be contributing to that as well and to have it be something that doesn't feel like you're watching a local cable, you know, documentary.
Listen, if you can put James Fox in contact with me, we very nearly did something a couple of years ago, but I lost contact with him.
I'd be very keen to speak with him.
And look, I think the future's pretty good for you by the sounds of it.
I can't wait to see whatever it is you produce.
One last question for you, and we've got to wrap this up now, Dean.
Have you ever been visited by or had experience of so-called men in black?
You know, that's interesting because that's, again, you're tapping into the areas that I want to explore.
I have never been.
In fact, I kind of ascribe to the idea that maybe these men in black are actually a bunch of people who are posing as men in black and who are enjoying doing that.
Well, I don't know about that because I have my own real life encounter that my listeners know here, but I won't go into that one.
Listeners will know.
Maybe I haven't even started getting my feet wet.
So you'd be the first person I would interview and you would be able to talk to it more than because I'm, you know, going from analyzing UFO footage to men in black is a big leap.
So I'm slowly integrating into that.
So I have not, though.
My thanks to our mutual friend Anthony Davis in Los Angeles for doing this because I didn't know what to expect.
So he's the guy who was the intermediary for the two of us in this.
And, you know, it's been, I didn't know where this conversation was going to go.
And I was worried about it at the beginning, but I think it made a lot of sense.
And I can only wish you well in your work, Dean.
You know, there will be people who say that this guy is just jumping on the bandwagon here and he's a great self-publicist.
I think you're going to get a certain amount of that, I'm afraid.
Well, to that, I say just look at the work, look at the message of what I'm doing, and especially the stuff that I'm going to be creating going forward.
It's kind of this mutual thing where there's the audience and then there's the filmmakers.
And so at the end of the day, I want to tell stories.
I want to tell the best stories, but I also want to legitimize something that to me should be as naturally and as accepted as the Northern Lights.
So I'm on the same team, and that'll show through the next projects that I'm doing.
So be patient.
Hang with me.
There's some fun stuff coming.
Okay, and we'll talk when it comes then.
Your website is?
It is ufoabductionmovie.com.
They can go there and then they can also go to deanaliotto.com and then they can get a sampling of the convention as well and everything that has occurred so far.
All right.
My journey.
Thank you for coming on and good luck.
Thank you.
Dean Alioto, and I shall put a link to him and his work on my website, theunexplained.tv.
Thank you very much for bearing with my bad throat on this edition.
Hopefully it will improve for the next time around.
But it sort of robbed me of a bit of range in the voice.
I hate that.
I hate things that hold me back.
Drives me mad.
People say to me, Howard, you've just got to be patient.
Patience is a virtue that, sadly, I've been somewhat lacking in my life.
But, you know, as I get older, I mellow somewhat.
Thank you very much.
More great guests in the pipeline here at The Unexplained.
If you want to contact me, go to the website theunexplained.tv.
And until next, we meet.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained.
I am in London.
And please, stay safe, stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thanks very much.
Take care.
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