Encounters: alien docu-series coming from Amblin and Netflix in September

Deadline reports that Steven Spielberg‘s Amblin Television is teaming up with Boardwalk Pictures and Vice Studios to bring the four-part docu-series Encounters to the Netflix streaming service – and the premiere date for this show is only a month away! It will be available to watch on Netflix as of September 27th.

Yon Motskin, creator of the Max series Generation Hustle, has directed the four episodes of Encounters, which will explore four extraordinary true stories of encounters with otherworldly phenomena. Each episode tells a single story: strange lights in the sky over small-town Texas; submersible space crafts haunting a coastal Welsh village; an alien encounter with schoolchildren in Zimbabwe and non-human intelligence reportedly interfering with a nuclear power plant in Japan. Told from the perspective of firsthand experiencers – in the places where the sightings occurred – and guided by scientists and military personnel, the series highlights the profoundly human impact of these encounters on lives, families, and communities.

Motskin also executive produced the series with Darryl Frank and Justin Falvey of Amblin Television, Andrew Fried, Jordan Wynn, and Dane Lillegard of Boardwalk Pictures, and Andrew Freston, Danny Gabai, Derek Mead, and Jason Koebler of Vice Studios. Patrick Altema served as co-executive producer for Boardwalk Pictures. That company previously made the four-part docu-series Pepsi, Where’s My Jet? for Netflix.

Netflix hasn’t yet announced a fourth volume of their version of Unsolved Mysteries, but it sounds like Encounters will fill the creepy true story gap nicely while we wait to find out whether or not there’s going to be more Unsolved Mysteries. That show would terrify me when I was a kid, and so would anything related to UFO and alien sightings (like Time-Life commercials), so it seems like Netflix is working to bring back my childhood nightmares.

Of course, a show with this subject matter and the title Encounters coming from Amblin is a nod to Spielberg’s own Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Does the Encounters docu-series sound like a show you would want to watch? Are you interested in stories of UFO sightings and run-ins with aliens? Share your thoughts on this one by leaving a comment below.