iIf you had contact with extraterrestrial life, what would you say? How would you understand yourself? What context is universal? To John Shepherd, these are more than hypothetics; they were choices with clear and practical answers. In the 1970s and ’80s, Shepherd made ambitious, sophisticated solo efforts to evict the unknown from his home in northern Michigan. The universal context, he decided, was non-commercial music – Afrobeat, jazz, reggae – blown into space by an extensive collection of machines resembling a spaceship that was slowly buried in a house.
In John Was Trying to Contact Aliens, a tender, groundbreaking short film that premieres on Netflix this month, Shepherd reflects on his decades-long confusion with the potential of outer space – a search for meaning, at least in part, in its small corner of Earth. The 16-minute film, which won the Sundance Short Film Jury Prize in January, finds Shepherd at home, still in northern Michigan, surrounded by machines that now look more at home in a spoof of a sci-fi movie. the 1960s. ‘And I’ll start it up again,’ he says, sitting in front of a wall of buttons. He is bearded, hair in a loose dog star, equal parts shrunken and iverich. A few bends of the dials, some wavy lines, a drum of electric humming, and the search goes on again.
Shepherd was, as it turns out in the film, something of a local mediator in the era of sci-fi movies and space hijackers, and had tried to make contact (the operative word in the title is “try”) foreign beings. Adopted and raised by his grandparents, Shepherd was at an early age interested in what could be – an interest that, when articulated, resembled the longing of many others closer to Earth. “My interest is in finding out the unknown, and the unknown is just that – unknown,” he says in an old news clip that plays into the film’s credits. “And you search, and you will continue searching, because of your desire, because you know there is something.”
Shepherd began building electrical equipment – boxy, tall, covered in dials and screens – in his teens, with the help of his grandfather. Soon the equipment, which Shepherd called “Project Strat” (Special Telemetry Research and Tracking), took up an entire bedroom, then the living room. An old photo captures the comic scope of Shepherd’s work: the right half of the photo may be a Nasa lab – Shepherd with his back to the camera, turning dials on a machine with wall covering her screen with activity crawls – while in the left half, his grandmother snaps while his grandfather leans, as if nothing is to be seen here.
This is the photo where first filmmaker Matthew Killip captured his eye. He read a book about UFOs, and was struck by the contrast of the Shepherd’s house – partly containing scenes of American comfort, partly ambitious range in space. Killip, a British film editor living in Brooklyn, collects Shepherd’s long history of space enriched through YoutTube searches and old newspaper clippings. Soon he was on a plane to northern Michigan. “I just grabbed my camera and flew out,” he told the Guardian. Killip working on his own, no budget or distributor set in place, Killip started filming a few hours after meeting Shepherd.
Killip was interested in extraterrestrial life less than scientific research than cultural phenomenon – “when you make a film about someone trying to make contact with strangers, there’s a built-in narrative problem, which is that they do not make contact with strangers,” he said. hy. But he found that Shepherd had a lifelong interest in making contact with someone, or something, in outer space to be “deeply romantic”, and more universal than a man who had thousands of dollars worth of radio and electrical equipment in the living room of his grandparents rigged. “We all send out a message hoping someone else will pick it up and understand us and understand who we are,” Killip said. “We are all trying to make contact.” John’s story then brings “the search for love, as a place in the world, as a partner who recognizes you, as a family that recognizes you, in a kind of cosmic context”.
“Sometimes, by taking the course I have in my life, the path is like maybe a lonely mountain road to some peaks of higher altitude to see the view, to control what most people do not see,” says Shepherd in an interview aired throughout the film, on the height of his radio in space. “You just do that more.” Despite the film’s brevity, Killip captures the bow of Shepherd’s quest for love on Earth – how Shepherd realized in his younger days that he was gay; how his introverted existence in a small northern town and carefully maintained obsession with space made the opportunity to meet a life partner seem as distant as foreign contact. “To find someone who is on the wavelength, where I am, and who can share my life with any person, is almost impossible,” he says in an old clip, “although I believe it “I believe for everyone, there is one.”
Finally, Shepherd met his match: a mirror for himself also named John, also bearded and long-haired. The two still live in Northern Michigan, and although radio broadcasts in space have stopped in recent years – the equipment is expensive, Shepherd’s interests are closer to Earth – his sense of curiosity remains intact.
As well as the intimate, extended sense of hope, Shepherd, someone who feels as disgusting in the mid-2020s as in Shepherd’s archival footage exclaims the unknown (“If your ETs are there, we want you to tune in tomorrow night at 9pm again for more cultural music, “Shepherd once shrugged in the void with radio towers and enough humor to suggest that strangers tune in to a radio program on Eastern time.) Shepherd’s story offers hope, Killip said. that “either on earth or through space, one can meaningfully connect in your life.”
Thirty years of trying to contact strangers left him with “little hard data,” Shepherd claims in the film, but the process itself was creative, generative, connective enough. “It filled my life,” he says. “It gave it something, meaning.”
.
