Do you believe in aliens? It’s a question that can really divide a room, but for zoologist and filmmaker Alexis Smith, it’s also a question that can be used to ask bigger questions about our own lives: where do we come from? How do we find connection in a stretched world… and are we alone out there? In her new documentary, Out There, Alexis joins up with a group looking to make contact with extraterrestrials and explores how Aotearoa became a surprising hot spot in the global search for aliens.
“From the perspective of people in New Zealand, I don’t think they know that this is going on here,” says Alexis Smith, a Zoologist and documentary maker whose latest project, Out There: A Search For Extraterrestrials, asks the big, existential question of: are we alone out there?
And it turns out, all our protected dark sky areas around the country, where unnatural light sources are kept to an absolute minimum, have made us something of an alien “hot spot,” Alexis says. “People come from far away, because there are lots of vast expanses of rural land, which is a better place to look for ETs – you’re not surrounded by light pollution, and also there are less people, in case the ETs want to reveal themselves more privately.”
‘The overwhelming majority of people that I interviewed have said that every encounter they’ve had has been full of love’
‘ETs’ stands of extraterrestrials. As far as ice breakers go, ‘Do you believe in aliens’ is right up there with a sentence starter that will divide a room quickly, and when we do think of aliens, we’re probably thinking of the big, scary, world-dominating kind. But the extraterrestrial activity that Alexis was aiming to capture in her documentary Out There, screening now as part of the Loading Docs film festival, comes from a place of connection, not fear.
From when Alexis was a child, she has always been consumed by these big, existential questions of ‘where do we come from’ and ‘where do we belong’ – and as a science-minded person, she wanted to look at the alien question from an evidence-based perspective, rather than purely a faith-based one.
So, when she first came across the term CE-5, she was intrigued. Well, firstly the name meant nothing to her – “It was just this random conglomerate of words and numbers that didn’t make any sense to me”, but then she dived deeper. ‘CE-5’ is the short-hand for Close Encounters of The 5th Kind, and is a global movement of people who meditate under the stars in an attempt to communicate with higher dimensional beings, e.g. what you and I might call aliens.
But in the pop culture pantheon of alien portrayals, the higher dimensional beings that CE-5 are reaching out to are far more Mr Burns “I Bring You Peace And Love” than it is the ‘blowing up the White House’ extraterrestrial terrorists of Independence Day.
“It’s so interesting that the picture of extraterrestrial that we’ve been taught to believe is through Hollywood, and it’s these terrifying, gruesome creatures that want to take over our world and kill all of humanity,” Alexis says. “But that is the complete opposite that [Ce-5] say they’re having when they’re meeting what they describe as extraterrestrials.”
“They describe them as other dimensional beings who materialise in our dimension, and appear more as beings of light, that can either show up as orbs or sparks of light, or a humanoid or non-humanoid form,” she says. “But the overwhelming majority of people that I interviewed have said that every encounter they’ve had has been full of love – the greatest love they’ve ever felt – and a deep feeling of peace, and loving, and connection.”
One of the core beliefs of the CE-5 global movement is that “when humanity is ready, these beings are there for us – once we’ve evolved in our own consciousness to a place of harmony and there is love and peace in humanity,” Alexis says. “It is a beautiful concept.”
Unfortunately, we as a global people don’t seem to be heading into the peace and love chapter of humanity any time soon, but that isn’t stopping the CE-5 movement from still having a very enthusiastic following, including here in New Zealand.
In Out There, Alexis joins a local CE-5 group in the South Island, under the picturesque and freezing winter sky by Lake Pukaki – one of Aotearoa’s dark sky reserves. As is CE-5 protocol, the group prepares for the cosmic meet and greet by meditating for the weeks leading up to it, to bring themselves into a state of peaceful connection that will then open the lines of communication with the ETs.
Freezing temperatures aside, it’s a beautiful and serene-looking process – and as the footage of Out There shows, something may indeed have come to join them. The documentary’s cinematographer was Mark Lapwood, one of NZ’s leading cinematographers, and he truly had his work cut out for him on this project. “He had the almost impossible task to film one of the most elusive creatures on earth – to say it lightly – and for them to appear randomly in the sky, and also to film a documentary, in sub-zero temperatures, without any light apart from the moon light,” Alexis says.
Over four nights of filming, the crew were able to pick up some unexplained activity – and it will be something of a litmus test to what you personally believe as to what you think of the footage.
(I absolutely believe there is something out there, but I also once called the police because I saw a weird star, so make of that what you will).
For Alexis, she is still looking for that definitive piece of evidence that will convince her scientific mind. But her experiences in Out There have left her open to believing – and she’s very much not alone in that.
“In my own research, so many people came forward, wanting to tell me their encounter experiences, but they wouldn’t let me use their name,” she says. “There are a lot of people out there who are keeping this secret, and that tells me something.”
Along the way, she spoke to the top UFO investigators in New Zealand, who confirmed the sheer weight of anecdotal experiences they receive. “They’re getting Zoom calls every single day from people who have had encounters and need someone to talk to, because it’s a lot to take in.”
When it comes to her own beliefs, Alexis thinks that, well, why wouldn’t it be possible that aliens are real? “We’re in this vast universe with so much mystery,” she says. “It would be insane if we were the only conscious beings in this vast universe. It feels more realistic to assume that extraterrestrials do exist… and why wouldn’t they be visiting us?”
Season 10 of Loading Docs is out now, with six brand-new documentaries.