If you think the people who swear they’d been abducted by aliens from another world are crackpots, your suspicions will be vindicated by “The Fourth Kind.”

The film’s title is the term given to the next step after close encounters of the third kind, the fourth being actual abductions by beings not of this Earth.

It all sounds very Halloweeny and one might wonder why “The Fourth Kind” was not released last week in time for trick or treat. It has extensive grainy video footage of “real events” — people telling of their abductions while under hypnosis, including a man who levitates from his bed in mid trance — interspersed with actors playing out these same scenes. But by Halloween, audiences had already been caught up in the chills from the grainy video footage — albeit staged — in the much superior surprise hit “Paranormal Activity.” In a showdown with that film, “The Fourth Kind” would have only looked fifth rate.

Nevertheless, one cannot dismiss the chutzpah of writer-director Olatunde Osunsanmi as he interviews the real Abigail Tyler, a psychologist originally from Nome, Alaska, who swears that aliens kidnapped her young daughter. Then he plays out her story with real actors –– Milla Jovovich as Abigail, Will Patton as the town sheriff –– intercutting their scenes with actual footage of testimonies from the real people. Often these scenes are played out side by side in a split-screen technique, with the actors often coming off second best.

Some of these testimonies are unsettling, especially at first when Abbey recounts the night her husband was stabbed to death in their bed in front of her by some unseen intruder.

Later, as she interviews her troubled patients, Abbey discovers that several of them tell her the same odd story about being awakened in the middle of the night by an owl peering into their windows, staring at them. As she delves deeper into their psyches, she uncovers things that are even stranger. Something weird is going on in Nome, Abbey decides, and proceeds through hypnosis to get to the bottom of these nightmare visions.

Wrong move.

Things grow increasingly dire among her patients, and before long Abbey herself is under suspicion for inciting a tragic incident involving one of them. Nearly all of the video footage that corroborates her version of events is conveniently distorted, son of a gun, so we only get a quick glimpse of a man levitating off his bed before the picture goes to all wavy lines and snow. However, one can barely make out on some of these tapes a background voice speaking a strange language that we are told is ancient Sumerian.

Unfortunately “The Fourth Kind,” which is being sold as a scary movie based on real events turns out to be a lot of hokum. Public officials in Alaska say there are no records of any Abigail Tyler practicing psychological therapy in the state. And her memory of a crucial event is wobbly.

Like the rest of the film, the story’s underpinnings don’t hold up. The only hold-up will be at the box office if you’re enough of a sucker to have bought a ticket to “The Fourth Kind.”

*The Fourth Kind

Starring: Milla Jovovich, Elias Koteas, Will Patton, Corey Johnson.

Rated: PG-13, contains violence, disturbing images.

mjanuson@projo.com