Where there’s an interest – however niche – business will follow, and for those catering to individuals passionate about the spooky, the paranormal and even unidentified flying objects, business is booming.

For example, longtime Hollywood publicist Dan Harary now has a dedicated service for clients in the UFO universe. And filmmakers Tim Crawford and Ron James have kept up a steady pace of documentaries that follow the phenomena and include eyewitness reports and congressional hearings.

“It’s just really getting started. No one else has 43 years of Hollywood history, plus knows about UFOs and aliens,” said Harary, who owns and operates The Asbury PR Agency, which is based in Beverly Hills. “It always will be primarily a Hollywood PR firm, but in the past year I have begun to collect these ‘UFO people.’”

For Crawford, who founded what is now UFOTV in the early 1990s, renewed interest in the subject matter has informed how he fills his streaming platform with originally produced content alongside the licensed movies it offers. He originally cut his curation chops as the man and company that stocked the movie rental stores of yore with obscure UFO-related content.

“The video rental stores are gone, for the most part,” he said. “I’ve managed to stay in the game through all of the technological changes and the delivery systems and the way people get their entertainment. We’re still here. And as a filmmaker, it’s been very fulfilling.”

Interest has many origins

Although widespread interest in the unidentified flying object dates back to the famed Roswell Incident, for Gen Xers and Millennials, UFOs hold a special cultural significance, if only from a pop culture perspective.

They grew up on classics like “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “E.T.” In the 1990s, blockbusters like “Men in Black” and “Independence Day” cemented the alien invasion movie as mainstream. The wildly popular TV series “The X-Files” and its various spinoffs are household names. Mark Frost, co-creator of the cult-classic TV series “Twin Peaks” with David Lynch, in 2017 authored a dossier-style book that explored the series’ lore and heavily featured major (alleged) real-world UFO events and the government’s Project Blue Book study of those moments – including President Richard Nixon’s supposed revelation of a captured extraterrestrial to actor Jackie Gleason.

But things changed in late 2017, everyone interviewed for this story agreed. That year, the New York Times published a story about two Navy pilots who reported encountering an unidentified flying object while in flight over the Pacific Ocean off San Diego – an incident that apparently attracted the attention of a Department of Defense wing that probes such reports.

“That changed everything for this community,” said Ron Janix, a Sherman Oaks resident who last year became co-owner of Contact in the Desert, a major annual UFO conference that takes place in Indian Wells. “Suddenly, UFO stories were being covered on ‘60 Minutes’ and other mainstream sources. Before that, it was still in that ‘giggle factor’ realm. We’ve heard politicians talk about this now. This stuff is unheard of.”

Interest was further fueled last year when an Air Force officer claimed to journalists and at a congressional hearing that the U.S. government maintains a UFO-recovery and reverse-engineering program. A series of declassified videos documenting UFOs was also released last year, and although skeptics often point to foreign military craft as the culprit, Janix said he thinks interest in the phenomena is “as high as it’s ever been.”

James, who runs Ron James Television in San Pedro, agreed that 2017 was a big turning point, but noted that interest has often fluctuated over the years. What’s different this time, he added, is that senators and representatives from both sides of the aisle are now advocating for disclosure, even adding measures to defense appropriations bills.

“We have members of Congress that are actively involved,” James said. “For the first time ever, we have politicians who understand the level of deception that has been going on and they’re as indignant as we are.”

James last year directed the documentary “Accidental Truth: UFO Revelations,” which won 15 awards and was narrated by longtime actor Matthew Modine – who perhaps bolstered his disclosure movement credentials by starring as antagonist Martin Brenner in the science fiction series “Stranger Things.” James is following up with a sequel documentary, with Modine set to reprise as narrator.

Creating a new market

Crawford’s gateway into the UFO niche began when he viewed documentaries that were narrated by Rod Serling – of “The Twilight Zone” fame – and by Star Trek’s William Shatner. But later on, as he recalled from his El Segundo home and office, a friend showed him some less-mainstream titles, documentary-style movies he considered to be more science-oriented and open to speculation.

Crawford said he was inspired to create a market for the UFO community, similar to how other companies introduced anime to a U.S. audience. This prompted him to create a distribution company – what is now UFOTV – for this sort of content, which he felt would do well via mail-order and in rentals.

“Both boxes were checked,” Crawford said, “and the idea was to be the world’s one-stop source for everything on UFO and extraterrestrial phenomena.

“We were presenting them with a brand-new paradigm,” he added. “We were saying this is a new thing and it justifies having a section devoted to it in every video store in America.”

The success of the more mainstream media helped Crawford’s company pitch other titles to video rental stores to help fill out their alien-themed sections, content he said few people knew existed at the time.

“For niche marketers like myself, the tactic is the success of one movie being used to push other movies,” he said. “The terminology they would use in the business is called ‘knockoffs.’ Sales reps were always looking for a hook to drive into something to sell something else.”

Now a full-fledged streaming platform available on most devices and operating systems, UFOTV boasts a library of more than 4,000 movies, either licensed or produced by the company. Crawford does not disclose subscriber or streaming counts, but said he does not sell any data or ads to support the operation. The company has received 34 EBE Awards – the acronym for “extraterrestrial biological entity” – for its films from the International UFO Congress, of which nine were awarded to Crawford personally.

Through a general theme of analyzing supposed governmental suppression, topics have expanded in “hidden history and politics” and “fringe science” to accompany the UFO disclosure titles. Two general rules are that UFOTV doesn’t produce or run documentaries targeting specific individuals, and it doesn’t delve into the likes of reactionary conspiracy theorists such as Alex Jones or movements like QAnon – the latter of which Crawford called “toxic.”

This informs a general suspicion, James added, toward media types who aggressively seek attention or paydays to promote this sort of content. It is especially insulting, he said, because of how many others “sacrificed everything and died penniless” advocating for their genuine beliefs.

“That hurts to see,” James said. “The more it become a business, it becomes a situation where you have to discern your content even more, because it’s not actually that easy. We can’t forget that we’re dealing with potentially the biggest question facing humanity.”

Mutual labors of love build a community

Harary claims to have had at least three “experiences,” the first of which he witnessed with his father and the second decades later with his own son. This prompted him to join the local Mutual UFO Network, or MUFON – a group that was written into many “X-Files” storylines. (James, the San Pedro producer, handles media relations for MUFON.) The first experience involved a silver, V-shaped aircraft that hovered in place; Harary recalled that his father had no real reaction to the craft and that the local newspaper had received “hundreds of calls” about the sighting.

“He looked at it, no expression, no interest. He wasn’t afraid, excited, nothing,” he added. “It was like he was looking at a head of lettuce at the supermarket.”

Following the 2017 death of his father – whom Harary later learned was an engineer for the U.S. Army, with a top-secret clearance – and a third experience, Harary wrote the book “After They Came,” which he published last year. He set up a booth at last year’s AlienCon in Pasadena to promote the title.

“I was selling my books and signing autographs,” he said. “I sold hundreds of books. I’ve been a publicist for decades, and now suddenly people wanted my autograph.”

Harary then co-founded the Hollywood Disclosure Alliance, a nonprofit that promotes UFO research in media and lobbies for disclosure by the world’s governments. Crawford and Janix all serve with Harary on the board of the group, which has more than 200 members; James joins all three as founding members.

“We are working to bring together the next era of feature films, documentaries and books to recount real-life stories from real-life people of extraterrestrial or paranormal events that have happened to them,” Harary said. “Because I’m a publicist, I have been getting some of these people as PR clients. I might be the only ‘UFO publicist’ who ever lived.”

Harary said he has eight clients to start, with retainers ranging from $500 to $5,000. Part of that work has been helping Janix recruit for and promote Contact in the Desert.

“It’s become a little baby wing of my business. Because it’s a personal interest and passion of mine, it makes it a lot of fun for me,” Harary said. “It’s a smaller scale, but it’s still income for me. I read and study and watch documentaries every single day. I have a pile of books I haven’t had a chance to read yet.”

And while major players in this field have been busy, they say it hasn’t made them wealthy – and that’s just fine with them. Being taken more seriously than they were before is often its own reward.

“The people that I work with directly and the people that I know closely in this community, it’s their passion project, their side thing, their love,” Janix said. “People want to be a part of this and want to be involved, and it’s genuinely very endearing to me how we all come together and do this without the big payoff.”