From The Pages of Close Encounters News....

"NO ONE'S WATCHING: AN ALIEN ABDUCTEE'S STORY"

A Movie Review by Harold Egeln, May 2006

Yes, Jeremy Vaeni, we, your fellow experiencers, are watching your movie, "No One's Watching: An Alien Abductee's Story," with great interest.

OK, mass popular culture, Steve Speilberg does "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" (1977) and "ET - the Extraterrestial" (1982); the SCI FI Channel does "Taken" (2003), CBS-TV does Budd Hopkins' "The Intruders" (1992), NBC-TV both a movie on the Betty and Barney Hill story (1975) and the Jack Webb "Project UFO" series (1978-80), Robert Wise "The Day the Earth Stood Still" (1951), and Desmond Leslie (George Adamski's friend and co-authr) "Stranger From Venus" (1954), and a Boston filmmaker "Touched."

But only two Close Encounter Experiencers, - Whitley Strieber with "Communion" (1989) and, now, Jeremy Vaeni with his in 2006 - have ever put their own stories overtly bravely on the Big Screen, aside from others who disguise theirs.

And, folks, "it ain't easy." But both Strieber and Vaeni, in their own ways, are giving us an insider's take on being taken. Books by the dozens have been written by witnesses, abductees and contactees. However, translating their own bizzare and transforming stories from book and life experience to the movie screen is a rare art.

The beauty of "Communion: A True Story" and "No One's Watching: An Alien Abductee's Story" is that they are an expression of Strieber's and Vaeni's personalities and deeply felt responses to their Close Encounters. In the movies, they act ou their unique life stories and those responses, with mindful depthness and powerful emotions.

To Vaeni's credit, with his delightful goofiness and profoundly in-depth curiosity about "What On Earth Is Going On Here?", he has done a brave act for himself and other encounter witnesses (abductees, experiencers, contactees, etc.). And he plays as he informs movie watchers of the complex inner terrain of the unexplainable, always out of reach. But his movie, like Strieber's 17 years ago, puts it all in touch.

Vaeni, like Strieber, does not demand belief in his experiences. They both request an open mind to both a doubting and interested public.

Vaeni's movie informs through the magic of "An American Family" type reality venue -- like the PBS-TV series of the early 1970s of that title did: by relating his story through his family - mother, father, sister, and his friends - a "girlfriend" and others. In doing so, he illustrates and expands on the incidents and thoughts in his earlier written book.

That is the magic of filmmaking and the wonder of how a really good movie-maker, in this case producer, director and star Jeremy Vaeni, conveys a truth or a magic box of dounts filled with hidden truths mixed in with wrappings of trickery, stealthiness and contradictions.

Vaeni's movie is a gift not to be judged but appreciated and accepted as you like. -- It emerges wildly from inside the Close Encounter Experience through his own life. It must be widely seen, respected and, as Vaeni would say, experienced, for what it is. It is a rarely precious movie window into the soul of a Close Encounter Explorer. It is a celebration and a joy to watch.