Tribeca’s Strangest Doc Tells the Weird, Wild Stories of UFO Abductees

In 2021, Scarsdale, New York, resident Dave Rivera saw a UFO. While practicing meditation in a playground outside his apartment building, Rivera noticed an inexplicable orb in the sky that didn’t have a propeller, appeared to be teleporting about, was intermittently shining a bright light, and didn’t move like a plane or a drone. Stunned, the young man took out his phone and recorded this event, and his story was soon picked up by a local TV news affiliate—a fact that Rivera relays to one of the many customers frequenting the car wash where he works. Rivera subsequently sent his video to the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) to determine the precise nature of what he’d witnesses, and to this day, he remains convinced that he had a legitimate close encounter of the third kind.

That said, Rivera also confesses that, on that fateful afternoon, he had eaten 1.9 grams of psychedelic mushrooms and was smoking a blunt, which makes his experience a far cry from reliable.

Such are the dubious anecdotes of They’re Here, a documentary (premiering at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival) about a collection of disparate New Yorkers who claim to have seen UFOs or been abducted by aliens. Daniel Claridge and Pacho Velez’s film is full of personalities that are as unique and sad as Rivera, and who are fixated on the possibility of aliens visiting Earth. What it’s short on, however, is a depth that might make it resonate as more than just a mishmash of kooky personalities with out-there views about themselves, the universe, and the little green men who supposedly monitor and analyze us from their flying saucers. Frustratingly superficial, it’s a non-fiction affair that cares less about saying something significant than about imparting quirky vibes.

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