I sat up front, enjoyed the opening drum, sax, and knob-twiddling from BSA Gold, and prepared to enjoy the film, which starts strong in sharp black and white then gradually lets me down. A worthwhile story framed as a protracted podcast mystery, withholding information so it can introduce twists, the interviewees frustratingly vague. Lot of archive footage including TV appearances by our participants on alien report shows. Ultimately when unknotted, it seems that Ernesto, who ran sound and acted for Ruiz in 1970, became a Pinochet supporter involved in the disappearance/murder of government critics. In the 1980s he gets into radio and invents a Friendship Island story, maybe playing different roles to expand the conspiracy, becomes friendly with some other radio people who’d planned to travel to the island but who turned back on the day of the Challenger explosion. The alien cult stories spread locally but nobody seems to have found (looked for?) the island. We see Ernesto in person, belatedly, and his funeral. The director previously made an art theft doc.