The McPherson Tape: Scarcity driven buzz

It’s October, so I’m participating in 31 Days of horror, with the one rule that I won’t watch any movie I’ve seen before. 31 Days is 31 opportunities to see new horror movies. New, as in a movie I haven’t seen before, and not necessarily a recently released horror movie.

One of the movies I watched is one that had been on my radar for a while, The McPherson Tape. This one has quite the reputation in the horror genre, and within the subgenre of found footage, specifically.

I respond to buzz and mystery, and the mystique surrounding this movie has an even cooler urban legend appeal than Blairwitch, so I started 31 Days with this one.

The McPherson Tapes, AGFA + Bleeding Skull Blu-Ray release, 2020

The McPherson Tape was a disappointment. The runtime is 66 minutes, but it felt like a lot more time. There’s a couple of suspenseful sequences, but nothing much happens in between those few moments that make you sit up in attention and admiration. I went to a Facebook group to vent these feelings, half expecting to get crucified for spitting on a revered classic, but quite a few people agreed with me. I became intrigued by this. There was a clear divide between what I saw and what the internet perceived of this movie. There was a cultural mystery here, so I looked a little into the origins of The McPherson Tape.

It was written, produced, shot and directed by Dean Alioto for $6500 in 1988 or 1989 in Northern California, with an 8 mm video camera, through production company IndieSyndicate Productions. On the idea for the story, Alioto said:

“I was flying back from Los Angeles and I was looking out the window at night and was thinking, ‘what if this is the last time I’m seeing the Earth? What if I’m in a ship and I’m being taken away?’ And then it just kind of crystallized by the time I landed—I should do War of the Worlds with video.

“So I’ll take a home video and make something interesting with it—aliens. And then do Ten Little Indians and see these guys one-by-one get taken. I’ll shoot it real time and hire improv actors. That’s how it came about to do it all in one night.”

foundfootagecritic.com

Dean Alioto, producer/writer/director of The McPherson Tapes, (UFO Abduction)

In the same interview, that you can read in its entirety here, Alioto states that he handed all original materials to San Francisco-based video distributor Axiom Films, who then lost all said materials in a warehouse fire just before the film’s intended wide video release. (To be titled UFO Abduction, and packaged as a 1983 authentic UFO abduction case caught on tape.)

From the ashes of the warehouse fire, the legend begins to form.

Alioto thought that was that, but in late 1993, he was contacted by a representative of the show Encounters, about a real UFO abduction tape that had become the sensation of the UFO Congress Convention a few months earlier in Las Vegas. It turns out a few advance copies of UFO Abduction had been sent to convenience stores of that era that had a tiny selection of videos for rent on their shelves. Someone had taken a copy of UFO Abduction, cut out the beginning and ending credits, and circulated VHS copies of decreasing image quality among the UFO community.

In 1994 Alioto, along with UFO Researcher Tom Dongo, and with Retired Lieutenant Colonel and UFO Researcher Donald Ware, appeared in an episode of Encounters, where Dongo and Ware offered their expertise to support the authenticity of the grainy, degraded video of a family being terrorized by aliens while celebrating the 5th birthday of Michelle Van Heese (Laura Tomas.)

Through the endorsement of the UFO community, the legend gains momentum.

The fever heat of the community’s collective desire for this tape far exceeds its availability, and Alioto’s movie becomes more real in inverse proportion to its scarcity. In an era before a Google search could provide you with an HD copy of The McPherson Tape, UFO Abduction glints like a rare diamond in the murky world of bootleg analog VHS circulation. The horror of alien abduction is real, and this tape is alluring proof. But it takes extended searches on UFO online forums to come up with leads on where to find a copy of UFO Abduction, and these scarce leads often only point to other leads: defunct geocities websites, expired emails, and huckster sellers of “rare” VHS tapes. But the promise of a true alien abduction hangs in the distance like a tantalizing totem of personal vindication, so the search goes on.

And the reputation of UFO Abduction as a rare and highly desired item has gone forward into the future. From a time when it took hours to download a 56k photo to a time of HD video streaming, even as the former low-resolution video is now The McPherson Tape, a quality Blu-Ray widely available with extras, its reputation precedes it. Buzz from the analog era informs the perceptions of horror fans of the digital age.

“I didn’t intend for this to be a hoax at all. My goal was to make the most realistic UFO abduction tape possible. But this was beyond my wildest dreams. It was a huge compliment to the cast and crew that a ufologist, scientist, and a colonel believed that this was an actual tape and actual documentation of someone being abducted. It cracked me up.”

Dean Alioto, producer/writer/director of The McPherson Tape, (UFO Abduction)

Dean Alioto, standing next to alien ship prop from UFO Abduction (1989)

I can’t recommend The McPherson Tape as an October movie watch, or even as an anytime horror movie watch. It’s a boring movie. But my opinion cannot even begin to make a dent on the cult rarity perception that this movie has, so you’ll have to make a call and spend an hour of your time to decide for yourself.