David Huggins, the 72-year-old subject of director Brad Abrahams’s documentary Love and Saucers, is not shy about sharing what sets him apart from almost everyone else in the world. As the film begins, he matter-of-factly states, “When I was 17, I lost my virginity to a female extraterrestrial.”
The Hoboken, New Jersey, resident is well-liked by his neighbors and area residents and seems to live a quiet, rather nondescript life, except for the fact that he has been obsessively painting about his visits from space aliens for decades. These visits began when his family lived on a remote Georgia farm in the 1950s, when he was 8 years old. Huggins states that at the age of 17, he had sex with an alien named Crescent for the first time. After he moved to New York to study art, he said that she began haunting his dreams, then was his girlfriend, and eventually became the mother of many of their alien–human hybrid babies.
Abrahams films Huggins talking to the camera in a no-nonsense manner, with shots of his copious amount of paintings depicting his close encounters interspersed throughout. The director allows the supposed contactee to tell his story without judgement and to let viewers decide for themselves what aspects of Huggins’s life might be “real” as they see it, and how he perceives it.
Abrahams also presents input from several people who know of Huggins in one way or another, from his boss at the deli to a professor of religion and philosophy at Rice University, neighbors who both do and don’t know about his contactee story, other contactees, and his son. No matter how skeptical or receptive they are regarding Huggins’s declarations, they all feel that he is sincere in what he relates to the world and accepting, and rather confident, of his place in it.
For potential viewers who might not be interested in Love and Saucers at its surface-level topic of a man who claims to be the loving father of a large number of hybrid babies living on another world and his sexual escapades with his alien lover, the documentary offers other things to ponder, as well. Huggins’s approach to outsider art is given plenty of screen time, including a gallery opening of his work. Certainly, there is plenty of psychological material to mine, as well, for those interested in considering theories as to what may have started and fostered Huggins’s lifelong beliefs in what has continued to happen with him.
Love and Saucers is a well-crafted, uncomplicated, accessible documentary that simply allows its subject to tell his story. Abrahams doesn’t try to tip the scales in favor of his subject or against him, which is a refreshing approach when many similarly themed documentaries tend to make their subjects seem either laughable, psychologically troubled, or the only people who know the real truth of what is going on in the universe. It is an intriguing work worth seeking out.
