We Are Not Alone

Produced by Oliver Sanders (UK 2024)

27 min

In 1980, Prestonwood Mall in Dallas contacted the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) with a unique request. It was the opening weekend of The Empire Strikes Back, and the mall’s marketing team wanted an additional attraction. Sensing an opportunity, John P Timmerman, the owner of a family air-conditioning business in Ohio and a dedicated volunteer at CUFOS, packed his car with an eye-catching collection of UFO photographs and embarked on a cross-country journey for the weekend.What began as a simple photography exhibit turned into a 12year research expedition across the malls of America.

In front of plexiglass panels, between the skylights and shiny floors, Timmerman interviewed curious shoppers with stories to tell. What he captured on his small tape recorder was the “raw material of ufology” - candid, first-hand accounts of strange lights, silver discs, and close encounters. Between 1980 and 1992, Timmerman recorded 1,179 witness reports across 120 tapes that cover every aspect of the UFO phenomena.

The collection is considered one of the largest ever put together by a single investigator.John P Timmerman spent years travelling far from his quiet family life in the Midwest searching for insights into our place in the universe. What he found, among the hum of escalators and muzak, was connection - or ‘contact’ - with thousands of ordinary people, all searching for the same thing.

Produced, Edited & Sound Designed by Oliver Sanders
Archive Digitisation & Co-Production by James Timmerman
Executive Producer: Lucia Scazzocchio

Special thanks to Dr Mark Rodeghier, Dr Michael Swords, Dr Michael West, The Center For UFO Studies, The Timmerman Family, Dominic De Vere, Francesca Thakorlal, Ben Plumb, Hannah Kemp-Welch

A Social Broadcasts production for BBCRadio 4 and BBC Illuminated Podcast

---

In The Dark Bristol: Rewinding Time - Connecting Through Cassette

Alfie Skinner (UK 2021)

11 min

In The Dark Bristol - New Producers

A social history documentary bringing the 19-year-old Producer closer to finding out what his parents were like when they were his own age.

Going through their boxes of old records and cassettes, Alfie discovers long-treasured taped voice recordings, made by his Mum and Dad for each other in 1996.

Alfie’s parents met when his Dad was 19 and his Mum was 18. Just months after getting together, they were geographically separated, when his Mum went to teach at a school in the rural areas of Zimbabwe on her Gap Year, leaving his Dad back in Bristol.

The village where Alfie’s Mum was staying was really cut off - with no electricity, running water or phone-lines. Without being able to call or email, to stay connected, his parents’ recorded spoken letters for each other on cassette tapes and sent them by post, never imagining that anyone else would be listening to them 25 years later!

Curious about the technology that Alfie’s parents used to keep in touch, he and his girlfriend use isolation in lockdown to experiment with making their own tapes to communicate with each other.

Despite his excruciating embarrassment at having to listen to his parent’s recorded love letters to make the programme, Alfie comes to realise the important role that the tapes played in their relationship and, in a way, if they didn’t exist, then he might not either!

Produced by Alfie Skinner

---