Chantelle Pyper is proclaimed to be the most abducted person in Britain, and appears to be a mutation of Diane Morgan's MANDY and Lisa Marie's Martian Girl in MARS ATTACKS.
DIRECTED, produced and filmed by Guy Gilbert, this fifty-minute Channel 4 documentary looks at three British cases of UFO abduction, and the support network supplied by the Anomalous Mind Management Abductee Contactee Helpline (AMMACH), run by therapist/media personality Joanne Summerscales and ex-communications/broadcast engineer Miles Johnston. Not only does the piece capture the Britishness of the alleged contactees, it also encompasses the sadness that has engulfed and guided their lives. We first meet Labour councillor and driving instructor Simon Parkes, who believes that he has an alien mother, an alien "Cat Queen" lover (well, he does own nine felines) and otherworldly children whom he sees regularly (although his wife is not happy about it). Simon never knew his father, and his mother was an alcoholic.
Regular abductee Chantelle Pyper lives with her 24-year-old son Dominic, who also has frequent encounters. Particularly irksome for Chantelle is that the aliens move and hide her cigarettes, and are in the habit of beaming her up after KFC take-away meals. To help her in this plight, Miles has sent Chantelle a device consisting of a crystal connected to a battery. Fittingly unimpressed, she describes it as "a little vibrator," and in a masterpiece of understatement says "It'll not work; it's a waste of time."
Joanna Summerscales and Miles Johnson. The AMMACH website was closed in 2015 due to extensive hacking, but its legacy lives on in The ET Newsroom, governed by Summescales.
Our third case is Marie, a freelance accountant, who believes that aliens have implanted devices in her body and tampered with her DNA. Luckily Miles "has all the latest equipment" for examination, which includes ushering Marie into a black-screen cubicle in his garden and asking to take her top off. Things get particularly heated when Marie doesn't get the answers she is looking for with a lie-detector carried out by Terry Mullins, chair of the British Polygraph Association. Marie also has a DNA test, which turns out to be normal. The accountant, it turns out, had a daughter Gina, who also experienced alien contact and committed suicide a few months before the programme was made. Marie believes that Gina is now with "light beings," and looks forward to reuniting with her.
Sleep paralysis and false memories provide plausible explanations for many accounts of alien abduction. But with no sceptical viewpoint, and solely concentrating on the sheer outlandishness of the situations (using CONFESSIONS in its title instantly - and deliberately? - reminds of Robin Askwith), the programme is a bizarrely sad experience. Starting with trailer clips from EARTH VS THE FLYING SAUCERS, THIS ISLAND EARTH and THE ANGRY RED PLANET, UFO devotees have even described the programme as a mockumentary, clearly upset by its flippant but nevertheless grounded tone. A better inclusion would have been footage from the original, dream-like INVADERS FROM MARS, a foundational film in the development of the abduction narrative, which predates and potentially influences real-world claims.