Do UFOs engage in predictive behaviors? Well, you’ll never know unless you look, and retired Chief Petty Officer Kevin Day suddenly has the financial and technical resources to do just that. Next December, one of the key players in the Tic Tac UFO mystery will be chasing a theory that UFOs may be migrating, not unlike whales, between Catalina Island off California and Mexico’s more remote Guadalupe Island. So it seemed like a good time to check in with veteran researcher Chris O’Brien, whose UFO Data Acquisition Project (UFODAP) gear will be accompanying Day on his expedition to the Pacific.

Only, the phoner with O’Brien took an unanticipated detour.

Kevin Day, as everyone who watched last summer’s History channel “Unidentified” series knows by now, was the USS Princeton radar operator who in 2004 kept a wary eye on the bogeys that collectively formed what became known as the Tic Tac phenomenon. His efforts to play a hunch that UFO activities are regular occurrences in the Catalina-Guadalupe region are now being subsidized by an undisclosed TV project. OBrien’s UFODAP cameras will be loaded to the gills with environmental sensors upon being deployed to the target area.

Former Sen. Harry Reid sits for an interview with filmmaker James Fox during production of his upcoming documentary, “The Phenomenon”/CREDIT: James Fox

O’Brien titillated the geek world in 2018 by announcing the start of a campaign to document peculiar goings-on in and around Colorado’s San Luis Valley, home to the La Veta Military Operations Area. It’s a Herculean challenge that pivots, in part, on UFODAP’s ability to screen out false positives like insects, birds and clouds. And the effort has been hampered by some logistical setbacks over the past year. Even so, UFODAP’s potential has attracted commercial interest, obviously, so there’s plenty to discuss on that front.

But O’Brien also wanted to swing some attention over to something he expects will make a more immediate impact on public opinion. In October, he got a studio screening of an upcoming documentary from James Fox.

“OK, I’m one of the most jaded, cynical – even bitter, at times – people about what goes on in the field, with the charlatans, with people not getting along, and everybody at each other’s throats,” he said from New York. “And I’m not a fanboy, I don’t gush. But I gotta tellya, at the end of this film, I was sitting there crying like a baby. And I’m going, ‘James, this is so over the freakin’ top, there won’t be a dry eye in the house when people see this.’

“I don’t think anybody who knows anything about this field is gonna walk out of there not completely blown away. It’s about time a film like this was done – and he’s got enough material to do a 10-part mini-series on each subject. There’s no way this isn’t gonna be a smash hit. It’s the best thing he’s ever done.”

It’s been 10 years since Fox released his last doc, “I Know What I Saw,” and 16 since “Out of the Blue.” Both were good news for folks who wondered if there were any filmmakers out there capable of handling the UFO issue with even a baseline of competence. But the old showbiz saw about being only as good as your last act means that newcomers may remember only the 2013 disaster, National Geographic’s stupendously insipid “Chasing UFOs” series. Fox didn’t create it, but he had a lead role in the reality show buffoonery.

But it wasn’t a complete waste, because it taught him a lesson.

“I’ve always been independent, and the one time I strayed, I regretted it,” Fox says. “I was lucky enough to get financial backing, which allowed me to maintain full control this time. And if I can’t do that, I’m never gonna do it again.”

Narrated by Peter Coyote, with big-screen theatrical release set for June, Fox’s latest is called “The Phenomenon.” And, given the rapidly changing, content-shaping sweep of events over the past few years, it may be his most disciplined and focused piece of work. The evolving story forced Fox to keep repeating the mission mantra to his team: “Remember where we’re going – we’re on the road to Ruwa.”

The incident that occurred in Ruwa, Zimbawe, 25 years ago may be among ufology’s most obscure, but a fuller accounting of what scores of racially diverse schoolkids saw while on recess at their playground has been eagerly anticipated for years, if not decades. The story is part of the legacy of the late Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard Med School psychiatrist John Mack, who put his professional reputation on the line in 1994 with his nonfiction bestseller Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens.

That same year, a crowd-sized Close Encounter of the Third Kind at the Ariel School warranted BBC coverage and provoked a brief flurry of headlines before getting drowned out by genocide in Rwanda. Within weeks, Mack rushed to Africa to gather video testimonials from elementary school students at the rural school.

Mack died in 2004, and his interviews were never edited into a polished narrative. Or at least, not until the John E. Mack Institute (JEMI) reached out to filmmaker Randall Nickerson, who began trying to revive the story in 2008.

That marked the first of Nickerson’s three trips to Zimbabwe to locate and re-interview as many eyewitnesses as he could find. The result is a feature-length film called “Ariel Phenomenon,” and its website posts endorsements from the likes of Hollywood special effects wizard Douglas Trumbull, actor Dan Aykroyd, and Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean, who broke the AATIP story for the New York Times in 2017.

But budgeting has long plagued “Ariel Phenomenon,” and no release date has been announced. But as Will Bueche, speaking for the Mack estate, said in an email to De Void, “JEMI felt comfortable licensing [Fox] a few minutes of that archival footage (5 to 10 minutes) because the two documentaries (Nickerson’s and his) are different in tone and intended audiences.”

While Nickerson’s film focuses exclusively on Ruwa, Fox’s work reaches back to the mid-century dawn of the flying saucer era. Its initial working title was “701,” to acknowledge the number of UFO cases the Air Force officially failed to solve when its Project Blue Book went dark in 1969, and only the hardcores will know all of the old cases exhumed by Fox. It’s a large canvas that stretches from the post-WWII era and into the second decade of the 21st century with the AATIP controversy.

But Fox’s 6.5-year globetrotting odyssey – which spanned five continents, with guidance from pioneering researcher Jacques Valle – is going for something a lot more complicated than a timeline.

James Fox relaxes with the Ariel School eyewitnesses he assembled for a reunion more than 20 years after the UFO incident./CREDIT: James Fox

“This is the first time I’ve attempted to explore the intelligence behind the phenomenon,” he says. “There’s familiar material, but we’re putting it into a new light with new testimonies. This is not just about structured craft of unknown origin whizzing above our airspace with impunity. There’s a potential agenda, a message, a mission, an intelligence.”

Fox went deep into history in order to properly frame the Ariel School incident, which becomes the kicker for “The Phenomenon.” For perhaps as long as 15 minutes during recess, the kids watched two occupants emerge from a silver-domed craft than landed in the bush bordering the playground. Shortish visitors, big heads, large black eyes, clad in what appeared to be black body suits. With so many witnesses, discrepancies over the details were inevitable.

“The impression I got from everyone I talked to was that this craft would kind of slip in and out of dimension,” Fox says, “like it would appear here, then it would be over there, or it was hovering just above the ground, or the occupants would appear on top of the craft, or next to the craft, or just in front of them, like they were blinking in and out of our reality very quickly. They all said it ended when the schoolbell rang, and I heard one or two of them say the object took off so quickly it was almost like if you blinked, you would’ve missed it.”

Variously fascinated by and fearful of what they’d seen, the kids drew pictures of the encounter immediately thereafter. If they agreed on one thing, it might be that the visitors communicated silently, nonverbally, via telepathic images. At least part of the message involved ecology.

After acquiring a sampling of vintage interviews from JEMI, “We brought some of them together for the first time in almost 20 years,” Fox says. “We flew them to the U.S. and then I flew to Africa and found maybe another seven or eight? We got 12 or 15, maybe, altogether. It took a couple of years.

“A lot of them hadn’t even talked to their spouses about it. They never had time to process what they saw, not really. It was like the adults just kind of exploited them, extracted what they needed and then left them to their own devices to deal with the level of impact it had on their lives. It changed them forever. I mean, imagine having face to face contact. Some of the kids evidently had a download from their eyes. How do you process that?”

Fox invited O’Brien to his place in the SF Bay area for a sneak preview because he wanted a fresh set of eyes to see if he was missing anything. O’Brien says Fox found clips, witnesses and interviews he never knew existed.

“James worked his ass off to get it. Even Jacques was surprised,” O’Brien says. “But these Ariel School kids – at the end, you get the chills because you see them in the beginning, as 9- and 10-year-olds, and they all have the thousand-yard stare, and there’s no way they could fake that. And then to see them today … like I said, this is one of the most powerful things I’ve ever seen.”

Trailers could start making the multiplex rounds as early as this holiday season.