Director’s Statement

The Cote photo first entered my life as an image. But what stayed with me was not the object in the sky. It was the silence around it. The decades of questions, whispers, disbelief, and longing that followed. It mirrored the quiet carried by people whose experiences fall outside what we collectively agree is real.

This film is part of a larger personal mission: to listen where others look away, and to share stories that have lived too long in the margins.

In speaking with experiencers of UFO/UAP phenomena, I am not searching for confirmation or contradiction. I am listening for meaning. These are people who have been changed by encounters they cannot fully explain — encounters that changed their understanding of the world and, in some cases, of themselves. Many in the past have lived with ridicule, secrecy, and profound loneliness. To tell their stories is an act of trust. To receive them is an act of responsibility.

I believe storytelling is a form of witnessing. When we listen without trying to fix, label, or contain what we hear, we allow something rare to happen: the speaker is no longer alone with their truth. This film exists to offer that space — for voices that have been dismissed, for memories that resist easy language, for experiences that live somewhere between unease and wonder.

The Cote Photo becomes a touchstone rather than a conclusion. It anchors us to a moment when something appeared and left no clear explanation behind. Like so many human experiences, it asks us not what happened, but what remained.

Visually, the film moves with restraint and reverence — archival textures, open skies, faces held in stillness. The camera does not interrogate, it listens. 

This film is my way of saying: these stories matter. Not because they prove anything, but because they are lived. Because being seen and heard is sometimes the difference between isolation and connection.

I am sharing these stories because they asked to be shared.

As Sergio Loaiza says, “It’s time for me to start telling my stories. To start sharing. Because their mission is to now share their stories.”

Adam Pillon