THE MCPHERSON TAPE (1989)

On the night of July 22nd, 1994, in front of the 5.5 million viewers tuned into Fox’s latest episode of Encounters: The Hidden Truth, retired Lieutenant Colonel Donald Ware debated the veracity of alleged UFO evidence and accidentally defined the found footage genre: “It did not have the appearance of being a scripted production because everybody was talking at the same time and you couldn’t understand half of what they said. The people on camera did express a great deal of emotion. If they were actors, they ought to get an Oscar or an Emmy.”

The semi-scripted production in question was 1989’s THE MCPHERSON TAPE, perhaps the only film of its handheld kind to earn that highest of praise—evidence. Sure, THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT had its TV specials, but those were in on the joke; in the same Encounters segment, these aliens are revealed as eight-year-old girls in Halloween masks and the Lieutenant Colonel still qualifies his assessment with an “If.”

The expert-approved hysteria of the tape was an unexpected victory in function for writer, director, and in-character camera operator Dean Alioto, who was mostly inspired in form: “The idea was to do War of the Worlds on videotape.”

Like Orson Welles’ infamous broadcast, THE MCPHERSON TAPE only lasts an hour and opens with a damning admission of fabrication that’s just begging to be missed or, say, lopped off by enterprising video pirates. In the film’s case, it’s a preamble text scroll hyping up what you’re about to see with all the subtlety of a carnival barker: “Contains the most important evidence yet made public regarding the UFO abduction phenomenon.” Common sense would dictate proof this revolutionary should be curated to its most groundbreaking frames—there’s a reason you only know 39 seconds of the Patterson-Gimlin film by heart. Instead of getting right to the green-man goods, however, THE MCPHERSON TAPE sits down to dinner.

The Van Heese family (relation to McPherson unknown) has just done a poor job cleaning their plates of rice and ambiguously sauced meat. We know this because Michael Van Heese, our de facto man on the scene, tests out his manual focus on the grisly remains. Just how reliable is our standard-def narrator? Without a word of conspiracy, older brother Eric and younger brother Jason immediately trick him into thinking the week-old camcorder’s red tally light is broken. Not that their expertise reaches much farther; once a fuse blows, Eric accuses the battery-operated camera: “Mikey, how much power does that camera draw?”

These are not details in lieu of a user manual; they’re dynamics. Eric and Jason are simpatico on pranks and the pecking order to the exclusion of middle-child Michael, a touch Alioto credited to E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL in a 2016 interview with the Found Footage Files podcast. His antisocial tendencies are aired out with all the compassion of a remembered forecast. “He never eats, he just takes pictures,” says Ma like her most sensitive son isn’t present and zoomed in, even recalling that his dead father thought he was odd, too. Lip service is later paid to Michael keeping the camera rolling as a cordless light source, but that’s just an excuse for the both of us – he records because that’s how he copes.

Everyone copes in THE MCPHERSON TAPE. The other brothers haven’t been around much since the old man died, but keep blaming the still-at-home Michael for not fixing the place up long after confirming the existence of aliens next door. The younger one seems hellbent on starting a family of his own to compensate, even if by accident. The older one talks loud and proud so everyone knows he’s the new head of the family and not, as some may falsely accuse or reminisce, the resident coward: “I wasn’t afraid, I was cautious.” Five-year-old Michelle doodles with crayons. Her mom, Jamie, distracts the birthday girl as long as possible before breaking down in free-fall panic, the distraction secretly for her own good. Jason’s girlfriend Renee is too focused on making a good impression for anything to leave much of a dent. And Ma Van Heese, bless her, drinks little bottles of rum every night with Johnny Carson.

That last mechanism comes secondhand, delivered after the boys discuss lighting a fart on fire and interrupted by the arrival of life from another planet.

So it goes.

At the risk of discrediting some very creepy work from three second-graders, the egg-headed invaders don’t do much in THE MCPHERSON TAPE. Between first contact and end credits, not counting the squirm of any subliminal pixels, they only appear with any clarity three times. And how does the trapped family spend most of the remaining 67 minutes?

“Do you still feel like opening presents?” Within 13 minutes of witnessing a UFO touch down, they’re back to slicing cake. All their watches stopping simultaneously drifts into complaints about how hard it is to find the wind-up kind anymore. After losing the only armed members of the homestead, those remaining take solace in Go Fish.

I barely remember my own father’s funeral. I couldn’t tell you how I ended up at the cemetery. What I cannot forget is sitting out the wake at my grandparents’ house, attempting for the millionth time to pull off a Brutality in Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 with my brother and my cousin. We were defeated but we weren’t losing, a self-defensive short-circuit of the human spirit that I’ve never seen captured more authentically than in THE MCPHERSON TAPE.

Because life is what happens when you have a dead alien in the guest room.

Between rounds, Ma delivers the film’s closest thing to a monologue:

We know how to wait. Spend our whole lives waiting. Wait for a boy to call, you know? Wait for one to ask you to marry him, and then you wait for the husband to come home.

After another small eternity of silence, she quietly comes clean: “God I hate waiting, I was never very good at it.”

Later in that episode of Encounters, Lieutenant Colonel Ware was offered the chance to reconsider his assessment of THE MCPHERSON TAPE. He didn’t. “I am not convinced the thing is a hoax because I know our government policy is to insert disinformation into every major UFO case or released document or possibly every home video that gets on the market.”

There’s a reason he still believed, even while intercut with the confession of admitted charlatan Dean Alioto. It wasn’t because the costumes were so realistic; it was because of the waiting, which none of us are very good at. Except for those actors, who do deserve an Oscar or an Emmy.

If they were actors.