Weird Documentaries: The Golden Age of Paranormal Cinema — 1970 to 1981
I’ve been fascinated by the paranormal since I was a kid, and this episode of Fascinating Nouns finally gave me the language to describe why — because I grew up watching weird documentaries. In this Halloween episode, I sit down with film historian, author, and professor Gary D. Rhodes to explore his book Weirdumentary, published by Feral House, which chronicles the remarkable subgenre of paranormal documentary films that dominated American cinema and television throughout the 1970s.
The weird documentary was born in 1970 with the theatrical release of the documentary adaptation of Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods — which was nominated for an Academy Award that year — and culminated in 1981 with Orson Welles hosting The Man Who Saw Tomorrow for Warner Brothers. In between, a brilliant Utah-based company called Sun Classic Pictures four-walled theaters across America, bringing family-friendly films about ancient aliens, Bigfoot, the Bermuda Triangle, the Loch Ness Monster, near-death experiences, and telekinesis to mainstream audiences who were genuinely willing to ask the question: what if?
The genre had three defining ingredients: fringe topics at the edges of accepted science, celebrity hosts like Leonard Nimoy, Rod Serling, and Orson Welles who lent credibility and gravitas, and low-budget dramatic recreations that somehow felt completely convincing to a generation of kids watching in movie theaters. It was also backed by real academic interest — parapsychology programs at Stanford, Duke, and UCLA were actively studying these phenomena in the same era.
This conversation covers the Bermuda Triangle and the Bimini Wall, Legend of Boggy Creek, Mysterious Monsters, the In Search Of television series, the end of the genre around 1981, its modern revival through Ancient Aliens and The Unexplained, and the broader question of why healthy skepticism and genuine open-mindedness are both necessary — and increasingly rare.
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