When discussed, the topic of alien abduction can often lead to one of the following reactions: mocking laughter and derision, or the conclusion that an abductee is contending with a psychological condition, rather than an actual abduction. Brad Abrahams’s documentary Love & Saucers (2017) stands out for its lack of sensationalism and respect for its subject, the Hoboken painter David Huggins. His paintings, which fill his apartment, illustrate his lifelong sexual encounters with aliens. Instead of arguing with him about how real the dreams in which he has sex with aliens are, Abrahams pays careful attention to their meaning in his life.
“When I was 17, I lost my virginity to a female extraterrestrial,” Huggins says at the outset of the film. His art serves as a visual memoir of his encounters, which began in 1951, when he was a child living in rural Georgia. Reading Budd Hopkins’s book Intruders: The Incredible Visitations at Copley Woods (1987) led him to an epiphany about his experiences with aliens. He suddenly realized that he had been feeling that he was going through the exact same thing as the book’s subjects. His earthbound marriage and fatherhood ran parallel to a relationship with his alien girlfriend, Crescent. Their years of nighttime sex had resulted in dozens of hybrid children.
In the film, Huggins recounts all of this from his Hoboken apartment, surrounded by his paintings. Love & Saucers doesn’t venture much further outside, but it gradually introduces other people in his world: a neighbor, the boss at the deli where he works part-time, his son Michael, and religious studies professor Jeffrey Kripal. Despite the nightmare fuel behind many of Huggins’s encounters, the tone of Love & Saucers is quite gentle. It becomes clear that Huggins has been successful at taming anxiety by incorporating high strangeness into his life through art. (In fact, he states an alien suggested that he start painting.) Influenced by the Impressionists, he paints landscapes in which giant crickets and black-haired female aliens casually prowl across America’s backyards. At the end of the film, following a segment dedicated to Huggins’s first major gallery exhibition, Abrahams plays a montage of his paintings over the closing credits.
Before this documentary was made in 2017, Huggins already had a reputation as an outsider artist. His work, with its sexualized aliens and allusions to forms of abuse and assault, could be seen as a form of cosmic horror, but the painter sees it in a more positive light. Love & Saucers goes along with him, shying away from skepticism. No matter what’s happened in his life, Love & Saucers presents Huggins as an ordinary man with some very unusual beliefs, not as a freak.
Love & Saucers screens tonight, September 8, and throughout the month at Spectacle as part of the series “I Know You’re Out There: Love, Fear, and Aliens.” Director Brad Abrahams will be present for a Q&A following the screening on September 30.
