UFOs, ancient astronauts, government conspiracies -- this movie has it all. Who knew a film starring Gary Collins could be so darn entertaining? Actually, there are a lot of familiar faces in this underrated 1980 science fiction thriller, including Robert Vaughn, Darren McGavin, Joseph Campanella and Dynasty's Pamela Bellwood. They are all working with a fantastic script that weaves science fiction, politics, and conspiracy together into a seamless and surprisingly compelling story.

Unless there was absolutely no marketing for this film, it is hard to see how Hangar 18 flopped so badly at the box office, especially since it seems tailor-made for its 1980 audience.

The film opens in space, where we witness the space shuttle launch a new defense satellite that is destroyed in a collision with a UFO. One astronaut is killed, but the shuttle lands safely -- while the UFO crashes to Earth. Astronauts Steve Bancroft (Gary Collins) and Lew Price (James Hampton) are in for a nasty surprise, though, when they find themselves blamed for the death of their crewmate.

With their NASA boss nowhere to be found and the exculpatory telemetry from the space mission doctored to remove any evidence of the UFO, they head out on a quest to prove their innocence -- and that means finding proof of the crashed UFO. That's complicated by the fact that the military and NASA jumped on the downed UFO like white on rice and secreted it away in a top-secret military hangar. Unfortunately for Bancroft and Price, the closer they get to the truth, the more they are seen as liabilities by those running the show.

Why would the feds turn on two American heroes and hide the truth of the crashed saucer? We all know how the government likes to keep its secrets, particularly those of the black ops variety, but something even more insidious than that is going on here. The next election is just two weeks away, and the U.S. president is running neck-and-neck with his challenger. The last thing the president's team wants is for rumors of a UFO to start surfacing. The White House, with the complicity of the Department of Defense, will do anything to keep the story under wraps until after the election -- and I do mean anything.

Hangar 18 plays well on no less than three fronts. Along with the escalating government conspiracy and our astronaut heroes' desperate fight to survive long enough to prove their innocence, there is the scientific investigation of the mysterious craft and its alien inhabitants. The filmmakers tie this in with the idea of ancient astronauts beautifully, in a manner that allows them to quickly uncover some mind-blowing secrets of both the past and the future. Clearly, though, it's the conspiracy that forges the strongest connection between the film and its audience. In the wake of the assassinations of the 1960s, the Vietnam War, and Watergate, a majority of Americans no longer trusted the federal government and its leaders. Those with an interest in the burgeoning UFO movement had even less reason to believe the government's stories. Thus, a conspiracy that might have been seen as outlandish just two decades earlier should have played wonderfully to a 1980 audience, especially with the likes of Robert Vaughn running the politically tainted show.

Of course, the idea of a government conspiracy to hide the truth is far from shocking to an audience of today. The only thing that would surprise most of us is for the government to actually tell the truth about something for once. That doesn't make Hangar 18 any less compelling, though. In the same vein, the primitive nature of the computers and scientific tools used to penetrate the mystery of the film's UFO takes nothing away from the scientific and science-fiction aspects of the film. Thanks to a masterful script and plenty of really good acting, this film is a seriously underrated science fiction/government conspiracy gem that should continue impressing audiences well into the future.