Uh-oh…Here comes the little grey men! With their sticky faces and lasers. So let’s demonstrate our Second Amendment by shooting them straight in the mug to show them who’s the good guys here. Can’t get more Americana than that, besides having a collective, chronic and crippling fear of aliens/lizard people (and Bigfoot). God bless America.
The McPherson Tape is a penny-budget amateur found footage film that starts during a birthday party with the Van Heese family at an isolated farmhouse in Connecticut. The year is 1983 and Michael has just bought a shiny new VHS camera to document the five-year-old Michelle blowing out the candles. Then suddenly the electricity goes out…
Michael and his brothers head out in the pitch black darkness to get a clue on what happened, and what they see not so far from the house is a UFO and three tiny aliens from a certain Steven Spielberg film. It’s, of course, all blurry, grainy and unfocused since there was no budget to build a decent-looking spaceship. As the pussy pants they are, they run back to the house in full panic mode, grab the shotgun and shoot one of the poor aliens. Thoughts and prayers.
Now we just wait for the remaining aliens to take revenge on these morons. Because it’s hard to give a single frick about the family. The grandmother seems more irritated by being in the film, while the youngest of the cast, Michelle, looks more bored and wants to play cards rather than pretend to be scared. There’s a lot of yelling, arguing and such to amp up the tension as they’re isolated in the house while Michael, the cameraman, moans constantly like as if he hasn’t jerked-off since last week: Ahhh – Ahh – Ahhh – Ahh – Ahhhh – Ahhh – Ahhh – Ahhh …
The McPherson Tape is written and directed by the young and upcoming filmmaker Dean Alioto, who made the film during one night after a week of rehearsals. A friend of his funded the budget of $6,500 and the film got a distribution deal. And here’s the starting point with the wild circumstances around it, all from the funny conspiracy theories and how people actually believed that this was legit proof that aliens walk among us. Because listen to this; after the distribution deal, the warehouse burned down with all the copies of the film and Dean Alioto bitterly wrote the film off as a big loss. Life went on as he continued to work in the television industry without realizing that the distributor had managed to send out dozens of copies before the fire. One of these VHS cassettes ended up in the hands of a prankster who re-edited the opening and closing text. He/she then spread pirated copies to the UFO community where the audience around the US burst into full hysteria mode as they believed that this mysterious home-made film was real. Rumors also spread that the authorities were trying to seize video copies, which, yeah, of course. The most profiled people who ate this up were the UFO expert Tom Dongo and the retired Lt. Colonel for the U.S. Army stated that I am not convinced that this thing is a hoax. Dean Aliato eventually got his lost film under the radar, as it lived a life of its own, which he apparently had forgotten about, and made a public statement that the film was just a fake amateur reel. But too late as the floodgates are fully open.
The original title for the film was actually U.F.O. Abduction, but got called The McPherson Tape during its resurrection at the UFO conventions in the 1990s, despite there’s no one in the film with that name. Huh…
Dean Aliato didn’t seem to have higher ambitions than making a silly film packed in a new unique format that we haven’t seen before, and all credits goes to him for being as ahead of his time with the found footage genre as he was. By all means. This would maybe be seen as the first Blair Witch if it got the theatrical release. And somehow it did, but only very limited at UFO conventions where the popcorn was replaced with mushrooms. But the product itself is way too sloppy and naive to be taken seriously, even back in 1989. I’d probably be more impressed if this was made in the 1950s or in the wake of Orson Welle’s radio drama The War of the Worlds. I couldn’t avoid laughing when we saw the glimpses of the aliens more closely, here played by three eight-year-olds in the most stereotypical and generic looking costumes possible. So it has its amusing entertainment value during its short runtime of 70 minutes, but mostly for the wrong reasons. The controversies behind it make it even funnier with the fact that there are UFO “experts“ even to this day in the year of 2025 who is convinced that this is 100% authentic. Because believing in aliens in the USA isn’t just a matter of believing, it’s a full-blown religion.
Dean Alioto remade the film in 1998 for the TV channel UPN, titled Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County. It never got a physical release but can be watched on YouTube. Despite a higher budget and more professional actors, the film is even worse than the original and gives an impression that it was made just to mock the gullible minds who still refused to believe that The McPherson Tape was not real. And guess what: several UFO “experts“ actually did. Yes – again. Fool me once, fool me twice. I’d bet that the same audience got some sleepless nights after Oren Peli’s hidden space turkey Area 51 (2015) and would have no problem believing that ALF (the ’80s sitcom) was abruptly canceled with the most brutal cliffhanger because the US Government found out that he was played by an actual real alien.
Writer and director: Dean Alioto
Original title: U.F.O. Abduction
Country & year: USA, 1989
Actors: Tommy Giavocchini, Patrick Kelley, Shirly McCalla, Stacey Shulman, Christine Staples, Laura Tomas, Dean Alioto, Kay Parten, Ginny Klekker, Rose Schneider
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0169005/
