Chris Norton is a filmmaker who wants to discover the truth about the alien abduction phenomenon. It is a personal quest, as his recently deceased father always believed Chris’ mother was abducted by a UFO on his seventh birthday. Chris has always remained sceptical about his dad’s viewpoint and seeks to get to the bottom of the mystery by making a documentary about the subject with his mate Brent.
His quest begins at an International UFO Congress being held at Roswell, New Mexico (the site of the famous/infamous flying saucer crash in 1947). Here he meets the attendees and is told about their experiences. In particular, he interviews on-camera Adam Williams who tells of seeing a white light, being paralysed and losing his memory back in 2009. He says it was like a nightmare, to which Chris asks if it was only a nightmare and nothing more. In response Adam gets aggressive and tells them to get lost (in a less-polite manner). Also at the conference is Emily Reed, whom Chris discovers has been abducted every seven years since her seventh birthday. In the search for physical evidence for these experiences, Chris and Brent are shown a ‘memory stealing’ device that was attached to the back of Emily’s neck during one of her abduction episodes.
To add some authenticity, the film includes a few real ufologists in the background and includes a short statement by abductee Travis Walton about his experience (which was given the full Hollywood treatment in the 1993 film Fire in the Sky). There are a few twists and turns in Beyond the Sky, and reference is made to the CIA-sponsored MKULTRA mind control experiments of the 1950s and 1960s. It is questioned whether alien abductions are just the product of set design and hallucinogenic drugs – well, maybe…Earlier in the story, Emily takes them to a native indian shaman who conducts an unsuccessful ceremony to ward off the attention of the aliens. Could the aliens be the stuff of legends or mind control? The closing scenes give us some possible answers… Chris, and the film itself, never seriously questions the reality of the abduction phenomenon, so it will please believers who think that we are being visited by something beyond our nightmares.
Not Earth-shattering, but an efficient and well-made low budget film about an intriguing topic.
BEYOND THE SKY / CERT: UNRATED / DIRECTOR: FULVIO SESTITIO / SCREENPLAY: MARC PORTERFIELD, ROB WARREN THOMAS / STARRING: RYAN CARNES, JORDAN HINSON, CLAUDE DUHAMEL / RELEASE DATE: 29TH APRIL
