Hot Docs 2025: They're Here

Sometimes a documentary is too much yet not enough. Such is the case with Daniel Claridge and Pacho Velez’s They’re Here, a well-meaning documentary about four UFO-obsessed folks in upstate New York. It paints a portrait of ordinary people drawn to UFOs in a quest for transcendence, yet it fails to bring anything substantially new to the ever-growing subgenre of UFO documentaries.

The film is too much because it gets too cute with its reenactments and artistic flourishes, as if the filmmakers think that the film can give the subjects the closure and solace that their quest for alien contact has so far refused them. For instance, the opening credits sequence has many shots of people with “Spielberg face,” looking up with awe as dazzling lights fill the screen. But in the end, we realize we’re just at the fair and the lights are coming from a UFO-shaped gravitron. Later, Claridge and Velez visualize abductions, but the resulting low-fi recreations feel like something from a bad History Channel show.

As something of an amateur ufologist, I can’t help but be drawn to tales of alien abduction and mysterious sightings in the sky. They’re Here scratches that itch, but only to a point, as it’s too enamoured with the mundane lives of its protagonists rather than the extraordinary claims they make. In the opening moments, we meet a woman who is convinced she has been abducted over a dozen times, but the film never interrogates her beliefs, nor even asks substantial details of her supposed experiences. Later characters fare better as the film investigates their hopes and desires in more detail. There’s a man who suffers memory losses from a childhood accident and finds some meaning in peddling his UFO-themed board game. There’s a young man who recorded a UFO on his phone and appeared on the local news. There’s the aspiring comedian whose jokes about aliens simply do not work on ordinary people.

You can feel Claridge and Velez’s affection for these people, their desire to show them as real human beings with hopes and dreams beyond their alien interests. It’s a testament that the film never mocks them when it’d be so easy to frame their stories for cheap laughs. But it also never goes deep enough into their lives or prods at their insecurities to reveal greater truths. It’s too passive with some, such as the avowed believer we meet off the top, while curiously intrusive with others, such as the man making the board games. It also splits too much time between them, offering portraits that are ultimately too little, too lacking.

Also, perhaps it’s the nature of They’re Here being a small film focused on a small part of New York state that we never get any discussion of larger issues within the UFO community; no mention of David Grusch or Lue Elizondo, of “Tic-Tac” or “Go Fast”. The movie might not be interested in these UFO whistleblowers or UFO videos leaked to the New York Times in 2017, but by not acknowledging them, it seems almost willfully ignorant of the context in which all UFO discussion occurs in 2025.

The closest we get to this are the scant glimpses of the investigations done by a representative of MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network, which attempts to explain or verify every reported UFO sighting across the United States. By leaving out mention of the wider context these people exist in, They’re Here ultimately illuminates very little about the phenomenon of UFO obsession in the first place.

They’re Here ultimately becomes a portrait, loving yet insubstantial, of some upstate oddballs who think they’ve seen aliens. It’s too specific for the uninitiated, too surface level for true believers.

5 out of 10

They’re Here (2024, USA)

Directed by Daniel Claridge and Pacho Velez.

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