"The ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter" is an attraction that is supposed to appeal to the guests senses in order to provide chills, frights, and genuine scares.

Note how I said "is supposed to".

Located in the Magic Kingdom's Tomorrowland section, it replaced the former "Mission to Mars" show and is located close to the main entrance of Tomorrowland. Before my first experience with this attraction, I had heard time and again how it was something I "had to see", or "so scary that (I) have to do it (the attraction)". So, naturally, I was curious to find exactly what this attraction was all about.

The basic idea is you're taking a tour of a company called XS-Tech which is trying to impress its audience through its new technological advances, in this case it's teleportation project. In the pre-show to the attraction, the audience is given a brief demonstration of how this technology works, as your robotic host teleports a small, furry creature from a glass container on one side, into another container on the other side of the host. This little display doesn't exactly go as planned, but shortly after this the visitors are ushered into another room where there's more discussion about how the technology can be used and also how the XS-Tech's chairman volunteers to be the first human subject to be teleported to earth.

The audience is invited to watch the experiment live and are then brought into the main show room. It's a large round room which can hold a good number of guests and the room wraps around the glass case in the center where the teleportation experiment is to take place. Once situated in your seat, a harness is brought down over your head and rests securely on top of you. The harness and seat is the means by which your various senses are to be affected by the events of the attraction.

So, the experiment begins and instead of the chairman being brought back, an alien is teleported back into the glass case in the middle of the chamber. All heck breaks out once the alien shatters the glass case and escapes into the room around you. There's a lot of sparks, and the power seems to go out. The audience is then subjected to sounds of the alien running past them, the creature breathing on their necks and or spitting on them. Eventually the alien is captured, sent back to where it belongs, and the show is over.

This attraction will definitely scare the living daylights out of small children under the age of, maybe, 12 and of those older ones who may simply be easily startled. I didn't go into the attraction with negative thoughts, but had an open mind, hoping it may actually live up to the hype I'd heard about it. Sorry to say, I was extremely disappointed. I could certainly appreciate the originality of the attraction, but it just didn't do anything for me. It certainly didn't scare me, and I found the entertainment value to be lacking. I felt the pre-show display with the robot was more interesting than the attraction itself. The water spraying on your face, the little puffs of warm air on your neck, and the close-to-your-ears sounds of the creature running around were somewhat nice touches, but, in my opinion, had no real effect on me to make me at all scared, nervous, or anything else. The animatronic alien didn't seem the least bit realistic and that only detracted more from the overall effect. The younger children in the audience were, of course, scared to death. But most of the people walking out of there were probably either thinking or saying the same thing I was..."that was lame."

If you haven't ever seen this attraction before, it may be worth a one-time visit, I'll give it that much. But in my future visits to Tomorrowland, I'm not going to waste my time on this attraction again.




Recommended: No

Best Time to Travel Here: Sep - Nov