If you ever wanted proof that we were on an alternate chaos timeline in parallel to another Earth where only normal stuff happens, then news earlier this year that “Tom DeLonge is producing a UFO documentary miniseries for the History Channel” was probably the surest evidence of that. Have a think about who you might be, a universe or two over, where things like this aren’t happening. Consider how happy and at peace you are over there. Their Amazon isn’t on fire. That bad break-up you had last year never happened and you’ve already got an iPhone 15. And, crucially, the former singer–guitarist out of Blink-182 hasn’t made a six-part documentary about the viability of alien spacecraft. That has yet to happen there.
There are two things about Unidentified (Monday 9 September, 9pm, History Channel) that we have to confront. One, Tom DeLonge is barely in it. His role, as best I can tell, is a sort of silent on-screen financier, who has put together a crack team of former Pentagon operatives who all got fired from the government for believing in aliens too much, and occasionally they convene at DeLonge’s California mansion and read things off notepads. DeLonge occasionally sits in on a car-ride or nods wide-eyed during an interrogation (always wearing a hat with a piece of tape obscuring the logo), but that is about the depth of his involvement. Secondly, you’d imagine the tone of an over-financed UFO documentary would be somewhere between “farcical” and “strange man in pub garden who has read too many forums”, but I am annoyed to report that it is actually “alarmingly convincing”.
Unidentified mainly follows Luis Elizondo, a former Pentagon worker who headed up the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, a man who hauls a backpack into every social interaction and whose energy lands somewhere between “disgraced former pro wrestler” and “aggressive new stepdad who keeps giving you obtuse chores to prove your manhood”. He heads to barely populated islands off the United States coast where Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP) supposedly landed, and he puts his wraparound sunglasses on the back of his head and makes vague hand gestures about how, by his calculation, alien spacecraft can move at 27,000 miles per hour. “Yeah,” baffled park rangers tell him. “Ahuh.”
But it’s all weirdly compelling, tickling the same synapses as Netflix murder documentaries, where a vast tract of half-found evidence is presented to you with severe earnestness, and you kind of fill in the gaps yourself. It’s incredibly glossy. It’s also absolutely soaked in Doomsday Prepper energy (I cannot prove it but everyone in this documentary has a bunker full of dehydrated beef meals for when the apocalypse comes), but in an oddly charming way. Like, yes: you do imagine a roomful of government staff are watching this in a triple-locked panic room in the heart of Area 51, laughing their well-informed heads off. But for the rest of us: does it really hurt to question our reality? Might we not as well do it with Tom DeLonge formerly of Blink-182, wearing a too-branded cap?
