In 1992, a now infamous study claimed that as many as 3.7 million Americans may suffer from “UFO abduction syndrome,” or the belief that they had an encounter with extraterrestrial visitors. This study has been criticized on both methodological and logical grounds, but there is no doubt that people who claim to have been abducted by aliens exist in significant numbers.

Many researchers in the past two decades have tried to account for the prevalence of UFO encounters by likening it to a religious impulse or the manifestation of a psychopathology. In the absence of hard evidence of an alien encounter, seeking alternative explanations for reports of ET abductions makes sense. But what if material evidence of these encounters does exist?

This is the conceit of Patient Seventeen, a new documentary released last month by Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell. Patient Seventeen chronicles the final surgery of Roger Leir, a foot surgeon and prominent ufologist who claimed to remove extraterrestrial nanotechnology that had been embedded in his patients.

To read more and view the video, click here.