Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County (1998) on Netflix
Tommy McPherson, a teenager in Lake County, Montana, is taping his family's Thanksgiving dinner when the power fails. He and his brothers go out to investigate and find a strange object.
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- IMDb6.2/104,183 votes
- Rotten TomatoesNot available
Trailer
Plot summary
The McPherson family gathers for Thanksgiving dinner in Lake County, Montana, while teenage Tommy McPherson keeps his home video camera running. A power cut interrupts the meal. Tommy goes out with his older brothers Kurt and Brian to check the fuse box, then the three walk into the woods toward a transformer that is throwing sparks. In a nearby field they watch a strange object, and two figures come out of it and turn a ray-gun on a cow. The men are spotted and one of the figures burns Brian's hand. Back at the house the family will not believe their account, even after lights cross the sky and a figure appears at a window, until Tommy shows them what he recorded.
Cast
- Katlyn Alexandra Ducharmeas Rosie McPherson
- Katlyn Ducharmeas Rosie
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County (1998)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Because Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County remade an earlier tape by the same director, audiences got confused about which one was the 'original,' and many did not realize the earlier tape, The McPherson Tape, was fiction rather than an authentic recording.
- The broadcast caused a level of confusion likened to Orson Welles's 1938 War of the Worlds panic, partly because UPN aired it immediately after Real Vampires: Exposed!, a tabloid-style vampire special, leading some viewers to believe the alien abduction was also real.
- The film's home-video, found-footage filming style was one of the things that fooled viewers into thinking it was a real recording; that same technique would be popularized a year later by The Blair Witch Project.
- The hoax unraveled online when internet sleuths linked the character Tommy McPherson to the actor who played him, Kristian Ayre, and it was further confirmed when the real Lake County Sheriff's department stated that no family named McPherson had ever lived there.
- When New Zealand's TVNZ broadcast the program, it added a disclaimer calling the show's authenticity 'a topic of dispute' in the US, but cut the closing credits, which prevented New Zealand viewers from seeing that the McPhersons were played by actors.
