Aliens are Friend and Foe in ‘The Experiencers: Full Disclosure’ [Review]

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Jun 12, 2026

Aliens are a curious thing, no? There are the spindly, acidic variants of Ridley Scott’s Alien universe, stark contrasts to the silly “banana” obsessed variety of Dandadan. They’re envisioned as little gray men who kidnap adults (see: The Forgotten, The Fourth Kind), or temporal goobs with the power to bring Amy Adams to tears (Arrival). They’re also Dean Alioto’s bread and butter. While his career is largely on the tube, directing and producing innumerable true-crime documentaries and extraterrestrial series, horror fans likely know him best for the one-two punch of The McPherson Tape in 1989 and Incident in Lake County a decade later. Both are hallmarks of the found-footage horror genre (eat your heart out, The Blair Witch Project), and now, Alioto is back in space with a more straightforward documentary: The Experiencers: Full Disclosure.

It’s fortuitous timing. The Experiencers, now available to rent on Amazon Prime Video and other platforms, was released just two weeks before Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day (which I’ve heard is pretty good). Spielberg undoubtedly popularized a specific brand of extraterrestrial, the cinematically ambiguous, sometimes friendly, space traveler more interested in questions than, say, outright annihilation. And The Experiencers, largely, culls from that crop with its rotation of talking heads relaying their own alleged experiences of alien abduction and encounters.

Alioto and his crew treat their subjects with respect, rarely doubting the sundry experiences recounted, whether that’s stories of alien implants (tracking devices installed to monitor humans) or shared dreams that, really, are abductions in disguise. The subjects are almost revered, and there’s little doubt as to the veracity of their stories, and that’s likely intended to be the audience’s domain; Namely, it’s up to us to believe them or not.

The stories are certainly frightening in their suggestive power. There’s nothing quite as visceral or frenetic as The McPherson Tape (though Alioto does deploy animated recreations throughout), though there’s a specific endurance in the sheer terror of being abducted from your home and violated by an alien species. It’s why alien terror has lasted well beyond the ephemerality of the genre zeitgeist; We’re always going to fear the unknown, and few things are unknown quite like space.

Presuming, of course, extraterrestrials are unknown. As a crash-course on alien lore, The Experiencers similarly lends airspace to several theories about what these extraterrestrials might be, including a paradoxical contention that they’re us, just more evolved and from the future. There’s a five-minute breakdown of evolutionary science and how we, one day, will look like little gray men that’ll remind you of every Thanksgiving dinner with your uncle ever.

Contextually, however, I kept returning to The Leader, a dramatization of Heaven’s Gate, which premiered at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. In 1997, 39 members of the UFO cult were found dead after a series of ritual suicides. Belief in aliens, for many, is a fringe interest, a search for meaning in a world that rarely, if ever, provides it. That is to say, it’s not an innately dangerous supposition to believe there is life beyond our planet. As a dovetail into more radical, anti-institutional beliefs, however, it’s frightening and certainly not harmless.

Now, I don’t know if the subjects of The Experiencers: Full Disclosure are themselves harmless. They certainly seem to be, but mileage will no doubt vary. There’s a great deal of pseudo-psychology from the participants, and one might wonder whether it’s responsible to validate and proselytize– which, really, is what happens– their experiences and beliefs in a culture already rife with distrust and misinformation.

A decade ago, I might have been less sensitive to the subtext. I grew up watching shows like Ancient Aliens, after all, and there’s a part of my brain, however anti-intellectual, that loves to leave space open for the profound and unbelievable. Whether The Experiencers: Full Disclosure is fascinating or irresponsible will be a matter of personal preference. However, there’s little denying Dean Alioto is this generation’s extraterrestrial expert. In his hands, even the most familiar of abduction sagas can feel incredible and frightening again.

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