Tribeca Film Festival 2024: THEY’RE HERE Looks At UFO Believers

Like that poster that hangs in the office of one of the characters on The X-Files TV series says, I want to believe that there is intelligent life out there. Carl Sagan had pointed out that statistically, there should be intelligent alien life on a number of worlds within just our own average, cosmically insignificant galaxy. Have they actually visited us, though? Of that, I am not so certain. My rational side suggests that what we know about the potential distances involved and the power and time requirements to traverse those distances would preclude any potential in-person contact with an alien race. Then again, though, such things as airplanes, satellites, cell phones and the internet would be unimaginable to someone who lived just a few centuries ago. As physicist J. B. S. Haldane once opined, “The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it’s stranger than we can imagine.”

Which brings us to the documentary They’re Here, a look at a number of people who claimed that they have either seen a UFO or had been abducted aboard one. The group is all located across Upstate New York, an apparent hotbed of UFO activity. There is Cookie Stringfellow, a grandmotherly type who claimed to have been abducted fourteen times before she politely asked them to stop. She went on to found the Rochester UFO Meet-Up Group. It is through that group that she became friends with Steve, who has trouble remembering his abduction experiences, which he blames on a childhood head injury. There’s Dave, who admits that yes he was high on mushrooms and pot at the time he saw something, though he still managed to capture video with his phone of… something. Aspiring standup comic Twon and his platonic roommate Victoria saw something while on their apartment building’s roof and he struggles to find a way to talk about the experience on stage.

They’re Here walks a tightrope in how it presents its subjects. This collection of people from various walks of Upstate New York life all fervently believe that whatever it is they experienced, it was not of this Earth. Claridge and Velez never hold up any of their subjects to ridicule, nor do they seem to completely buy into the idea that these people have indeed had some sort of close encounter. In fact, the film is not as interested in interrogating their stories so much as it is in examining how these people try to integrate these experiences into their lives. Dave is searching for meaning and even when an analysis of chis phone video comes back saying that it is “most likely a Mylar balloon” he hangs onto the hope that “‘most likely’ is not definitive…” Steve has crafted a board game out of his experience. At a gathering of UFO-philes, we see one woman who has taken her own experiences and used them as inspiration for her song writing. In this way, the film is more about faith and incorporating an extraordinary event into one’s life than it is about flying saucers and black-eyed, grey-skinned aliens.

The documentary does hit a brick wall towards the end. Not every one of the subjects’ stories has a neat ending point. But it feels as if Claridge and Velez wants to give everyone some amount of resolution. While we don’t know what the future may hold for roommates Twon and Victoria – though the glances we see them give each other may suggest something more for them personally could be on the horizon – the directors decide to show Twon being transported aboard a craft that is hovering over their apartment building. Steve gets a similar fate, perhaps to allow him to finally see what he could never remember. It’s frustrating because it undercuts what had seemed to be the film’s central thesis that one can never be too sure about they had experienced.