Watch My Mum Talk to Aliens

My Mum Talks to Aliens is an Australian documentary that came to my attention after it was posted as an Amazon (prime) video. It’s a video I’d watch again because it represents a new genre in UFO films, where UFOs are put in their social context. This lends a great deal more general interest and in-depth richness to the story of UFOs as well as related phenomena, both explained and unexplained.

In the case of My Mum, the documentary unfolds as if it’s a battle of rationality between a skeptic and a believer, who just happen to be son and mother. Then you see how rationality and logic line up against social and familial bonds. The son is grossly offended by his mother’s lack of rationality, until her lack of rationality is publically insulted in a debate with a skeptic. At that point, he begins to want to defend her, and maybe expands what he considers to be the range of normal a tiny bit in order to still be able to include his mum among the sane.

It’s a very nice illustration of what the sociology of knowledge and science is all about – how what we believe and even why we believe it is, to a considerable extent, influenced by social forces. In My Mum, the son moderates his position about what is normal slightly in order to maintain a social bond with his mother. It’s an object lesson in how people categorize obviously wrong things as acceptable or not (yes, I am positing that obviously wrong things exist) that doesn’t carry the price tag the same lesson might if one of the players was of a minority race or lower income. Ufology is all love and white light that way.