As usual, your universe's critics are useless here. For example, reviewer cuiloni writes, "A mediocre film, rather predictable film." Reviewer Sterno-2 writes, "The movie has plot holes large enough for the Rockettes to dance through." And reviewer buckrulze writes, "This movie is so bad I couldn't wait for it to end. It is an epic failure from opening to the closing credits."
Read on for the hidden truth about Hanger 18...
After a text explanation that the film is based on true rumors about the U.S. government covering up UFO sightings, the film begins on a space shuttle orbiting Earth. The crew at Mission Control, led by Darren McGavin, warns that a launch will begin in ten minutes; the shuttle will be launching a satellite into orbit. The shuttle crew, led by Gary Collins with support from James Hampton (who looks the same as he did in F Troop 13 years earlier), sees something mysterious on their radar, but they proceed with the launch of the satellite. Just as the satellite is about to launch, they see what appears to be an alien ship.
The satellite, which uses its own engines to put itself into orbit, smashes into the alien ship and there is a massive explosion. Also, the third astronaut on the shuttle, who was conducting a spacewalk, is grotesquely seen floating headless in space.
On Earth, NORAD is alerted because the alien craft is falling out of the sky. It lands, as it must, in the desert in Arizona. An Air Force helicopter finds the downed craft with its lights blinking.
Meanwhile, the Air Force assigns Mission Control head Darren McGavin to take a team to investigate the downed UFO, while also informing White House Chief of Staff Robert Vaughn of the situation. “We believe we have an alien spacecraft in our possession.”
Further briefing informs Mr. Vaughn that the alien ship was moved to Hangar 18 in Texas. “Now wait a minute,” Mr. Vaughn says. “We’re getting into a problem area here. The election is only two weeks away.” He is worried that wild rumors will hurt the current president’s election chances. “I don’t want to blow this election because of rumor or panic. We’ve got to keep this thing under wraps for two weeks, just until the election is over.” He adds, “You know what it would do to his chances for reelection if the public found out that we had an alien spacecraft parked at a NASA facility?” (He does not answer this question, considering it rhetorical, but I for one would like to know the answer.)
Unfortunately for astronauts Collins and Hampton, a newspaper report indicates that NASA blames the third astronaut’s death on them. A secretary at NASA asks the astronauts, “Who’d float a story like that?”
Hampton replies cynically, “The Air Force, honey.”
Collins adds, “To cover themselves. But this is stupid.” (He does not clarify any further.)
Collins and Hampton go into Mission Control and find the recording of the radar display on a computer. The UFO blip is gone from the recording. “Either we imagined this whole thing, Lou,” Collins says, “or the blip of the UFO has been erased.”
They look for Darren McGavin but find that he has been replaced by character actor H. M. Wynant, who doesn’t know when Mr. McGavin will return.
In fact, Mr. McGavin has travelled to Hangar 18, where he is now in charge.
His friend Phil, upon seeing the ship in the hangar, says, “I’ve heard all those crazy stories about UFOs like everybody else. I didn’t believe them.”
Mr. McGavin says philosophically (and perhaps incorrectly), “Well, it’s not something that most people…want to believe in.”
Meanwhile, Collins and Hampton come up with a plan to save their reputations and reveal the truth. Hampton knows a man who works at the Crown Mountain tracking facility. They reason that the telemetry tapes at Crown Mountain haven’t been edited, so they plan to go to Crown Mountain to get the tapes. When Collins asks Hampton to introduce him to his friend at the facility, Hampton quips, “I don’t know if he’s your type, though. He’s a lot shorter and a lousy dancer.”
In a thrilling scene, Mr. McGavin and two others don radiation suits and investigate the spacecraft.
As soon as Mr. McGavin touches the hull, a siren sounds, steam is released from the UFO, and a door opens. Mr. McGavin climbs a ramp and leads the group into the ship. They find a highly complex engine room with hundreds of lights and buttons, some labeled in an alien language.
They are suddenly startled by a door opening to what appears to be a tall robot, but it turns out to be an empty pressure suit. Then they take an elevator up to a command deck — where they are startled again to see two bald aliens sitting in command chairs!
The film cuts to Collins and Hampton at Crown Mountain. They find an unreacted tape of the UFO telemetry, but Hampton’s friend refuses to give them a copy. However, he allows them to see a projection of where the UFO must have fallen to Earth: Bannon County, Arizona.
Meanwhile, White House Chief of Staff Robert Vaughn gets involved directly in the coverup, ordering that the only witness to the downed UFO in Arizona be given a federal contractor’s job to keep him away from Collins and Hampton.
Back in Hangar 18, medical staff pull the two aliens, who appear to be dead, out of the spacecraft and into a lab. Darren McGavin investigates the interior of the UFO further, finding a broken glass vial, an armadillo in a glass tube, and, more concerningly, a woman in a larger glass tube. McGavin arranges for the woman to be extracted and taken to a hospital where the damage to her body can be treated. Then, in an exciting sequence, Phil opens a drawer and the UFO begins to lift off the ground. “I just pulled a panel over there and everything went haywire,” Phil says.
“Well, watch what you’re doing,” Mr. McGavin orders.
The film cuts to an effective jump scare moment in the back of an ambulance, as the female abductee of the aliens suddenly wakes up and screams loudly at the camera. (The woman is never seen again.)
In Hangar 18, Mr. McGavin continues the investigation by pushing random buttons in the ship. A group of red laser beams bursts from the ship into a crowd of scientists.
Mr. McGavin runs out of the ship. “Everybody okay? Everybody all right?” Nobody says anything about his reckless behavior, and the laser is never mentioned again.
In Arizona, Collins and Hampton fly a private plane to a small runway, where the proprietor of the local airport (who has a thick New England accent, for no apparent reason) rents them a truck. They drive into town, unaware they are being followed by federal agents sent by Robert Vaughn. The astronauts quickly find the crash site based on singed dirt, but they are intercepted by two federal agents. Fortunately for our heroes, they are able to beat up the agents and jump into the rented truck, then drive away. There follows an exciting car chase where the agents’ car smashes into the old pickup truck. In the end, the agents drive off a bridge and their car explodes, allowing Collins and Hampton to escape.
Of course, word of the federal agents’ death reaches Chief of Staff Robert Vaughn. He yells at his colleague Joseph Campanella, “Two men are dead. We don’t handle things that way. This is the White House, for Christ’s sake!”
Back at Hangar 18, the linguist brought in to study the alien language recognizes that the alien pictograph for Earth is also present in Meixcan ruins that can only be seen from the air. Additionally, various hieroglyphics in a different Mexican pyramid resemble the writing in the alien spaceship, possibly providing a key to understanding their written language. Mr. McGavin tells him logically, “If this isn’t the wildest coincidence, then what you’re saying is that beings from another world have been here on Earth before.”
The film then moves to what the viewer is probably most anticipating: an alien autopsy. In an artistic subversion of expectations, however, the filmmakers do not show the autopsy, instead cutting away as the scalpel is about to penetrate skin and then cutting back after the bodies have been wheeled away. (Clearly, after showing the decapitated astronaut in the opening, the filmmakers believed showing the autopsy would be somewhat tasteless.) The doctor in charge, Sarah Michaels, tells Mr. McGavin that the aliens resembled humans in most ways. “It’s obvious we’ve both gone through a parallel evolutionary process. It’s startling.”
Meanwhile, the astronauts meet up with Professor William Schallert, who tells them the rocks they found in Arizona were fused by high heat, but some factors other than an alien spaceship could have done it. He says, “If what you’re suggesting is so, then you’re talking about the most significant event in the history of mankind.” He adds a statement that is incontrovertibly true: “But nobody’s gonna believe you unless you can prove it.”
On the way out of Professor Schallert’s office, Collins and Hampton deduce that the only place the UFO could have been taken is…Hangar 18.
Back at Hangar 18, Mr. McGavin leads a meeting discussing a report from the UFO generated by the linguist, who has managed to translate nearly all of the pictographs. Mr. McGavin explains, “This is a report of a previous visit of the spacemen to Earth. This report speaks of the capture, the training, and the use of certain animals as slaves, both male and female. The slaves worshipped them as gods.”
Phil asks, “Then what they referred to as ‘animals’ were…pre-human?”
“The report also speaks to the fact that female slaves found it a great honor to be chosen to live with and to bear the offspring of the gods.” Mr. McGavin further explains that the aliens altered human evolution. “They are the missing link.” He also asserts, quite emotionally, “We, mankind, the human race…are their children.”
There follows another exciting scene in which Collins and Hampton rent a car to drive to Hangar 18, but they find the brakes have been tampered with. Collins drives expertly, avoiding traffic while for some reason accelerating. Eventually, the car crashes into some dirt, but then a pair of federal agents starts shooting at the astronauts, who run away to an oil refinery. Perhaps unwisely, they steal an oil tanker truck and drive away onto the highway, only to be followed by the agents. Hampton quips, “You know, if this thing takes a bullet, you’re not gonna have a gas shortage.”
Collins retorts, “Or us, pal.”
In a spectacular stunt scene, Hampton grabs a flare that was stored in the truck’s cab, then climbs out onto the roof of the cab. (Like Tom Cruise and Jackie Chan, James Hampton does all or most of his own stunts.) He jumps onto the tanker, then climbs to the back of the truck, opens the valve, and lights the flare. Unfortunately, in the process, Hampton is shot, though he does explode the car and kill the two federal agents.
Tragically, Hampton dies on the side of the highway, in Collins’s arms.
Collins drives (it is unclear how he obtained his car) to Hangar 18, smashing through the entry gate and parking near some temporary buildings and breaking into a building. He is discovered by Darren McGavin, who takes him to the hangar to show him the alien craft. At the same time, the linguist has translated text on a video in the UFO cabin indicating the aliens are coming back and plan to target various power plants and defense installations on Earth.
Meanwhile, Robert Vaughn and Joseph Campanella decide their problems will be solved if they blow up Hangar 18 and use a plane crash as a cover story. A large bomb is loaded onto a small private jet that flies by remote control from New Mexico to Texas. The plan successfully crashes into Hangar 18.
Shockingly, the UFO remains intact. The film ends with a new report telling us that McGavin, Collins, and several others survived because they were inside the craft. The news report admits a UFO has been found, and ends with “As yet, there has been no official statement from the White House.”
The End
Hangar 18 is a near-perfect exploration of the truth behind UFO conspiracy theories, on top of being a classic thriller. It takes the idea of Capricorn One -- astronauts chased through the desert because they know a secret the government is covering up -- and brilliantly ups the ante by not showing the astronauts walking through sand for hours on end but by having them involved in car chases. (It even reproduces and improves upon the famous, and ridiculous, car chase from Capricorn One where Elliott Gould drives in fast-motion without brakes.)
But Hanger 18's strong suit is its realism. If a UFO did crash in the American southwest, the film explains exactly what would happen afterward, down to the possibility that the incident would affect the outcome of a presidential election. It is no surprise that the film is so realistic, as it benefits from a strong cast of actors with collective centuries of TV acting experience: Darren McGavin, Robert Vaughn, Gary Collins, James Hampton, Joseph Campanella, and many, many more. They are all capable of making the audience believe that every new twist is really happening right in front of them. And prolific director James L. Conway has a similar track record of convincingly realistic work -- Hangar 18 follows In Search of Noah's Ark (1976) and precedes The Boogens (1981) in his storied filmography. Finally, Hangar 18 might be one of the finest of all the Sunn Classic Pictures films released in the 1970s and 1980s...which is saying a lot, indeed.