The alien in the woods: how an unsolved UFO mystery inspired Amazon’s sci-fi hit The Vast of Night
Extraterrestrial life first came to Earth – from one point of view – on June 24, 1947. A pilot named Kenneth Arnold was flying, alone, in a small propeller plane, across the Cascade mountains in Washington state. Glancing at Mount Rainier to his left, he spotted several objects, high in the air some distance away. They gleamed in the sun, and moved at speed. Later, he said that they were “saucer-shaped”, and as he stared, an “eerie feeling” came over him.
After Arnold spoke to the media, the term “flying saucer” became au courant. (It first appeared in print two days after the sighting, on June 26.) The Air Force appeared, and interviewed the pilot; eventually, they judged that he’d seen a “mirage”. At the same time, they were launching a series of classified probes that would last for decades to come. And meanwhile, among the American public, the sightings began to grow.
The Vast of Night, the debut film by Andrew Patterson, has arrived on Amazon Prime; on its appearance at Sundance last year, it won acclaim from the likes of Steven Soderbergh. It’s saturated with a love of UFO lore, and of the post-war era where the tales began. The film has a small budget (under $1 million), a small-town setting (New Mexico) and a smallish cast (two leads, and a few others with sizeable roles). The conceit is small as well, with a single plotline to the end.
It’s November 1958. One night, in the town of Cayuga, New Mexico, a high-school basketball game has the whole town gathered to watch. A young duo, Everett (Jake Horowitz) and Fay (Sierra McCormick), are left manning the town’s radio-station and switchboard, when they hear a mysterious sound on the air. They investigate, jaunty at first. But it turns out that some locals know more than they’ve previously dared to say. This isn’t the first time the sound has been heard in Cayuga. There may be something up there in the sky.
Patterson not only directed The Vast of Night, but co-wrote and produced it too. He told Ars Technica last year that he began with a basic idea – one available to any American since Kenneth Arnold took that flight. “I have a document in my phone,” he explained, “of three-or-four-dozen single-line movie ideas. This one said: ‘1950s, black-and-white, New Mexico, UFO film.’”
So it turned out (albeit in colour). And a few historical events were used to enrich the script. In more than one interview, Patterson has mentioned the “Kecksburg incident”. It took place in December 1965, when a bright light was seen flashing in the sky over a string of American states. The residents of Kecksburg, Pennsylvania reported a violent noise, a tremor, and something in the nearby woods. The local radio station, KDKA, was flooded with calls from witnesses. Some who rushed to the scene spoke of an object in the trees: acorn-shaped, engraved with symbols, around 10 or 12 feet long. But the military arrived, and the curtain came down.
The story of Kecksburg is cut up and spread through The Vast of Night. After hearing the strange frequency on the radio, then through her switchboard, Fay receives panicked calls. The lines begin to go dead. She tells Everett, who’s on air across town at WOTW, and an appeal for information prompts a mysterious man to call the station; the voice alleges that he spent years in the military cleaning up classified crash-sites. The aircraft he saw there, he says, were strange – and radios in the vicinity would play that very sound.
In 2015, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ran a feature for the half-centenary of the Kecksburg event. Several residents, including a Post-Gazette retiree, told the paper how, that night in 1965, they saw military trucks arrive and take some debris away. They didn’t, however, agree on its size or shape. A “ufologist” called John Ventre told the paper that, according to his new research, it was a US spy satellite. But Ventre wasn’t sure. “Personally,” he added, “I’m rooting for the UFO evidence, since I’m with the Mutual UFO Network.”
The Air Force declared that what landed at Kecksburg was a meteorite, and the case was quickly closed. The identity of the DJ who took the calls is no longer known. Being as unfathomable as the object itself, he has become the best part of the Kecksburg tale. Urban myth has made him a dissident who tried to expose the truth. Patterson loves that idea. “[The DJ] was putting together an audio documentary and news story, interviewing locals about what they saw,” he told Vanity Fair last month. “Then men showed up from some agency and, I believe, confiscated all his tapes.”
Patterson added a second incident that he’d kept in mind, when writing the part of Mabel Blanche (Gail Cronauer), who tells Everett and Fay that her son vanished from Cayuga as a child. (She recognises the sound on the radio, too.) The story goes like this: in 1969, three friends drove out one night into rural Oklahoma, and were never seen again. One year later, three teenagers headed out on a secret hunting trip, and met the same mysterious fate. There were no leads for 44 years – empty ground in which rumours grew. But finally, in 2013, a sonar sweep of the Foss Lake reservoir found two cars at the bottom, side-by-side. Both groups, in all likelihood, had driven off a lakeside road.
Patterson hasn’t suggested that Kecksburg was an alien encounter, nor that Foss Lake was anything strange. Believing is not the point. UFO stories are more often about storytelling: about the radical outside, a space you can see by looking up at night, but whose depths we barely know. The Vast of Night doesn’t end by spoiling the human drama, focused on its young, excited leads. There’s no physical “close encounter”; no operating tables on spaceships full of silent black-eyed things.
“I think the scariest thing in the world is not something malicious or violent,” Patterson told Vanity Fair. “I think the unknown is much more frightening. The idea that other life exists somewhere in space, and is so drastically different from us that they might be indifferent to our world, is a pretty awful realisation.”
This is why The Vast of Night isn’t a film about aliens; it’s a film about watching them on TV. The story is framed as part of an anthology series – “Paradox Theatre” – and it flaunts its artificiality with a series of audacious tracking shots. It’s hammy in the right degree: an homage to schlocky post-war B-productions that delivered their thrills with a homespun kick. As an interview with IndieWire showed this week, Patterson is abundantly proud of what he pulled off with his limited means.
And while we, in 2020, think we’ve come a long way from 1958, we still like to imagine that there are, as Mabel calls them, “people in the sky”. The US Air Force closed Project Blue Book in 1970; it had collected over 12,000 UFO reports, of which over 95 per cent were considered “explained”. But that left a decent minority, and in 2017 it emerged that investigations had gone on in secrecy.
One such project, the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, ran from 2007 to 2012, at a cost of $100 million. It collected reports not from the general public, but from US military personnel. Only this April, gossip was spreading online, the way it once spread in small New Mexico towns. The Pentagon was forced to release video footage of what its pilots saw.
The Vast of Night is streaming on Amazon Prime now
