Fourth kind what is real

How could they get any shut-eye with menacing aliens scooping them up from their beds, doing horrible things to them and then erasing their memories? Borrowing heavily from The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity — with Bulgaria standing in for Alaska — Osunsanmi makes the most of his manufactured reality, while the interviews with hypnotized abductees screaming like banshees and levitating off beds helps to up the creepy ante and introduces a couple genuine scares.

Milla Jovovich the Resident Evil series opens the film by explaining she will play Tyler. The "real" Tyler, portrayed by an uncredited hollow-eyed actress, gives a running interview to filmmaker Osunsanmi to further the story. Under hypnosis, Tyler's patients explain they all see a smiling owl hanging around the bed when they inexplicably wake in the night, a portent that something brutal and horrific is about to happen to them. There's much screaming and thrashing by her patients and Will Patton is especially over-the-top as the local sheriff who's had just about enough of this paranormal nonsense.

Using split and multi screens, we watch the "real" grainy, scratchy footage of the hypnotized patients in Exorcist -like contortions even the owl can swivel its head degrees , while the actors re-enact their versions of events. You can't drive there, that's for sure. The only ways in are by sea, air, dogsled or birth canal. Why the aliens chose this community of 9, to abduct so many people is a mystery.

Also why owls stare into bedroom windows. Nome has been the center of an alarming series of strange disappearances, we learn. So many, the FBI has sent agents there 10 times more than to the much bigger Anchorage. The film goes to great lengths to be realistic.

Other fact-based characters are her colleague Elias Koteas , the local sheriff Will Patton and a professor who interviews her Olatunde Osunsanmi. The real psychologist's name has been changed, but since she's right there on the screen, how much of a mystery can she be in Nome?

It was with crushing disappointment that my research discovered this is all made up out of whole cloth, including the real Abigail. The film wasn't even shot in Nome, but mostly in Bulgaria. And Dallas Massie, a retired state trooper who's the acting police chief in Nome, says he's heard nothing about aliens. I learn all this from the blog of an Anchorage Daily News reporter, Kyle Hopkins, who says about 20 people have indeed disappeared in the area since the s, and writes: "The FBI stepped in, reviewing two dozen cases, eventually determining that excessive alcohol consumption and the winter climate were a common link in many of the cases.

This approach seems to have backfired badly on the filmmakers as most reviews of the film are highly critical of this unconvincing "archive footage". Kyle Hopkins wrote an excellent piece for the Anchorage Daily News debunking the movie. He conceded that there is a long history of disappearances and suspicious deaths in Nome. They have been investigated by the FBI who "mostly blamed alcohol and the cruel Alaska winter". Hopkins goes on:. According to promotional materials from Universal, the film is framed around a psychologist named Abigail Tyler who interviewed traumatized patients in Nome.

But state licensing examiner Jan Mays says she can't find records of an Abigail Tyler ever being licensed in any profession in Alaska. No one by that name lived in Nome in recent years, according to a search of public record databases. Still, there is a shred of "evidence. Except the site is suspiciously vacant, mostly a collection of articles on sleep studies with no home page or contact information.

Denise Dillard is president of the Alaska Psychological Association. Hopkins also points out that Nome is not, as portrayed in the film, a city surrounded by beautiful mountains but is instead "a flat tundra town at the shore of the Bering Sea". Source: Roadshow Films. Which brings us back to The Fourth Kind , with its owl motif. Owls kind of look like grey aliens, with their big, blank eyes, rounded heads, and smooth features, and so the idea of an encounter with a Grey being interpreted as an owl by a confused and frightened human mind might occur to a canny filmmaker.

A marked uptick in owl-like alien encounters, witnesses correlating their dreams of owls with alien abductions, and even a number of books on the very subject one, Stories From The Messengers by Mike Clelland, even boasts an introduction by Strieber.

Now, maybe that tells us that UFO abductees are simple fabulists, taking their cues from the pop culture of the day. The Fourth Kind Since the s, a disproportionate number of the population in and around Nome, Alaska, have gone missing. Despite FBI investigations, the disappearances remain a mystery.

Abigail Tyler, a psychologist, may be on the verge of blowing the unsolved cases wide open when, during the course of treating her patients, she finds evidence of alien abductions. Sign out. Movies home Videos What's on.