Topic
The books, broadcasts, films, podcasts and reporting that shaped what the public knows. 495 events, newest first.
Media13 Aug 1997
Comedy Central premiered South Park with 'Cartman Gets an Anal Probe,' in which aliens probe Cartman and abduct a younger child. The crude pilot lampooned familiar abduction tropes and launched a long-running series.
Photo: Comedy Central, Public domain
Media27 Jul 1997
Showtime premiered Stargate SG-1, a series sequel to the 1994 film starring Richard Dean Anderson as an officer leading teams through an alien gateway. It ran ten seasons, moving to the Sci-Fi Channel for the last five.
Photo: Falashad, CC BY 2.0
Media11 Jul 1997
Warner Bros. released Contact, Robert Zemeckis's adaptation of Carl Sagan's novel, starring Jodie Foster as a radio astronomer who detects a signal from the star Vega. It framed alien contact through radio searches rather than saucers.
Photo: NASA, Public domain
Media2 Jul 1997
Sony released Men in Black, a comedy about agents who police aliens living secretly on Earth, drawing on UFO lore about mysterious men who silence witnesses. It earned about $589 million worldwide and launched a franchise.
Photo: Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc., Public domain
MediaJul 1997
Roswell, New Mexico, staged a celebration for the 50th anniversary of the 1947 debris recovery, with tens of thousands of visitors expected. It came days after the Air Force released 'The Roswell Report: Case Closed', which attributed alien-body stories to test dummies.
Photo: J Dykstra, Public domain
Media23 Jun 1997
TIME's June 23, 1997 issue put Roswell on its cover, with a story by Leon Jaroff arguing that mundane debris found in 1947 grew, through retelling, into a far larger legend of a recovered flying saucer.
Media26 Mar 1997
San Diego County authorities found 39 members of the Heaven's Gate group dead in a Rancho Santa Fe mansion after a planned mass suicide. Officials and people who knew the group said members believed a UFO trailing Comet Hale-Bopp would take them away.
Photo: Heaven's Gate, Public domain
Media24 Mar 1997
At the 69th Academy Awards, Independence Day won the Oscar for visual effects, credited to Volker Engel, Douglas Smith, Clay Pinney and Joseph Viskocil. It was the film's only win from two nominations.
Media13 Dec 1996
Warner Bros. released Tim Burton's Mars Attacks!, a satirical alien-invasion comedy adapted from a 1962 Topps trading card series. It opened in Los Angeles and New York months after Independence Day revived big-screen saucer invasions.
Photo: Chester from Toronto, Canada, CC BY 2.0
MediaNov 1996
Amateur astronomer Chuck Shramek called Art Bell's late-night radio show to report an object trailing Comet Hale-Bopp, and others then claimed it was an alien craft. Astronomers identified it as an ordinary star; the story later figured in coverage of the Heaven's Gate suicides.
Photo: ESO/E. Slawik, CC BY 4.0
Media21 Sep 1996
NBC premiered Dark Skies, a drama in which a young couple in 1960s Washington uncovers Majestic-12, a secret agency fighting an alien presence. Critics compared it to The X-Files; it ran one season.
Photo: Universal Television, Public domain
MediaSep 1996
A Gallup survey taken September 3-5, 1996 found 71 percent of U.S. adults believed the government knew more about UFOs than it was telling, a figure Gallup later used as the benchmark for its 2019 result of 68 percent.
Photo: Gallup, Inc., CC BY 4.0
Media2 Jul 1996
20th Century Fox released Independence Day, an alien-invasion blockbuster. It set records as the fastest film to $100 million and grossed over $300 million in the U.S. and about $817 million worldwide.
Photo: 20th Century Studios, Public domain
MediaJul 1996
Hakui, a coastal city on the Noto Peninsula that promotes itself as a UFO town citing an old shrine manuscript about objects in the sky, opened the Cosmo Isle Hakui space and UFO museum in July 1996. It displays genuine U.S. and Soviet space hardware beside UFO material.
Photo: Motokoka, CC BY-SA 4.0
Media21 Apr 1996
The SETI League, a volunteer group formed after Congress ended NASA's SETI funding, put Project Argus online on Earth Day 1996. It linked amateur radio telescopes, many built from old satellite TV dishes, aiming at real-time coverage of the whole sky.
MediaFeb 1996
After the TSS-1R tethered satellite broke loose from shuttle Columbia on STS-75, shuttle camera footage showed the tether amid many small drifting lights. UFO promoters later called it a swarm of craft; NASA and skeptics said the lights were debris and ice lit by sunlight.
Photo: NASA Johnson Space Center, Public domain
Media9 Jan 1996
NBC premiered 3rd Rock from the Sun, a sitcom about extraterrestrials posing as a human family in Ohio to study people. The series ran until 2001 and won eight Emmys, part of the mid-1990s wave of alien-themed entertainment.
Photo: The Carsey-Werner Company, Public domain
Media1996
John Greenewald Jr., then 15, began filing Freedom of Information Act requests in the summer of 1996 and started an online archive of the records he obtained, first called John's World and later The Black Vault. By 2020 it held more than two million pages, much of it on UFOs.
Media1996
Astronomer Carl Sagan's book on scientific skepticism used UFO and alien abduction claims as central case studies, attributing reported encounters to hallucination, misidentification, hoaxes and therapists' influence, and comparing abduction stories with older demon lore.
Photo: Kenneth C. Zirkel, CC BY-SA 4.0
Media1996
Nuclear physicist and ufologist Stanton Friedman published 'Top Secret/Majic', defending the authenticity of the disputed Majestic-12 papers, which describe a secret Truman-era group handling a recovered saucer. The papers' authenticity is widely disputed, and skeptics call them fakes.
Photo: AllenS, Public domain
