“REAL” and  REEL: Flying Saucers and UFO Aliens

The UFO phenomenon has been and continues to be a rich source of story ideas for sci-fi filmmakers, drawing inspiration from the well-documented experiences of UFO witnesses and contactees. And in something of a chicken-or-the-egg feedback loop, the films and television shows of this sub-genre of science fiction entertainment subconsciously influence the public’s perception of UFOs, for it is not uncommon to find that descriptions of aliens and their mysterious ships proffered by witnesses mirror those of the latest popular on-screen fictions. Further, studies have shown that there is a correlation between popular science fiction releases and UFO sightings, with the former often causing a spike in the latter, with marked similarities in detail noted between the “real” and fictional.

Betty and Barney Hill’s UFO Incident

Consider, for example, the famous Betty and Barney Hill Case of 1961, modern UFOlogy’s first instance of an alien abduction and the introduction of the now-familiar “Greys” to UFO lore. Did the aliens described by the Hills originate not on another world, but in Hollywood?

A late-September evening found the married couple at the center of this extraordinary episode driving along a rural highway, returning home to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, after a vacation that included a visit to Montreal. It was shortly before midnight when they pulled over to observe a peculiar light in the sky, which Betty thought was a flying saucer, like the one her sister had allegedly seen several years prior. Barney maintained that it was simply an airplane in the night sky.

But according to the narrative that emerged during their later hypnosis, the light came closer and proved to be a large flying disc the shape of which Barney compared to a pancake. Several hours later, they found themselves some 35 miles further down the road with only vague, fragmentary recollections of what had occurred out on that lonely highway. They returned home both feeling a little odd. Their disquiet would persist through the coming months.

Two weeks after the incident, Betty had a series of nightmares about their having been taken aboard the UFO and subjected to bizarre medical experiments. She began writing down what she remembered of her dreams, often revising her notes and sharing these details with Barney. He was sympathetic but wanted to put the matter behind them, despite a lingering anxiety about the experience. Betty became obsessed with their encounter and was arguably predisposed to a belief in UFOs and space aliens because of her sister’s experience, a story that she had often recounted to friends. Barney would have been content to drop the whole thing, finally agreeing to their undergoing hypnosis if only to put to rest what he saw as the “nonsense” about his wife’s dreams.

More than two years after the incident, psychiatrist Benjamin Simon, in separate sessions, put the couple under to get at the particulars of their ordeal, but Barney’s description of grey-skinned aliens with oversized, bald heads and large dark eyes differed considerably from that of the beings Betty’s dreams had revealed to her. Under hypnosis, Betty’s story changed to more closely match her husband’s.

It was years later remarked that Barney’s description of the saucer men was similar to that of an alien character featured in an episode of the science fiction television series Outer Limits that had aired not two weeks prior to his first session with Dr. Simon. Barney had died in 1969 but when presented with this coincidence, Betty asserted that she was unfamiliar the show.

Or maybe Barney had caught a Twilight Zone episode broadcast less than a year after their encounter, the alien there featured also resembling those he had detailed under hypnosis. Was Barney unknowingly influenced by the fictional space aliens he might have seen on TV? Perhaps. The 1953 sci-fi movie Invaders From Mars is also cited by those familiar with the case as including certain motifs akin to Barney’s account of the events of that night. Might a distant memory of this film have coloured his story?

Doctor Simon, for his part, concluded that Betty’s copious notes as she tried to reconstruct her nightmares likely contributed significantly to Barney’s fantasy. Skeptics point to these distinct possibilities as muddying the evidential waters. But Betty’s belief that she and her husband had been abducted by aliens remained unwavering, despite the detractors who lined up against her, some even from within the ranks of UFO aficionados.

The UFO Incident, a TV-movie starring Estelle Parsons and James Earl Jones as Betty and Barney aired on NBC in 1975, bringing to a national audience the Hills’ story.

Travis Walton’s Fire in the Sky

Over the years, Hollywood has adapted for the screen a number of UFOlogy’s greatest hits, if you will, dramatizing headline-making or particularly intriguing close encounters. Among the best and most popular of these is the feature film Fire in the Sky (1993), relating, with some embellishments for dramatic purposes, the alien abduction tale of lumberjack Travis Walton.

While working in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest in Arizona’s White Mountains, near the town of Snowflake, Walton and six of his fellow loggers contend that on November 5, 1975, they came across a UFO in the woods, and that he stepped out of their truck to get a closer look at the flying saucer hovering above them. Suddenly, Walton was hit by a brilliant beam of light that shot out of the craft, knocking him unconscious. Terrified and thinking Walton had been killed by the blast, his companions drove off in a panic.

Walton’s recollection of his experience was spotty, but he did remember waking up in a hospital-like room—presumably aboard the UFO—under the observation of three small humanoid creatures, and that he attempted to fight them off. He could barely lift his arms, however, under what seemed to him some sort of heavy gravitational force. He was then taken into another room by a helmeted figure, where a plastic mask was placed over his face, and he blacked out. He remembered nothing more until he came to walking aimlessly along a highway, the UFO retreating skywards above him.

Five days had passed since he’d been taken, but Walton felt that maybe only the overnight period, or at most a day, had transpired. His companions, in the interim, were suspected of having murdered him and disposed of his body, but his return, of course, put an end to such talk. Polygraph tests supposedly confirmed that Walton and the others had, in actual fact, seen a flying saucer. Tabloid The National Inquirer soon after awarded them a $5000 prize for “Best UFO Case of the Year.”

Skeptics disputed the results of the polygraphs, which were administered by the Inquirer and the UFO group APRO, the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization. They also pointed to the similarities between Walton’s description of his extraterrestrial kidnappers and the aliens depicted in the TV movie The UFO Incident, which, as it happened, had aired only just a couple weeks before Walton was supposedly abducted! Had he watched the story of Betty and Barney Hill’s experience on TV and taken from it inspiration? Walton and his co-workers were soon denounced for perpetrating a hoax in a bid for money and notoriety.

Phoenix Lights Inspires Several Films

Several lesser films in this category purposely blur the line between “fact” and fiction in building their plots around the Phoenix Lights Incident of March 13, 1997, a mass UFO sighting, meaning it was witnessed by a large number of people, in this instance across the skies of Nevada and Arizona in the U.S., and Sonora in Mexico.

Night Skies (2007) is a direct-to-DVD sci-fi/horror movie about a group of friends travelling the desert back-roads on their way to Las Vegas who witness rather more than otherworldly lights in the night sky. Shot documentary-style, The Phoenix Incident (2015) pits Air Force jets against UFOs in a dogfight, and speculates on the fate of a group of hikers who did, in reality, go missing that night in the Phoenix area. And found-footage flick Phoenix Forgotten (2017) focuses on three students who, on the 20th anniversary of the event, set out to uncover the mystery of the Phoenix Lights, and are never seen again!

Roswell

The Showtime Network’s Roswell (1994), also known as Roswell: The U.F.O. Cover-Up, details the U.S. military’s purported recovery of a wrecked flying saucer that had crashed on a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico, in early-July of 1947, and the misinformation campaign that followed. Roswell is the most famous of all UFO cases, well-known even outside of the UFO community.

At first, public interest in the Roswell Incident quickly waned once the episode was chalked up to nothing more than a fallen weather balloon. But the re-examination of the event by UFOlogists in the late-1970s rekindled interest, catapulting Roswell from a forgotten footnote in the early history of flying saucer flaps to the most famous UFO incident of all time, and the ultimate example of a government-orchestrated smokescreen designed to hide the existence of extraterrestrials, and deny any official knowledge of same. Conspiracy-minded UFOlogists are convinced that the authorities know far more about UFOs than they let on, and that advanced extraterrestrial technology was gleaned from the Roswell wreckage by the military, studied, and subsequently applied to the development of today’s sophisticated stealth aircraft and other weapons systems.

Sometime between mid-June and July—date uncertain—ranch foreman William “Mac” Brazel came upon clusters of debris scattered about a pasture. Some accounts have Brazel and others hearing a loud crash during the night of July 2 near the small town of Corona, in the vicinity of Roswell. Brazel paid no mind to the debris he’d found, but returned to the spot on July 4 with his wife, son, and daughter to gather some of the fragments of whatever had crashed. The next day, he heard radio reports telling of flying discs seen in the area, and of a reward being offered to anyone who found a piece of one. He wondered if the debris he’d found might be that of such a craft. On July 6 or 7—again, date uncertain—he mentioned to local sheriff George Wilcox that he just may have found the wreckage of a flying saucer.

The sheriff contacted Major Jesse Marcel, chief intelligence officer at Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF), and Marcel and a plainclothesman accompanied Brazel back to the ranch to examine the debris. They gathered more of the pieces of what they presumed was a disabled balloon and its “kite.” A kite is a radar reflector, tethered to a balloon and used to track it from the ground.

Click to play a radio news report on the recovery of a flying disc near Roswell.

On July 8, RAAF public information officer Walter Haut issued a press release announcing that a flying disc had been recovered by base personnel. The Roswell Daily Record ran the story the next day. But Eighth Air Force Commanding General Roger M. Ramey quickly dampened all the excitement by declaring that the debris was from a weather balloon, the beginnings of a cover-up, according to many UFOlogists, who believe that the subterfuge remains in place to this day.

A press conference was held at the time to provide the newspapers with the weather balloon narrative, and had the desired effect of killing the story by the next day. Major Marcel was photographed at that press conference posing with supposed pieces of the wrecked balloon.

In the mid-1990s, the Air Force offered insight into the incident, explaining that the wreckage found those many decades ago was, indeed, that of a balloon, specifically, a top-secret Project Mogul balloon. In 1947, Mogul was a classified surveillance operation that employed high-altitude balloons to monitor Russian nuclear tests. So a cover-up had taken place, but not of anything flying saucer-related. It was the true purpose of the Roswell balloon that the military had wanted to keep under wraps.

Nuclear physicist Stanton T. Friedman, of Fredericton, New Brunswick, and other civilian UFO investigators revisited the case beginning in 1978, interviewing hundreds of witnesses. Most of them, however, were only peripherally connected to the events in Roswell all those years ago, although Friedman’s research did include an interview with a now-retired Jesse Marcel. While differing, sometimes vociferously, on details, Friedman and many of his fellow Roswell researchers concluded that at least one extraterrestrial spaceship had crashed on that ranch in 1947, and that the military had recovered the wreckage, and the lifeless bodies of the craft’s occupants, or possibly, the injured but still breathing aliens! Further, the government had hushed up the whole affair in order to hide the truth about flying saucers from the general public so as not to create a panic, and, in a burgeoning Cold-War climate, to take advantage of any advanced technology the saucer might yield.

Some theorists take another tact, going so far as to submit that government conspirators enlisted Hollywood’s help in carrying out a wide-reaching and continuing disinformation campaign. Fanciful fairy tales about space aliens in movie theatres and on TV were designed to steer the public afar of the facts concerning UFOs—that they’re all fake, a manufactured decoy to divert attention away from the military’s super-secret advanced-weapons development programs.

It gets so that it’s hard to keep track of all the conspiracies on top of conspiracies!

The Roswell Incident has been called the world’s most famous, most exhaustively investigated, and most thoroughly debunked UFO claim. The story has been seized upon by a public only too willing to believe, and has become something of a modern myth.

Teen drama Roswell (1999-2002), based on a YA (young adult) book series, imagined the extraterrestrials who crashed-landed near Roswell as refugee alien/human hybrids, this genetic tampering having been effected so that they might better fit in with the locals as high-school students. The show was remodelled in 2019 under the title Roswell, New Mexico.

The Birth of UFOlogy and Hollywood’s Early Flying Saucer Films

Interestingly, the first feature film about a flying saucer, an independent production released in 1950, was more Cold War spy thriller than science fiction. The Flying Saucer told the tale of Russian agents attempting to steal the top-secret invention of a brilliant American scientist—the titular craft. The screenplay’s notion of the saucer being, conceivably, an interplanetary vehicle was merely a red herring.

But Hollywood was quick to capitalize on the spaceships-from-another-world angle of the flying saucer craze set off by the first UAP incident of the Modern Age of UFOs, in which the witness hypothesized that what he had seen could well have been a formation of alien vessels from outer space!

Kenneth Arnold Sighting Begets Term “Flying Saucer”

On June 24, 1947, Kenneth Arnold was piloting his monoplane from Chehalis to Yakima, Washington, on a business trip and spotted nine “silvery and shiny” objects flying in formation just north of Mount Rainier. He later described them as “shaped like saucers” and “something like a pie plate that was cut in half with a sort of a convex triangle in the rear.” Their zigzagging, chain-like formation resembled to him “the tail of a Chinese kite.” He spoke of their movements as erratic, weaving, “like a fish flipping in the sun” or “a saucer if you skip it across the water.”

It was Arnold’s colourful metaphors that inspired a sensationalizing press to coin the terms “flying saucer” and “flying disc” as shorthand for these and other such mysterious airborne vehicles observed by everyone from airline pilots to potato farmers in the weeks and months following his sighting.

Explanations offered for what it was that Arnold had seen included wisps of snow blowing from the mountain peaks, an unusual cloud formation, a flock of pelicans, a meteor shower, light reflecting through drops of water on his aircraft’s windows, and a mirage. In a later interview, Arnold mused on the nature of the objects, stating “if it’s not made by our science or our Army Air Force, I am inclined to believe it’s of an extraterrestrial origin,” adding that everyone should be concerned, but that “I don’t think it’s anything for people to get hysterical about.”

The Arnold sighting received national coverage in the U.S., and indeed, made headlines around the world. The press’ use of the descriptive “flying saucer” cemented in the public consciousness the shape of these inexplicable, supersonic and purportedly extraterrestrial craft increasingly observed in skies across America, even though the sketch Arnold produced of the objects he had seen for the Army Air Force showed a half-moon shaped fuselage with a tapered, triangular rear section. UFOs reported in the weeks and months following, and over the ensuing years, have been variously perceived to be spherical, egg-shaped, cylindrical, triangular and boomerang- or bat-like.

Yet the image of a perfectly round saucer is what stuck in the public imagination. Hoaxers (of which there were many) and Hollywood alike reinforced this perception, as, for example, in a scene from the 1951 movie The Thing From Another World, in which a group of scientists and airmen based in the Arctic find a crashed aircraft encased beneath the ice. With only a dark, indistinct form visible under the frozen surface of the crash site, the men spread out along its edges to determine the size and exact shape of the thing. They find themselves standing in a perfect circle as the realization dawns that they’ve found a flying saucer!

One of the most memorable of the early flying saucer films is The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), in which alien emissary Klaatu and his robot enforcer, Gort, land in Washington, D. C. in a sleek, shiny flying saucer to convey an ultimatum to the nations of the world. It is, today, considered a classic of the genre and remains one of the smartest science fiction films ever produced.

The opening sequence quite realistically depicts the military’s response to, and the global press coverage of, the arrival of Klaatu’s spaceship, which circles the planet before alighting in a public park in the American capital.

Concerned that men will soon launch their atom-fuelled belligerence into space, Klaatu comes offering a mutually beneficial accord. But his intentions are misconstrued by nervous army types and the spaceman is soon a fugitive seeking an understanding ear, as well as a means to get across his peaceful if uncompromising message, finally delivered in a dramatic monologue at the conclusion of the picture. It is gripping, impactful stuff that has dated well, losing little of its relevance over the decades since it premiered.

Harryhausen, Keyhoe, Adamski, Reich and Earth vs. the Flying Saucers

Perhaps the quintessential flying saucer flick of the 1950s was Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), a shallow but enjoyable yarn of middling calibre uplifted only by the superior special effects of talented stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen.

Quickly developed to cash in on the growing public interest in UFOs, the low-budget black-and-white film was loosely based on Major Donald Keyhoe’s book Flying Saucers From Outer Space (1953), which documented the many reports of saucer sightings making news in the wake of the Arnold sighting.

A retired Marine aviator, Keyhoe was the foremost UFO researcher/writer of the 1950s. A couple of decades earlier, he had penned aviation adventure stories, as well as science fiction and weird fantasy tales for the pulps. He approached the subject of UFOs skeptically at first, however, eventually came around to believing that there was something to these flying discs and argued for a serious investigation of the matter. He ultimately became convinced that the Air Force knew that UFOs were extraterrestrial in origin but was withholding that information to avoid panicking the public.

Keyhoe cooperated with the producers of Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, expecting a documentary-like approach to be employed, in keeping with the tone of his book. He was disappointed with the final cut, which he classed merely a kitschy sci-fi B-movie.

Harryhausen drew extensively from the eye-witness descriptions of UFO encounters collated in Keyhoe’s book, and in designing the film’s now-classic spinning saucers, was influenced by the descriptions and photos of both George Adamski, the most infamous UFO “abductee” of the 1950s, and Oregon farmer Paul Trent.

Adamski claimed to have seen well over a hundred UFOs, beginning with an alleged October 9, 1946, sighting at the Palomar Gardens camp ground in California, near the famous Palomar Observatory located between Los Angeles and San Diego.

During a meteor shower, Adamski and a few friends reportedly saw a large, cigar-shaped “Mothership” and in early 1947, Adamski pronounced that he had photographed this same Mothership crossing in front of the moon.

He began lecturing on the topic of UFOs in 1949. His claims of close encounters in late-1952 with a humanoid flying saucer pilot named Orthon further bolstered Adamski’s budding career as a flying saucer researcher and lecturer. Orthon was described by Adamski as a tall, tanned Venusian having Nordic features and Adamski produced photographs he had taken through his telescope of Orthon’s ship, these among the most well-known in UFOlogy.

But the science, even of that day, flew in the face of Adamski’s assertions regarding the other planets in our solar system. His photographs were widely judged to be fakes, in the case of the Venusian Scout Ship, simply shots of a model Adamski had constructed using common hardware-store items. Most UFOlogists regarded his tales of Orthon, and of having been taken aboard an alien spaceship to visit Earth’s neighbouring planets, as serving only to cast ridicule upon the nascent field of, and so deterring any serious study of the flying saucer phenomenon.

Paul Trent and his wife, Evelyn, who lived near McMinnville, Oregon, avowed that in the early evening of May 11, 1950, they both observed from their backyard a slow-moving flying disc overhead. At first transfixed by the unconventional metallic flying machine, Paul finally thought to fetch his Kodak and ran inside their farmhouse to get the camera, emerging just in time to snap a couple of pictures before the saucer flew off. The Trent’s at first believed what they had seen was a secret military aircraft and were reluctant to share their photographs, lest they invite any unwanted trouble. Eventually, they were persuaded to tell of their experience.

Skeptics have debunked Trent’s snapshots, remarking that the object was likely a small model hung from the power lines visible at the top of the frame, and that it bears a suspiciously strong resemblance to a side-view mirror from the farmer’s truck.

But other experts spoke to the versimilitude of the pictures and added that the Trents were not seeking any kind of fame, and never profited financially from their photographs.

Harryhausen’s look for the Earth vs. the Flying Saucers UFOs seems a cross between Adamski’s Venusian Scout Ship and the Trent flying disc, and came to typify the UFOs associated with those first mid-20th century flying saucer flaps. His design has been imitated many times on both the silver- and small-screen, and in other popular media like comic books.

Shaped by Keyhoe’s collected accounts of UFO encounters, Harryhausen’s saucers have, in turn, almost certainly had an influence on the descriptions given of UFOs by witnesses who have reported sightings since. Harryhausen’s aliens, too, one of which we briefly glimpse in the film when his protective helmet is removed, eerily resemble the renowned Roswell aliens! Coincidence?

Let’s continue examining the definitive 1950s flying saucer film Earth vs. the Flying Saucers:

In one of the film’s scenes, the characters speak of “Foo Lights,” referring to a bona fide phenomenon reported by World War II military pilots, who tagged them “Foo-Fighters.” These were glowing balls of light that seemed to follow their aircraft and manoeuvre wildly. Never reported as hostile, Allied Command at first thought them to be some kind of new enemy weapon, but learned that German and Japanese pilots were also reporting these curious luminous displays outside their cockpits.

Foo-Fighters were thought by experts to be an electrostatic phenomenon similar to St. Elmo’s Fire, or light reflecting through water drops or ice crystals on cockpit windows.

Lastly, in what may be a concurrence too striking to dismiss, the truck-mounted sonic cannon used to knock down the attacking saucers in the film’s exhilarating conclusion very much resembles a fanciful real-life device called a “Cloudbuster,” designed by Austrian doctor and psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, and apparently used as a weapon by Reich and his son to fight a “full-scale interplanetary battle” in the Arizona desert! Was this UFOlogical event the direct inspiration for the movie’s finale?

One of psychiatry’s most radical thinkers, Reich espoused controversial ideas about sex and coined the term “sexual revolution.” He held that socio-economic conditions, and in particular a lack of what he termed “orgastic potency” were at the root of neuroses.

Reich moved to America in 1939, in part to escape the Nazis, and soon after claimed to have discovered a biological or cosmic energy he called “Orgone.” He built “Orgone Accumulators” to allow his patients to harness the reputed health benefits of this newfound force. He and Gwyneth Paltrow would have gotten along just swimmingly!

In 1951, Reich claimed to have discovered another form of energy which he labelled Deadly Orgone Radition (DOR). It is at this point that he designed his Cloudbuster, a series of 15-foot aluminium pipes mounted on a mobile platform and connected to cables that were inserted into a water basin. He held that his invention could unblock Orgone energy in the atmosphere and prompt rain, presumably to neutralize the DOR.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Federal Food and Drug Adminstration had taken notice of his Orgone treatments and in 1954 an injunction was issued ordering the destruction of Reich’s accumulators and the withholding of any supporting literature.

This turn of events seems to have triggered in Reich a mental breakdown and he soon became convinced that Earth had come under attack from cigar-shaped UFOs, or “Energy Alphas,” which he reported were flying overhead seeding the atmosphere with Deadly Orgone Radiation in a bid to destroy the planet. He and his son spent their nights searching for these UFOs with binoculars and a telescope, and upon locating one, would deploy their Cloudbuster to suck the energy right out of it! Reich claimed that they’d downed several of the craft in this manner. In 1955 came their “interplanetary battle” with the Energy Alphas, fought from a rented house in Arizona they had set up as their base station.

Ancient Aliens

While the Foo Fighters of World War II mentioned above pre-date by just a few years the Kenneth Arnold sighting, according to some researchers, the UFO phenomenon has been with us for a very long time, centuries undoubtedly, and perhaps eons. This subset of UFOlogical study is explored in the History Channel’s long-running pseudoscientific documentary series Ancient Aliens. But we’re deep into Erich von Däniken territory, here; approach with a cynical mind!

Nonetheless, Hollywood finds in these highly speculative suppositions about “ancient astronauts” fuel for such science fiction fare as the Stargate and Battlestar: Galactica franchises (1994-2018 and 1978-2012, respectively), the Doctor Who serial Pyramids of Mars (1975), the classic Star Trek episode “Who Mourns for Adonais” (1967), and the Weird Western films Cowboys and Aliens (2011) and The Aurora Encounter (1986), these latter two kindled by the so-named “Mystery Airships” of the American West.
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Sightings of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena in the western U.S. of the 19th century included those of the Mystery Airships, or Phantom Airships, of 1896-1897. These were a series of UFO sightings and abductions reported in newspapers of the time, noteworthy among them the Aurora, Texas, UFO Incident, in which a metallic, cigar-shaped UFO crashed into a windmill on a farm near the off-the-beaten-track town of Aurora in north-east Texas. The devastating crash resulted in the death of the craft’s pilot, who the locals determined was “not an inhabitant of this world.” He was nevertheless given a proper Christian burial!

Airship sightings occurred worldwide during the 1880s-1890s, the mysterious dirigible-like craft popularly thought to be the inventions of a Thomas Edison or some such figure not yet prepared to reveal his newest invention to the world.

Other pre-Arnold UAP include:

The Battle of Los Angeles

Also referred to as “The Great Los Angeles Air Raid,” this barrage of anti-aircraft fire directed at what artillerymen took to be Japanese bombers over Los Angeles during the night of February 24-25, 1942, was probably triggered by nervous soldiers in a post-Pearl Harbor environment mistaking meteorological balloons released earlier that day for the enemy. Based on a grainy photograph of multiple search lights trained on an indistinct object in the sky that ran in the L.A. Times a day later, UFOlogists have argued that this incident amounts to an example of an early UFO sighting.

For the apocalyptic military sci-fi movie Battle: Los Angeles (2011), the scenario was given a contemporary update that most assuredly featured extraterrestrials, not weather balloons! The film follows the street-to-street engagements of a platoon of marines stationed in L.A. as they do their part to repel a worldwide alien invasion.

 

Celestial Phenomena Over European Cities

At dawn on April 14, 1561, the residents of Nuremberg, Germany, observed hundreds of spheres and cylinders overhead. From the cylinders emerged smaller, round objects that darted about the sky, battling each other, seeming to exhaust themselves until falling, spent, to Earth to be consumed in a tremendous cloud of smoke. Objects shaped like crosses were also observed, as were two in the shape of a lunar crescent. Finally, a huge, black, triangular shape appeared and there followed a thundering crash outside of the city.

A similar event unfolded in the summer skies above Basel, Switzerland, in 1566. Many 15th- and 16th-century pamphlets and illustrated news broadsheets, the forerunners of newspapers, printed accounts of such “sky spectacles” and “miracles” seen across the continent. Modern scientists have suggested that these events were nothing more fantastical than solar eclipses or atmospheric singularities such as sun dogs.

Ezekiel’s Wheel

And in the ancient world, sightings of anomalous lights and glowing objects in the sky were interpreted as the actions of deities. The Hebrew prophet Ezekiel’s visions of what he saw as God can be found in the Bible. He describes an approaching windstorm in the form of a “great cloud, with brightness around it, and fire flashing forth continually, and in the midst of the fire, as it were gleaming metal.” Within this aura were four winged “cherubim,” or living creatures, humanoid in form. Beside each of these figures was a bizarre structure Ezekiel likened to a “wheel within a wheel” that sparkled like topaz, with rims “tall and awesome” and “full of eyes all around.” These wheels descended and rose in concert with the four creatures. UFOlogists have interpreted this Biblical event as a close encounter.

THE CHILDREN OF DAVID VINCENT

The Invaders

Architect David Vincent, played by Roy Thinnes, was the lead character in seminal UFO television series The Invaders (1967-1968), ABC’s fearfully paranoia-inducing exercise was informed by the lingering McCarthyism of a decade earlier, and “alien doppelganger” movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958).

Vincent is set in opposition to alien invaders from a dying planet in the process of surreptitiously taking over the Earth, which they intend on making “their world!” According to the show’s opening narration, Vincent’s chronicle began “one lost night on a lonely country road, looking for a shortcut that he never found.” The narrator continues melodramatically: “It began with a closed deserted diner, and a man too long without sleep to continue his journey. It began with the landing of a craft from another galaxy. Now David Vincent knows that the Invaders are here, that they have taken human form. Somehow he must convince a disbelieving world that the nightmare has already begun.” Over the course of the short-lived series, Vincent was joined by other believers in thwarting the aliens’ plans.

Captain Scarlet and UFO

Across the pond in England, Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s Century 21 Productions were playing in a similar sandbox with, first, the Supermarionation puppet series Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (1967-1968), followed in short order by the live-action show UFO (1970-1973), both set in the future and involving secret organizations tasked with defending Earth against a hostile alien threat.

The X-Files

The most popular and successful television series involving UFOs is the unquestionably The X-Files (1993-2002), which ran for nine seasons on the Fox Network, spawned a spin-off, The Lone Gunmen (2001), two feature films, The X-Files; Fight the Future (1998) and The X-Files: I Want to Believe (2011), and a two-season revival (2016-2018).

The series followed the weekly investigations and developing affections of a pair of mismatched FBI agents—he the rogue true believer, she the by-the-book skeptic—as they dealt with all manner of supernatural goings-on, and doggedly sought to uncover the government-sanctioned conspiracy concerning UFO aliens and their sinister plans at the heart of the show’s overarching storyline.

The “Blue Book” and Other UFO Shows

X-Files, NBC’s comparable but lesser-known Dark Skies (1996-1997), and the recent History Channel sci-fi/period drama Project Blue Book (2018-2020) are all progeny of The Invaders in subject matter and tone, and tapped into UFO lore for story elements, often including real-life UFO “celebrities” like Jesse Marcel and Donald Keyhoe as characters in their storylines. Project Blue Book, in point of fact, features as a principal character Dr. J. Allen Hynek, the real-life astrophysicist-cum-UFOlogist who advised the Air Force on flying saucers in the 1950s and ’60s, and later devised the classification system commonly used today to rank UFO sightings.

An earlier TV series about the Air Force’s official probe of UFOs was more police procedural than conspiracy-rich thriller. Referencing in its introductory sequence Ezekiel’s Wheel as the starting point of man’s preoccupation with UFOs, NBC’s Project U.F.O. (1978-1979) followed the efforts of two USAF officers assigned to investigate flying saucer sightings.

Both Project U.F.O. and Project Blue Book loosely based episodes on some of the better-known UFO incidents in Air Force dossiers, but with the details often changed to better suit the dramatic narrative. Nevertheless, the core “true” story remained essentially intact.

These genuine cases included the Washington, D. C. Incident, in which UFOs swarmed the U.S. capital throughout July of 1952; the Kelly-Hopkinsville Encounter of 1955, in which a family and their friends were besieged in a rural Kentucky farmhouse by luminescent and levitating goblin-like extraterrestrials; the Shag Harbour incident of 1967—labelled “Canada’s ‘Roswell’”—in which a UFO is said to have crashed into the Atlantic offshore of a Nova Scotia fishing village, leaving a strange yellowish foam on the surface of the water; and one of the most credible encounters on record, the Lonnie Zamora incident.

Lonnie Zamora’s Flying Egg

On April 24, 1964, Socorro, New Mexico, police officer Lonnie Zamora was alone in his police cruiser in pursuit of a speeding driver on the outskirts of the city when he heard a roar and noticed a flame in the sky some distance away. Thinking a local dynamite shack might have exploded, he broke off pursuit and went to investigate. Upon approaching the scene, he saw what he took to be an overturned car and two people dressed in white coveralls standing beside it. One of them saw him and appeared startled. He maneuvered closer, intending to lend assistance and exited his cruiser just as he again heard a roar, low-pitched at first, growing increasingly louder and shifting to a higher frequency. The object was spewing an orange-blue flame from its underside, and was rising into the air.

Realizing that the object was not an overturned car, Zamora noted that it had a smooth, shiny surface, like aluminum but not as mirror-like as chrome. It was oval in shape, with four short landing struts and no discernible windows or doors. He made out a red insignia across the middle of the object. While still on site in the immediate aftermath of his encounter, he managed to make a quick sketch of the symbol.

Zamora began running away from the scene, fearing the loud sound or flame might be dangerous. He ducked down behind a rise about 50 feet from his parked cruiser, put his head down and covered it protectively with his hands, but looked up when he no longer heard the din. The object was traveling away from him, hovering about 15 feet off the ground, before it rose rapidly skyward and sped off across country.

Zamora returned to his patrol car and radioed for assistance. Another officer soon joined him and the two inspected the site, finding still-burning brush. The assisting officer pointed out the presence of fresh indentations in the soil. Other policemen arrived soon after and also remarked on the smoldering vegetation. Samples of sand that appeared to have been fused by heat were later collected for analysis at the University of New Mexico, as were two samples of organic material recovered that subsequently could not be identified.

Zamora characterized the two figures he had seen next to the object as nondescript and smallish, like children. He caught only that single, brief glimpse of them. Later reporting that he’d heard a sound like a hatch closing just before the craft began its take-off, he surmised that he had surprised them, and that they quickly scrambled back inside their ship and departed.

Witnesses corroborated Zamora’s account to the extent that they reported having seen an airborne, egg-shaped object, the distinctive flame, and had heard the loud roar in the same vicinity, and at about the same time as Zamora had.

Investigations of the incident by Air Force officials and civilian UFO organizations were unable to satisfactorily explain away what Zamora had seen. The Blue Book report, while discounting an extraterrestrial explanation, reached no conclusions, avowing that “the Air Force was continuing its investigation, and the case is still open.”

Officer Schirmer’s “Flying Serpent”

A few years later, early in December of 1967, 22-year-old Ashland, Nebraska, police officer Herbert Schirmer similarly came upon a flying saucer while on patrol.

The hovering object he later described, not unlike the Zamora UFO, was oval in shape, resembling a football, sheathed in what appeared to be aluminum, displayed landing gear, and emitted an orange flame from its undercarriage as it rose and sped away.

Unlike Zamora, however, Schirmer later revealed while under hypnosis that he’d been taken aboard the craft and met friendly humanoids whose features were vaguely reptilian, and who wore on their uniforms an emblem depicting a winged serpent. He was able to produce sketches of the UFO, the alien commander, and the emblem.

Schirmer had evidently withstood the same idiosyncrasy of missing time that Betty and Barney Hill had experienced, and until undergoing hypnosis, remembered little of the encounter beyond his initial sighting of the craft. But the young policeman’s story is believed by skeptics a fabrication, possibly inspired by Zamora’s, the Hill’s, and other well-publicized UFO incidents.

The reptile-like alien, or Reptiloid, is one of the more, shall we say colourful fixtures of UFO lore. Kenneth Johnson, creator of the V television miniseries which quickly grew into a franchise (1983-2011), appropriated the mythos in developing villainous Diana and her Visitor cohorts, decidedly unfriendly—and carnivorous!—aliens with nasty designs on humanity. The concept of shape-shifting “Serpent Men” infiltrating the corridors of power in order to control human civilization dates back to the days of pulp fiction magazines and the weird fantasy tales of Conan creator Robert E. Howard.

A version of Schirmer’s sketch of the winged serpent emblem made its way onto the set of the ever so cheesy low-budget Canadian UFO flick Starship Invasions (1977) as a costume element. Playing the leader of the story’s evil alien Legion of the Winged Serpent, Hammer Horror icon Christopher Lee sported the emblem on the breast of his goofy looking outfit.

INTERMISSION…

We’ll pause, now, for a brief musical interlude and continue immediately thereafter, when we examine three significant UFO sightings, all of them having occurred in 1948.

Credit: The Kiffness (www.thekiffness.com)

We continue with our look at the reciprocal relationship between the UFO experience and the filmed entertainment industry, each indubitably feeding the other. Following are briefs on three significant UFO sightings reported in the same year, 1948, the dawn of the modern UFO phenomenon. Many of the characteristics of these incidents have been repeated in succeeding encounters, and dramatized in many a flying saucer screen fiction produced in the years and decades since.

1948

In the months following the Kenneth Arnold sighting, three sightings in particular stirred strong interest in flying saucers by both the public and military. These incidents convinced personnel with Project Sign, Blue Book’s predecessor, that flying saucers were real. A top-secret report was drafted for U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff General Hoyt S. Vandenberg concluding that UFOs were interplanetary craft!

Taking note of the public’s fascination with flying saucers, Hollywood jumped on the bandwagon with aforementioned films like The Day the Earth Stood Still and Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, as well as Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957), Teenagers from Outer Space (1959), the much-derided Plan 9 from Outer Space (also 1959), and numerous others. British filmmakers, too, got in on the trend with such productions as Stranger from Venus and Devil Girl from Mars (both 1954).

The Chiles-Whitted Sighting

In the early morning hours of July 24, 1948, commercial airline pilots Clarence S. Chiles and John B. Whitted were flying an Eastern Airlines DC-3 at an altitude of about 5000 feet in the skies near Montgomery, Alabama. Chiles spotted something in the distance, glowing a dull reddish hue. He pointed it out to his co-pilot, thinking it to be one of the military’s new jet planes.

The object apparently closed on their airliner within seconds and streaked past to the right of them before pulling up and climbing at high speed into the clouds, a tremendous trail of flame shooting out behind it. The whole encounter lasted only some 15 seconds.

Both pilots described the object as torpedo- or cigar-shaped, looking “like a wingless aircraft…similar to a B-29 fuselage.” It appeared to have two rows of windows along its length from which glowed a brilliant light, akin to that produced by a magnesium flare. The pilots estimated the object’s length at about 100 feet, its diameter at 25 or 30 feet. Neither heard any particular sound of an unusual nature related to the object. Officers with Project Sign interviewed the two pilots following the incident and found that they differed on but a few of the object’s structural details.

Only one of their passengers, a C. L. McKelvie, said he had seen anything unusual, reporting a bright streak of light flashing past his window.

Some news articles and books later published citing the incident claimed that the airliner had been hit with a wave of turbulence during its brief encounter with the object, but neither pilot, nor passenger McKelvie, had ever mentioned experiencing any such jolt.

UFOlogists investigating this incident were divided on whether or not the two pilots had been surprised by a meteor, possibly a very bright bolide, and misinterpreted what they had seen. Meteor activity was rife on and about the date of the sighting. The Project Sign investigators, however, faced with two very credible witnesses who had seen a UFO up close, believed the pilots’ story as they had related it and rejected the meteor explanation. The Sign report listed the object as “unidentified.”

From the mid-air capture of a small four-seat Stinson 108 light aircraft by the giant Metalunan flying saucer of This Island Earth (1955) to a UFO’s interception of the doomed Flight 549 over upstate New York in the fourth-season X-Files episode “Tempus Fugit” (1997), a nod of acknowledgement is owed the Chiles-Whitted incident. Every film or television show of the last 70-odd years in which a commercial aircraft in flight encounters a UFO stems, at least in part, from this early case, which lent screenplays a certain patina of verity by providing scriptwriters with a based-on-real-events template to follow and build upon.

One of the most arresting such scenes plays out in the first reel of Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). The taut sequence unfolds entirely from the perspective of air traffic controllers in radio communication with the pilots of commercial airliners during a UFO encounter. The audience is held rapt without ever seeing what the pilots see, or the apprehension on their faces as they react to avoid a collision, or a brightly glowing UFO alarmingly buzzing an airliner in the night skies. The white-knuckle drama is all realized simply but so effectively by the sound and cadence of the pilots’ voices crackling over the radio, and of the group of controllers responding as they monitor the occurrence.

We move from commercial to military aircraft for the other two foremost UFO incidents of 1948. Both instances involve Air National Guard fighter planes engaging bright objects in the sky. The idea of Air Force fighters set against UFOs is a staple of the genre, from Earth vs. the Flying Saucers to Independence Day (1996) and its sequel (2016).

The Gorman Dogfight

The Gorman Dogfight of October 1 saw North Dakota Air National Guard pilot George F. Gorman pursuing what he described as, simply, a blinking “ball of light” in the skies over Fargo. This UFO was apparently no more than 8 inches or so in diameter—the Foo Fighters of World War II are brought to mind. Gorman later added that the light would stop blinking and grow brighter when it accelerated.

An experienced wartime fighter pilot, Gorman was part of a cross-country flight of National Guard aircraft on this day. His flight decided to land at Hector Airport upon arrival over Fargo, but Gorman opted to remain aloft to get in some night-time flying hours. At about 9:00PM, he flew over a nearby football stadium, where a high-school game was underway. He noted the presence of a Piper Cub flying about 500 feet below him, then spotted a bright light in the sky to the west.

He radioed Hector’s control tower and inquired as to local air traffic other than his own plane and the Piper Cub, the pilot and passenger of which also reported seeing the light. The tower responded that they had no other traffic in the area.

Gorman flew towards the light to investigate, but found that it was able to outrace and outmanoeuvre him at every turn. He made several attempts to get close to the light, which made an initial close pass of his P-51. At one point, Gorman climbed after the UFO but the steep ascent caused his aircraft to stall. He finally had to abandon chase when the elusive light rocketed away and disappeared from view. His dogfight with the UFO had transpired over about 15 or 20 minutes, and had moved for a time over Hector Airport, where it was observed through binoculars by air traffic controller J. D. Jensen, and the pilot and passenger of the Piper Cub, who had landed and walked over to the control tower to get a better view of the bizarre orb.

Sign’s investigation initially concluded that “something remarkable had happened” in the skies over Fargo, ruling out that the light had been another aircraft or a weather balloon. Readings made of Gorman’s plane registered higher levels of radiation than the other fighters parked on the tarmac, suggesting that maybe Gorman’s plane had been in close proximity to some kind of atomic-powered craft.

Subsequently, upon further investigation, Sign reconsidered their initial findings and concluded that Gorman had, most probably, chased a weather balloon, one of which, equipped with running lights, had been launched by the weather service from Fargo shortly before Gorman engaged his UFO. The evidence of elevated radiation levels was dismissed as invalid because any aircraft flying at high altitudes, where the thinner atmosphere provides less of a shield against incoming cosmic rays, would show a higher degree of contamination than aircraft on the ground. The object’s wild aerobatics, it was postulated, was an illusion created by Gorman’s own manoeuvres relative to the object as he chased and dove towards it. He may have also have caught site of the planet Jupiter after loosing visual contact with the object momentarily during the dogfight, and ended up pursuing the planet, thinking it was the UFO.

Gorman, for his part, held that there was certainly thought behind the UFO’s movements.

The Thomas Mantell Crash

But just a week into the year came the earliest, chronologically, of our three key incidents of 1948, and the most sobering, for here was recorded the first casualty associated with a UFO encounter! The death of a military pilot while engaging a flying saucer moved the idea of interplanetary alien spaceships and the little green men aboard them from the domain of whimsical silliness typical of newspaper coverage at the time, to serious concern. If extraterrestrial in nature, it seemed that flying saucers might also prove hostile and a threat to American skies.

Captain Thomas Mantell was one of four Kentucky Air National Guard pilots directed to investigate a UFO sighted near Fort Knox, Kentucky, on January 7. At about 1:45PM, Godman Army Airfield had received a report from the Kentucky Highway Patrol of a large, circular object flying westbound near Madisonville. Personnel in Godman’s air traffic control tower spotted a white object in the distance, seemingly stationary, the base commander describing it as “very white…about one fourth the size of the full moon.” The UFO was observed for roughly 90 minutes, not only from Godman, but from airfields in neighbouring Ohio, as well, one observer there describing the object as “having the appearance of a flaming red cone trailing a gaseous green mist.”

Incoming after a training exercise, Mantell’s flight was ordered to investigate. One of his pilots, however, was low on fuel and broke off to land. Mantell and the other two pilots rose in a steep climb and gave chase. Only Lieutenant Albert Clements’ plane was equipped with an oxygen mask, but his oxygen was in low supply. At 22,500 feet, he and the other wingman broke off and returned to base. They would later state that they had seen an object, but that it was too small and indistinct to be properly identified.

Mantell flew on alone in pursuit of the UFO, climbing ever higher. According to the Air Force, once past 25,000 feet, he likely blacked out due to hypoxia and his plane went into a dive, spiralling down to the ground and crashing on a farm south of the town of Franklin, on the Kentucky-Tennessee state border.

Rumours quickly spread that Mantell had been hit by a Soviet missile, that his body was found riddled with bullets, that he’d been shot down by a UFO when he got too close, that his plane had completely disintegrated in the air, that the wreckage was radioactive, and that Mantell’s body was missing from the wreckage! None of these rumours could be substantiated, however. Regardless, in due course they passed into the realm of urban legend and endure even to this day.

Project Sign quickly investigated the incident, anticipating the flood of questions that would surely follow the death of a military pilot who had chased a UFO. They determined that Mantell had probably been mistakenly in pursuit of the planet Venus, as had another pilot flying a similar aircraft a few weeks earlier in another incident that paralleled this one.

Another explanation put forward a few years later when Sign revisited the file was that the UFO was in fact a Skyhook high altitude balloon. Skyhook balloons were large and, at their topmost, spherical, trailing below them a tapering lower portion that made the whole kit appear somewhat cone-like. They were made of a highly reflective material that gave them a metallic sheen. Project Skyhook was a secret Navy research exercise and neither Mantell nor any of the other military personnel involved on that day would have known about this classified operation.

Mantell’s fateful story served as inspiration for the Japanese giant monster film Sora no Daikaijū Radon, known in English as Rodan (1956; U.S. release, 1957). Toho Studio’s first kaiju shot in colour, the film underlines a scene in which a jet fighter, responding to reports of a UFO performing breakneck maneuvers, is downed and the pilot killed by said UFO, eventually revealed to be not a flying saucer, but a giant supersonic-capable pterosaur dubbed Rodan.

Also, the earlier-mentioned Project U.F.O.’s premiere, “The Washington, D.C. Incident,” included a loose interpretation of Mantell’s story. And, Star Trek’s “Tomorrow is Yesterday” cleverly worked a Mantell-like sequence into the episode’s opening teaser, with the Enterprise cast as the UFO!

EPILOGUE

Without any real, hard, irrefutable evidence to back up their extraordinary claims, UFOlogists struggle to gain the respect of the scientific community. To date, UFOlogy has failed to conclusively prove its case. But we also don’t know with anything approaching certainty that there is no intelligent life in the universe other than here on Earth—and we’re not even sure of that!—so it’s possible that extraterrestrials as smart or smarter than us exist somewhere out there, perhaps in a form similar to our own, perhaps in a truly alien configuration with which we are entirely unfamiliar. And maybe they’ve developed the technology to come visit.

This much we do know: Hollywood and like entertainment factories around the world have undoubtedly influenced the UFO phenomenon as much as they’ve been inspired by it.

The people of Earth have opinions on UFOs! Some believe them to be extraterrestrial spacecraft conveying alien visitors to our planet from another star or another dimension. Others consider the whole craze to be either some kind of mass delusion or a hoax perpetrated on society’s most gullible. The rest of us fall somewhere in between those two polar opposites.

Wherever one may land on the matter, I think it fair to say that UFOs have provided in particular science fiction fans with hours upon hours of entertainment. Countless books, comics, games, toys, and the focus of this afternoon’s treatise, film and television productions, have stirred our imaginations, open as we are to what our favourite genre offers, the X-Files’ so-called “extreme possibilities.” So keep watching your screens, fellow sci-fi fans, and enjoying the fictional flying saucers thereon, but by all means, keep watching the skies, as well.