I remember this was a huge phenomenon when it came out and people were recording it on their home VCR’s and playing it back frame by blurry frame. News programs reported on it. Serious people discussed the reasons why they thought it was fake, as though it wasn’t just grainy footage of a plaster dummy stuffed with spiced meats.
It sparked a genuine debate about whether we were alone in the universe, and what that would mean for human beings. It’s really amazing how easy it was to pull off such an obvious hoax and full a lot of people.
If you’re amazed by that, I’ve got a lot of stories about a certain pandemic for you. So many people got fooled, and still are to this day, you wouldn’t even know which side I’m on from this paragraph alone.
Another movie in the same vein is ‘The Last Dragon’. A fake documentary about dragons, plainly stating so in the beginning. Yet, some people still got fooled.
Or Beyond Believe, which your movie is related to.
There’s even that one time a mass hysteria happened due to a dramatic radio play. People overall just don’t get better at not getting fooled.
I first heard about the fake mermaid “documentary” by someone who was fooled by it. Also a few years ago there were “alien bodies” in… Mexico maybe? They absolutely could not have looked more ridiculously fake, like junior high school art project fake, “found” and promoted by a known con artist, and people in UFO circles are still talking about them credulously.
I like to listen to old Art Bell episodes when I’m driving and it’s pretty astounding how these people can just grift and grift and grift for decades. Thirty books, speaking engagements, radio, newsletters, training courses. The hard evidence is always just a few months away. The whole thing is about to blow wide open by Summer, by next year, in two years. Then it just melts away into the next thing. I find it entertaining for some reason.