Jordan Peele’s NOPE Is An Essential Entry In The Pantheon Of UFO Movies

The UFO in Jordan Peele’s NOPE. Image Credit: Universal Pictures

Written by Justin Scott Snead - 8 August 2022

For the UFO Community, NOPE compels us to ask: do you want the 23 minute high-definition video, or do you want to forge a deeper understanding of the phenomenon’s true nature?  

We may not be able to have both.

Sometime in early 2004 the crew of the USS Ronald Reagan was treated to an absolute spectacle. The nuclear powered aircraft carrier was doing flight operations off the east coast of the United States. One night, a UFO hovered 200 feet above the aft flight deck and trailed the ship for hours. It was an unusual UFO because it was shaped like an egg and appeared to be covered in fire. 

The event was kept secret by the navy until witnesses began speaking out in 2021. The online newspage The Debrief recently interviewed a dozen witnesses who were on the ship that night. They all describe a large, orange-glowing object with a fiery surface. 

“It was oval-shaped… it didn’t look solid,” one witness said, adding that it was “glowing, gaseous” with a swirling movement on its surface. Another witness said, “it was wavy, but somehow still solid like a plasma almost.” A third witness described the surface as “translucent” and “viscous” and moved like the globs inside of a lava lamp. A fourth witness said this movement resembled a “science video of the sun close up.”

While everyone agreed it was a bonafide UFO, no one dared to guess exactly what it was. A witness named Karol Olesiak wrote: “the insinuation that these are crafts seems like techno-fetishism to me… To a pilot everything is a craft.” It’s almost like they got the feeling that this thing was alive. 

For some of the crew, this UFO experience not only altered the course of their lives, but changed their perception of reality...   

But wait! You thought you were reading a movie review for NOPE. You are, dear reader, a Liberation Times movie review. 

Spoiler Alert: I’m going to stay a little vague on the plot, but if you haven't seen NOPE, go see it, come back and read this, then go see it again. 

OJ, Angel, and Em look for the UFO. Image Credit: Universal Pictures

NOPE’s basic premise is that a UFO is haunting a family of Hollywood horse trainers on their ranch. While it looks like a classic flying saucer, like the USS Ronald Reagan’s fiery egg, this UFO is a little different from what we expect. It doesn't so much abduct people, but eats them. It hangs out over the ranch, occasionally expelling the undigested bits on their house. The brother, OJ Haywood, played by Daniel Kaluuya, and sister, Emerald Haywood, played by Keke Palmer, hatch a plan to capture high-definition video of the UFO so they can be the first ones to prove to the world that UFOs are real. They want what all of us crave, especially now--proof, and a splashy reveal. They want a spectacle--what Em calls the “money shot” that would get them interviewed by Oprah. 

But really, this is what Em wants. For help she conscripts a camera tech named Angel, played by Brandon Perea, and a Hollywood cinematographer with the great name Antlers Holst, played by Michael Wincott. OJ is not really interested in getting “the Oprah shot.” He just wants the thing to go away.  

Their scheme, which includes a complex camera set up that the Galileo Project would be envious of, ends with a climactic faceoff with the UFO. The four UFO hunters get their footage. At this point in the movie, there are two mystifying decisions two characters make, which if we understand them, will help us unlock the movie’s message.   

Why does the Antlers Holst step out of his hiding place hoping that the UFO will eat him and his camera footage? Why does OJ step into the path of the UFO confident that it won’t do the same to him? The answers to these two questions are aimed at the very heart of the UFO community in its current predicaments. 

The Problem of Spectacle-ization

Writer/Director Jordan Peele has said that one of the questions NOPE is trying to answer is why five years of public disclosure of startling UFO evidence has not produced a firmer and more widespread belief in the reality of UFOs.  

The Pentagon has admitted that it secretly started a serious UFO investigation in 2008, and that it continues to this day. We have seen Pentagon-verified video of fighter pilots chasing UFOs, and seen a UFO disappear into the ocean. The head of the entire U.S. Intelligence Community released a public report that said the military has observed craft that seem to exhibit “breakthrough aerospace capabilities” and which cannot be explained by current science. Current and former government officials, including politicians, speak openly about the likelihood of extraterrestrials visiting the Earth.  

Why is this not enough?   

Peele’s answer is that we are all addicted to spectacle, and that our culture’s over-saturation of spectacle has deadened our senses to such a point that our perception of reality is impaired. 

In a promotional interview for the film, Peele explained: “Spectacle harms us in many ways. Whether it is because we give it too much power, because it has a spectacular nature to it, or because we use the spectacle to distract ourselves from the truth.” 

In the UFO community, we hear the excuses all the time. There should be clear, unambiguous, close-range video. We need to be able to kick the tires of the crash retrieval. We need to see the UFO land on the White House lawn. This high bar for UFO acceptance has been the expectation of the public, and even some government investigators, since the very start of the flying saucer era.

This expectation of a spectacle creates a tendency to assume that something so big, so earth-shatteringly significant as otherworldly visitors would present itself as a much bigger deal. Surely they would put on a flashier show for us. And if anyone had indisputable evidence, surely they would make a spectacle of themselves. They would go on Oprah. 

NOPE says this is a trap. With UFOs, expecting to find a spectacle, or trying to create a spectacle out of them, blinds us from seeing what is right in front of our face. The problem with spectacle is that too much is never enough. The UFO could land in D.C. or light atop the Empire State Building, and it might not be enough.

Peele warns against what he calls spectacle-ization, which is “any time we’re going to make money off of the human need to see something crazy.” In NOPE, bad things happen to people who participate in the creation of spectacles. 

A flashback sequence that frames the movie takes place during the filming of a cheesy, saccharine sitcom in the mid-1990s. This TV show is about an NASA scientist and his wife who have adopted a space chimp named Gordy to raise alongside their son and daughter, hijinks ensue. While filming an episode, Gordy rapages. When Peele drops us into the flashback, the live studio audience has fled, and the four actors are in the process of having their faces eaten off. 

The only actor not harmed is the boy who plays the son. In a parallel to an interaction with the UFO in NOPE’s climax, the boy does not look Gordy in the eye. He is the only one not making a spectacle of the chimp, and Gordy seems to appreciate the gesture of respect.    

Unfortunately that boy did not internalize the lesson. He grows up to be a showman, Ricky ‘Jupe’ Park, played by Steven Yeun. Jupe runs an Old West theme park near the Haywood’s ranch, and buys horses from OJ. When Jupe convenes his own live audience and tries to make the UFO a star attraction--the Star Lasso Experience--let’s just say the UFO reacts to that about as well as Gordy did.  

Jupe introduces the Star Lasso Experience. Image Credit: Universal Pictures

Another example of the curse of spectacle is the Haywood family. Why did the UFO choose to park itself over this particular ranch? The answer is not part of the plot, but thematically its presence could be retribution because their family is partly responsible for the entire motion picture industry. The Haywood’s are referred to as “Motion Picture royalty” because a 19th Century ancestor was the very first actor to appear in a moving picture, a two second clip of a man riding a horse. (The way that clip is described in the film is historically accurate, but the name of the rider was never deemed significant enough to record for the history books.)  

With these examples, Peele shows his ambivalence toward showbusiness. NOPE is both a love-letter to the movies, but also a criticism of its products. He describes Hollywood as “the industry and business of spectacle” and that while there is “magic to it… there is also something insidious about it.” He calls this insidiousness the “violence of attention.” 

Gordy felt that violence, and lashed out against it. Maybe the UFO does too. And what is the audience of these spectacles supposed to make of this dynamic? Are they seeing clearly? Certainly not. 

When it comes to UFOs, skeptics usually say witnesses and experiencers only project onto conventional objects what they have seen in the movies. The other side of that coin is that most of the public won’t accept UFOs until they resemble what they have seen in the movies--until they see the Oprah shot.  

Which brings us back to the cinematographer’s dilemma. By the end of NOPE, Antlers Holst has got his Oprah shot, filmed on an IMAX camera no less. He then realizes what will happen next. His film will be replayed on an endless loop on all the cable news networks. It will be played endlessly in movie theaters like WWII newsreels, and then it will go to YouTube where he will make a killing. He will, of course, be interviewed by Oprah.    

There is only one problem. He happened to have seen the UFO with his own eyes. He experienced its essential nature. He knows that it is real, but also that its truth was not captured on film, and never will be. He knows that when the eight billion pairs of eyes stare into that film, they will not see what he saw. They will whip up a spectacle that might make Gordy’s rampage look like a picnic.   

So what does he do? He stands up, declares “We don’t deserve the impossible,” and he destroys the film--fittingly, he does this in a rather spectacular fashion. 

Up until this moment Holst is sane and grounded. He is a passionate artist devoted to filming nature and getting the kind of money shots he had just procured. His act of sacrifice might seem senseless, but I suspect anyone who has actually seen a UFO with their own eyes can relate to him quite clearly in that moment. There is at least one crewman of the USS Ronald Reagan who does. 

The NOPE cast: Steven Yeun, Daniel Kaluuya, Jordan Peele, Keke Palmer and Brandon Perea. Image Credit: Gilbert Flores for Variety

Karol Olesiak is also a passionate artist who saw a UFO. He is a poet and activist, and his website Soldiers for the Cause was the first published account of the encounter with the fiery “orange orb.” While the UFO was floating 200 feet above the flight deck, Olesiak was Quartermaster of the Watch stationed on the bridge. He says he was eye level with the object for four hours. 

Olesiak had been a “UFO enthusiast” since he was a boy. But after actually seeing one, “the incident didn’t satisfy the curiosity I had carried with me.” In fact it only increased the mystery. For one, he writes, “what we saw looks nothing like the things being recorded by pilots on gun cameras” or, for that matter, anything like the classic flying saucer depicted in movies like NOPE. During the event he got the distinct impression that “different sailors seem to be seeing different things.” What he saw in those four hours put him in mind of the burning bush from Exodus. (Even Moses, after receiving some clear, simple directions from that bush, proceeded to ask it a series of follow up questions.) 

Such an anomalous encounter is both straightforward and difficult to process with our rational brains. Olesiak writes that in order to actually believe in these anomalous events, “we have to explore our wiring,” and he questions whether there is any amount of training or education “ample to interpret such an experience.”

“I think it speaks more to the nature of reality than alien life visiting [us]. Nick Bostrom’s assertion that we might be living in a simulated universe holds more credence when you experience something like this. Otherworldliness is just a feeling after all and we are due for a Copernican Revolution.” 

It is for this reason, he concludes, that taking pictures of the sky in hopes of capturing a UFO is probably a waste of time. 

“The fact that we accept photographic evidence as assurance might be another problem. Or that our first instinct in such an encounter is to record somehow. As if that will make it more real. At this stage, the exploration of this feeling of otherworldliness that people get just by seeing the way that the phenomenon moves might warrant study.”

The Copernican Revolution will not only be televised, it will stream on an endless loop on YouTube. Which means it won’t produce an actual revolution at all. Reduced to mere spectacle, the captured UFO will cease to be otherworldly, and therefore it will cease to be true. 

Olesiak drew these conclusions fifteen years after his experience, but in NOPE it seemed to have hit Holst all at once in a moment of epiphany. He saw this coming and chose to give his life to prevent it. 

But what about OJ? His experience with the UFO was different. Whereas Holst saw unbridgeable difference, OJ saw connection. This too has lessons that speak to our current moment.  

The Hope of Connection

OJ faces the UFO. Image Credit: Universal Pictures

The insights NOPE has to offer cannot be separated from the fact that they derive from the experience of the Black writer/director, and his cast. Peele has said that his intention was to make a “great American flying saucer film,” but that “you can’t have Black people in a flying saucer film and have it be the same experience. There is a different relationship.”

When diverse voices are invited to give their take on things, they discover what others have missed, and so it is with the UFO phenomenon. 

Black Americans have a complex relationship with spectacle. Throughout American history, spectacle helped enforce a system of oppression, and also defeated that system. 

Spectacle is also deeply personal. Ask any boy or girl who is the only Black kid in the classroom what spectacle means to them. NOPE’s OJ was that boy. He grew up in southern California under the puzzled gaze like that of the white actress at the start of the NOPE, who seems to be trying to compute how such a handsome Black man could have a name like OJ. 

OJ is the only one of the five main characters who is not interested in filming the UFO. His goal is to buck it, and his experience as a horse trainer has taught him that the only way to do that is to form a bond. When Em, Holts, and Angel are hatching their scheme, he tells them, “Every animal’s got rules… Know how it comes. You got to enter into an agreement with one.”  He nicknames the UFO Jean Jacket, after a horse he was never able to train.

He then employs a series of standard horse training techniques on the UFO. Above all, he is patient. He is careful not to look directly at it. This is what he would do with any horse. It is also a way of showing the UFO that he won’t treat it as a spectacle, but will take it on its own terms as a fellow living being. 

When the alien finally emerges from its UFO, it puts its face right up against OJ’s. In the crucial moment of the film, OJ lifts his gaze to meet it, with all that history of spectacle etched on his face. They are eye-to-eye, but the alien does not attack like it has every other time. They understand each other, one spectacle to another. Because OJ honored the alien’s true self, the dark spell of spectacle-ization is broken.  

One day, perhaps soon, we will finally come face to face with whatever UFOs are. Either we will meet them in person, or we will get to see that 23 minute Oprah shot that the Pentagon is sitting on and has allegedly shown members of Congress. When that day comes, will we see them as merely spectacles? Or will we stand and face them as OJ does? OJ is able to see the UFO’s true nature because of his life experience and his upbringing.

What about the rest of us? Are we ready?