Here’s a question: what event best defines the latter half of the 20th Century? The development of the atomic bomb? The birth of the internet? The emergence of the multichannel television universe? Documentary filmmaker David Cherniack suggests the real answer might just be elsewhere, in the July 24, 1947 sighting near Washington State’s Mt. Ranier of seven mysterious metallic objects zooming across the sky at impossible speeds.

As Cherniack charts in his remarkable new feature-length documentary UFOs: THE SECRET HISTORY, from that July 24, 1947 moment forward a deluge of additional reports of sightings of what came to be known as ‘unidentified flying objects’, or ‘UFOs’, flooded in, including the now-famous incident two weeks later in Roswell, New Mexico.

And from these events emerged a mythology that would change our entire civilization: it was the cataclysmic instant when we began to acknowledge the possibility that there were others out there far more advanced than us. On a par with the revolutionary theory that the Earth revolved around the Sun and not the other way round, these first, stunning reports of UFO sightings began to change our perception of ourselves to the startling revelation that, instead of the pinnacle of creation, we should think of ourselves as mere babes emerging at glacial speed from our planetary cradle.

The 1947 sighting at Mt. Ranier was also important because the story of how the momentous question “Are we being visited?” arose, evolved, and was eventually dismissed by much of mainstream culture tells us much about our civilization, its hopes, its fears and its secret workings. UFOs: THE SECRET HISTORY tells that story, from 1947 to the present.