The Roswell Mystery Revisited!
Retrospective on crashed UFOs, Cow Mutilations, and a Paranormal Buddy Cop Story?
Unsolved Mysteries
Great news for Unsolved Mysteries fans: it’s back with four new episodes on Netflix sans Robert Stack!
That’s not entirely true. Robert Stack does make a brief appearance on the episode about Roswell which is a follow up to the original 1989 episode that rekindled public interest in the alien crash site story.
Unlike previous seasons of the revamped series, the ratio of murder disappearance episodes to paranormal episodes has flipped in favor of the paranormal. Clearly, I was not alone in skipping the murder stories to just watching the ones about mothman and alien abductions. Not that the murder ones aren’t that interesting. I just only have so much time in a day to pick and choose what I watch.
This season features three paranormal/UFO episodes about cattle mutilations, the Roswell investigation, and a paranormal detective who forms a strange work relationship with an entity called “Becky.” All the episodes are worthwhile, especially if you don’t know much about the phenomenon in each.
If you are fairly well versed in the cattle mutilation and Roswell stories, you aren’t going to learn a whole lot that’s new in these episodes. However, even for those familiar with the topics, I will say they are worth the viewing mostly because you get to see interviews with the actual eye witnesses, clear images of the highly unusual mutilations of the animals, and a fresh overview of the phenomena over several decades.
I found the Roswell episode particularly interesting. While much of the information was revealed in books I read (particularly Cover-Up at Roswell by Donald R. Schmitt), this episode’s point of view is about the evolution of the story over the decades using the 1989 Unsolved Mysteries investigation as the centerpiece. It is particularly impactful getting to see the real recorded testimonies of witnesses and the investigators as they describe how they learned there was much more to this story than they believed when they started. After all the evidence is investigated, by the time the official Air Force response comes in the 1990’s, the arguments to debunk the events come off as laughable at best and blatantly deceitful at worst.
However, the most compelling episode this season for me was the one about the paranormal investigator. This one was about a man named Don in the U.K. who had a gift for communicating with the spirit world, and he was called in to do investigations and cleansings in haunted places. At one of these places, he encountered a spirit that called herself “Becky” who was able to clearly communicate with him. After forming a bond, Becky began helping him with investigations both finding things and clearing out evil spirits.
It sounds like the premise of a quirky network crime drama, but this strange story takes some remarkable turns that make it really hard to brush off too easily. When a parapsychologist hears word of this story, he begins to investigate and is shocked by his findings. Whether you believe in the afterlife or not, these two men make it very clear in their emotional interviews that they have no doubts in their minds that there is some sort of existence beyond the grave.
Sterling Martin is a writer, artist, and designer living in Chicago, IL. His background includes drawing, writing, theatre, teaching, improv & sketch comedy, and whatever else he can get his hands on to be creative. You can find him on the internet at:
Instagram: @sterfest.art
Website: sterlingmartin.design
Cara: sterfest@sterlingmartin
Threads (well, I’m on it): @sterfest
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