7/16/17: EXTRAORDINARY: THE STAN ROMANEK STORY
Like many lonely, chronically disappointed tweens who had the good fortune of growing up with the X-Files, I spent much of my youth in a permanent UFO frenzy. I pored over esoteric encyclopedia sets at the library, watched the stupid skies, subscribed to the MUFON newsletter, and even “read” books I couldn’t begin to understand about the theoretical physics of different recorded sightings. I was motivated by the same things as likeminded anybody-elses in similarly small, crappy towns: boredom, untreated mental illness, and easily substantiated feelings of inadequacy. Oh, and also group psychosis (I said, casually). My certifiable “best friend” at the time was a person who used her unassuming presentation and affected naivete to introduce, after a calculated fashion, all sorts of impossible ideas about her own alien encounters that were hard to ignore in their outrageousness. She excelled at setting these things up, not only as something that made her special, but as a reason for other people to feel sorry for her, which could put younger rubes like myself in an uncomfortable place. Certainly there was a whiff of artificiality about her, even for a desperate moron like myself, but I vividly remember my first feelings of full-on skepticism, inspired by a scene in which she was only a bystander. We had excitedly noticed a flyer for an event at our local library, at which an “experiencer” would be presenting his “evidence”. We got one of our parents to drive us and arrived in a mood of deadly seriousness, notebooks in hand, draped in cheap trench coats. I don’t know what I expected, but the guy (whose identity I can’t recall) was a completely familiar type of upstate redneck, who told his tale with a mixture of insistent self-importance and dewey-eyed victimhood, which I would later learn second-hand to associate with abusive parents and other sorts of suburban psychopaths. His prized abduction artifact appeared in photographs as a nondescript metal “implant”, which he unwisely accompanied with a recitation of arguments he had with medical professionals about how the item was swathed in fibers “from my underwears” and whether that could be because it showed no signs of extraterrestrial origin, or because the implant dropped out of his asshole. Even at the peak of my willingness to believe in anything that would make life seem more interesting, I felt my heart breaking a little as this person spoke.
Even now, decades later, I managed to take a similar emotional rollercoaster ride while subjecting myself to EXTRAORDINARY: THE STAN ROMANEK STORY. It’s been a long time since I felt even a twinge of real interest in the topic of alien abductions, but I maintain an interest in true crime media, both for the factual content, and out of morbid curiosity about how people choose to put these things together. One recent afternoon, having run out of cheap, sadistic british tabloid shows to watch, I decided to take in a UFO documentary for old time’s sake. While I’m still able to repeat names like Betty and Barney Hill sometimes, I had never heard the name of this “experiencer”, supposedly at the center of the most thoroughly documented case of alien abduction in history. This was perhaps for the best, as what I was to see would shock me very deeply, although not at all in the way that the filmmakers intended.
The story goes as follows: In September 2001, shortly after the attack on the World Trade Center, schlubby nobody Stan Romanek videotaped an unknown flying object for the first of what would seem to be countless times. His visual encounters quickly escalated to lost time, mysterious injuries, and anomalies in his home security recordings. Unsatisfied with these casual intrusions, bobble-headed “grays” then began sneaking around his home, and finally, Stan became a frequent visitor of outer space--the wonderment of which was often tarnished by the appearance of the malevolent men in black.
At the time of this viewing, I had no vulnerability to becoming a believer, but I was ready to feel at least a frisson of ambiguity in Romanek’s reportedly thorough documentation. What I found instead was much more disturbing. After an interminable string of X-Filesy lowercase title cards that leave no doubt as to the filmmakers’ commitment to Stan’s cause, we finally see a series of short videos of these UFOs--distant, blurry, jittery images that almost always include the voices of off-screen “witnesses” whose dubious existence is supposed to amount to some form of corroboration. I thought, ok, maybe there’s something more debatable, like...later on. The next piece of alleged evidence is a series of space travel-related equations that Romanek wrote during hypnotic regression therapy (a red flag if ever there was one), all of which turn out to be known quantities that could certainly be researched and memorized by a UFO buff with some time on his hands. Finally, Romanek himself--a scruffy middle-aged white male--fully takes the stage in an endless set of repellant photographs of himself leering smugly thought a bloody nose or some such, proudly displaying greenish cigarette burn-like sores that supposedly appear on his person after something very like a flashlight beam or laser pointer makes its appearance in and around his home. His self-satisfied countenance added indignation to my rational assessment that none of what I had seen so far would be impossible to reproduce for even a clumsy amateur. Then, I saw it. The now infamous “boo” video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wc_gCqkyz9M
I absolutely could not believe that what I had seen was being presented to me as photographic evidence of alien life. Admittedly, Romanek has a fine sense of cinematic timing--the piece truly feels like it’s leading up to a jump scare--but little egghead swiveling and dipping in and out of frame, like something out of Scooby-Doo, is qualifiedly hilarious. Equally hilarious is the idea that these advanced alien beings don’t have a more refined method of surveilling humans, and even more hilarious is Romanek theatrically running up to the window at the end of the video, seemingly holding the flash used to create the “mysterious” flashes of light that accompanied the visitation. More hilarious still is the following grainy video of a similar creature peering at Romanek in his kitchen, as he cries out “What is that? What’s it doing?” in spite of the fact that he has allegedly been visited by what he claims are aliens for quite a while now.
Romance’s put-on ignorance is high among the most disturbing things about him. He employees a conversational technique well-known to liars and people who have had to deal with them: Instead of saying something like “I know it sounds crazy, but I have been abducted by aliens. There is no other explanation. Here I’m missing time and waking up in strange places because of what they did to me, here I’m mysteriously ill or healed by their intervention, here I’m clearly being stalked and harassed by the government because of what I know”--instead of this kind of sure-footed declaration, Romanek invariably pretends not to understand what has happened to him, even though he’s made a career out of his abductee status. He tells each tale as if it were his first and only encounter with the paranormal, and couches them in deliberately unsound alternative explanations for what may have happened. In my favorite edition, he describes a scene in which three half-human aliens knock on his door in the middle of the night in order to tell him that “it’s going to be ok” or something. Instead of simply getting to the point that he so desperately wants his audience to take, Stan exhaustively describes the knock at the door. He’s a heavy sleeper! He never wakes up for a loud noise, and yet, mysteriously, he did! He thought it must have been a drunk neighbor banging on the door, because he is a rational man (and I guess that must be a common occurrence?)! He went to the door and saw three people, and automatically assumed he was being burglarized! He yelled over and over to his family that he was being robbed! Because that would be normal! On and on he goes with defensive statements his many alien-free explanations for the knock, even though a guiltless person of sound mind might have simply said, “Someone knocked at the door at an odd hour, so I woke up and went to see what it was.” Curiously, even though we are rapidly careening toward the part of the story in which the adoring aliens reveal their worshipful plan for Stan, this anecdote ends with Stan aggressively trying to hurl one of the aliens off his balcony.
Because this whole conceit is so clearly designed to scaffold Romanek’s brittle ego, it’s not enough to say that he is the special focus of extraterrestrial fascination. There must also be evidence of Stan’s extreme machismo. Not only does he bravely insist on telling his tale in spite of sinister government warnings, but he single-handedly takes on three “obvious black ops guys” in a fantasy sequence that would make a fibbing child blush. The MIBs “somehow find out exactly where (he) parked (his) bicycle!”, and leap out of a van in an elaborate kung fu demonstration. Flabby Stan allegedly laughs this off, to their consternation, and proceeds to nearly murder one of them with his bike lock. They flea from his might after resorting to tasing him, and the filmmakers seem to produce a police report, but not the witness who supposedly filed it.
There are a variety of witnesses in the movie, typically identified as “woman 1″ or “woman 2″, or presented only audio recordings only of supposed doctors who supposedly verified Romance’s various medical miracles. Most of Stan’s supporters do seem to be women, though, which has an unpleasantly culty sort of vibe to it. Crazed narcissists like Stan can make themselves enormously compelling to certain sorts of people who want to feel special by proxy, or worse, who feel an obligation to comfort a person burdened with such specialness. No one in the film is sadder than Stan’s watery-eyed wife Lisa, who must not only defend his authenticity at all costs, but who has also lived through the incomprehensible horror of watching Stan “reunite” with a woman with whom he has supposedly copulated in outer space. This Other Woman, predictably a taller more buxom specimen with nicer hair, must have been subtly hypnotized by Romanek at the UFO event where he identified her. This is much easier to do than you could ever imagine, to someone who is as anxious to Believe is the people you would find in such a place. After tormenting Lisa for six years with his fantasies about how the aliens bred him with a beautiful woman on their saucer, all Stan probably had to do with was spot out a sexy specimen at one of his speaking dates, and say something along the lines of “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before? You know, IN SPACE?” People in this sort of hungry, lonely mental state can lose the boundary between their memory and their imagination at a speed that the blissfully ignorant could never dream of.
And so it was that the emotionally battered Lisa entered into an ambiguous threesome with her husband and his invented alien breeding partner. Perhaps the most troubling part of the movie comes when the anxious filmmaker more than goads Lisa into describing herself as a person who is not only honest to a fault, but who loathes deception above all other things. No statement could be more damning from a person who is defending such an outrageous fabrication. Lisa has to halt her genuine weeping over her domestic predicament to recite this script about her honesty, stammering and looking up and away before each conclusion. Ironically, this tic is something I first learned about in SEX, LIES & VIDEOTAPE--liars compulsively look up and at an angle while lying.
Now it’s time to qualify my assertion that this was “perhaps” the most troubling part of the movie. More awful still is the introduction of Stan’s various space children, first in the form of an obviously faked photograph that has to be seen to be believed. According to the subject, an ethereally beautiful little girl with enormous crystal blue eyes and white-blonde hair (yet who still “looks exactly like” the dull brunette Romanek) appeared multiple times scampering around in his backyard--but, naturally, vanishing before any contact is made. These appearances are followed by electronically distorted phone calls in which Stan’s elfin progeny tell him how much they love them. This part of the story is somehow padded out by a phone call from an adult female caller who addresses Romanek as STARSEED, warns him about government baddies, and most preposterously, insists to the filmmakers that Stan is different from other people...the way he thinks...the way he views the world...(because of) who he really is. Personally, I felt affronted by the idea that an intergalactic messiah who is so “different” would also wear corny pickup line tee shirts and use the word “frickin’”, but I guess that’s why I’m not the one who is productively boning out amongst the stars.
Stan’s stories about his alien family are also disturbing for another reason, which is revealed just before the ending credits. It isn’t just that his emotion is so frankly fake, at least in a scene where he seems to claim that he weeps every time he remembers his distant babies--and is then unable to tear up on camera; It isn’t just the obvious confusion of reverence and victimization, so typical of psychopaths, that rears its head between his stories of being covered in sores and pissing blood and ALSO being coddled and adored by aliens; It isn’t even just the creepy repetition of how the little nymphettes rush up and hug his thighs and lavish affection on him. At least, not by itself. It’s that in February of 2014, Stan Romanek was charged with possession and distribution of child pornography. I discovered this earlier in my screening, when the “Boo video” made me wonder what kind of movie I was watching. Was this actually meant to be a straight comedy, and Netflix had simply miscategorized it? Was there going to be some big reveal of a hoax, after all this drippy sincerity about Stan’s predicament? I couldn’t wait to find out, and what I found out helped to contextualize a lot of the rest of the film. The filmmakers, of course, contextualize these charges with a list of headlines from sources like Info Wars about how the FBI routinely frames dissidents for child porn just to bury them. The thing is, I can believe that that sort of thing may happen to people now and again. I just don’t believe that it happened to Stan Romanek.
I mentioned the proximity of Stan’s first alien encounter to 9/11 for a reason: I believe, in my arm chair psychologist fashion, that that national catastrophe catalyzed his powerful need for attention. Suddenly, something had happened that gripped the whole country, something that came from the sky. This may have activated Romanek’s evident need to be the absolute center of focus, which required of him an unthinkable stunt to jar the people around him out of their patriotic grief and rage, which had nothing to do with himself. Something from the air would have to descend upon Stan, something much wilder than a hijacked airplane. Stan would have to become simultaneously a victim to rival the actual victims, and a hero to rival the actual heroes responding to this assault on the country. In a curiously isolated sequence, Romanek gives a very brief summary of his childhood, which is predictably unenviable. As an undiagnosed dyslexic, Stan was unfairly placed in “retard classes” and, he petulantly describes, abused by his sadistic teachers as if he were as lowly as his classmates. He claims also to have been surrounded by Bloods and Crips, and in that environment became so violent and strong that he beat up everybody including the principle of his high school. That’s about as much as you get out of Romanek that is not about aliens, but even that scrap gives you a pretty clear portrait of a person who fixates on having been misjudged as inferior, stupid and thuggish. I supposed to get out from under that, without much talent or charm in evidence, one would have to cook up evidence of glory at least as outrageous as being an alpha space stud. I think what I’d really like to see is a counter documentary made by someone, anyone, with the wherewithal to pick apart Stan Romance’s epic ruse. Unfortunately, I’ll just have to settle for the child pornography case, which goes to court at the end of this month.
