A 24-year-old shot an alien abduction movie for $6,500 in a single night. A retired Air Force lieutenant colonel watched it and decided it was real.

UFO ABDUCTION (1989), now better known as THE McPHERSON TAPE, is one of the earliest found footage horror films, made a full decade before The Blair Witch Project taught audiences to distrust a shaky camera.

The premise is simple. A family gathers to celebrate a child's fifth birthday. Someone records the evening on a camcorder. The lights go out. What comes through the door is not human.

Then the story leaves the screen and gets stranger.

The master copy burned in a warehouse fire months before release. A few credit-stripped bootlegs survived and drifted into the UFO community, where viewers traded them as real evidence of an abduction.

Retired US Air Force lieutenant colonel Donald Ware presented the tape at the 1993 International UFO Congress Convention in Las Vegas. He reportedly said the people on camera showed so much genuine emotion that "if they were actors they ought to get an Oscar or an Emmy."

When director Dean Alioto remade the film for television in 1998, stubborn believers insisted the government had hired him to discredit his own "authentic" footage.

Alioto has spent years posting behind-the-scenes photos of the kids in alien costumes. Still, many remain convinced the footage documents a real alien abduction.