Alex Casey talks to filmmaker Alexis Smith about documenting her journey to communicate with extraterrestrial life. 

It began with just a few sudden bursts of light. Filmmaker Alexis Smith had been lying on a trampoline with her friend for a few hours on Waiheke Island, and nothing had happened. Exasperated, she wished aloud – “I wish they would just give me a party in the sky.” Almost immediately, they saw bright lights appear above their heads. “It was so crazy, all these flashes came from nowhere, along with this rush of really nice energy. It was really bizarre.” 

A few hours later, she encountered something even stranger. 

“It was about 2am when we both saw it,” Smith says. “This big aircraft appeared out of the clouds about one kilometre away.” Talking over Zoom, she raises her hands to demonstrate a steady hover. “It was huge, about three times bigger than any big international aircraft, and it was completely silent.” She presents more details: a silver oblong shape, rounded windows, and coloured neon lights around the edges. What she can’t present, sadly, is a photo. 

Whether it’s Sabrina Carpenter pashing an E.T., Alien Romulus getting a certified fresh rating, or the congressional hearing into unidentified aerial phenomenon, extra-terrestrials have beamed themselves back into the mainstream of late. And yet, they raise more questions than ever – NASA’s 2023 report analysed hundreds of UAP sightings and still could not confirm, nor rule out, the presence of “potential unknown alien technology” operating on Earth.

For Smith, the truth about extraterrestrial life has always been on her mind, among many other things. Having studied Zoology in Scotland, Smith followed in the footsteps of her hero David Attenborough by then making documentaries for the BBC. She’s used the genre to explore everything from science explainers to the Church of England, eventually moving to Aotearoa and making Edgewalkers for TVNZ+ and award-winning Te Ara: The Path. 

In her latest documentary Out There, made for Loading Docs season 10, Smith becomes as much of the subject as the beings she is trying to find. In the hopes of removing some of the stigma for people who have seen unexplained things, had unexplained encounters, or just have questions, Smith chose to share a story from her childhood as a part of the documentary. “I still find it nerve-wracking to talk about, because I know it is so strange,” she laughs. 

“One of my first memories I have is being a toddler in the back of the car driving home from my grandparents’ house, and just having this really deep feeling and memory of another place that I had come from that wasn’t Earth,” she says. “I intuitively thought of it as another planet, and I felt this deep, deep yearning to go back.” As she got older she continued to feel the yearning, even drawing maps of outer space “as a reminder to my adult self to never forget.” 

Those maps feature in the documentary Out There, as Smith reaches out to a fascinating group of New Zealanders who meet up regularly in the hopes of communicating with extraterrestrial beings. The group that features in the documentary, CE-5 Aotearoa, describe themselves as a “scientific and diplomatic initiative” seeking to “establish peaceful communication with extraterrestrial intelligence” through meditation protocols.  

At this point, the ungenerous yet necessary question must be asked: aren’t these people all completely delusional tinfoil hat types? “Look, I know exactly what you mean, but there’s none of that,” Smith says. “They’re the loveliest group of people who come from all kinds of backgrounds, all kinds of careers, ages, countries. The one thing that unites them all is their curiosity and desire to be proactive in finding and connecting with extraterrestrials.” 

As Out There confirms, interest in alien life does indeed come from all walks of life. CE5 members featured include a hairdresser, an engineer and materials scientist, and a magazine editor. “I’ve had experiences which can only be described as high strangeness,” says Doug the engineer. Later, he recalls his encounter with a “being” around two feet tall, with “skinny arms and legs” and “two big round black eyes” with only three fingers on each hand. 

The testimonies are buzzy to say the least, but Smith knew that she needed evidence. After a year of working closely with the CE5 group to earn their trust and learn their protocols, she was allowed to bring in a camera crew for four days as they attempted to make contact. “Because of the stigma, it was very scary for them letting a camera crew in,” she says. “But they trusted me that I would be respectful because I was going in and looking for answers myself.” 

On the very first night, it didn’t take long for things to start happening in the sky. “It’s so hard to describe, but it’s as if a ship flew invisibly across the sky and flashed really brightly, then flew invisibly across the sky and flashed really brightly somewhere else.” In the documentary, you can hear the group is delighted, whooping “and again! and again!” at the light show above them. There’s just one problem: the cameras were being repositioned, and missed it. 

It’s a tale as old as time when it comes to UAP encounters, but luckily it wasn’t the crew’s only chance. On their third night of sitting under the stars, Smith says the group requested “close proximity contact” which resulted in hairdresser Kim reporting that she had been “touched” by a being. “No one around the group was moving at all, and she said it felt like it had almost touched her in her bones, and it had sent this energy through her,” says Smith. 

Other members of the group reported sensing a presence behind them, and others saw flashes of light around the group at the same time. Still, that was not enough to convince Smith. It was only months later, after watching hours and hours of footage, that she finally found something on tape that she couldn’t explain. Small sparks of light, momentarily popping up around the group, exactly around the time that Kim reported her close encounter. 

“Of course, I started to look into what else it could be,” Smith says. “We spoke for a long time about all the other possibilities – glow worms, fireflies, starlight reflecting off dew drops, or even pixels in the camera.” But our fireflies and glowworms don’t flash, and the camera never behaved like that at any other point during the shoot. “It all adds up to something very compelling, and something that requires some very deep consideration.” 

Because even though she’s now had multiple unexplained encounters, including the bright lights over Waiheke, Smith still isn’t a full convert just yet. “I am open-minded, but it’s very hard to push me into full belief,” she says. “But with all the research I’ve done and all the people that I’ve met, I have hope that there is something out there.” The next step is to get scientific analysis done on the footage as part of expanding Out There to a feature-length film. 

“I’m really curious to know the truth, and I’m determined to find it,” she says. “So yeah, watch this space.” In more ways than one, potentially. 

Watch the new season of Loading Docs, including Out There, here.