Topic
The books, broadcasts, films, podcasts and reporting that shaped what the public knows. 495 events, newest first.
Media17 May 1992
CBS aired Intruders, a two-part prime-time miniseries starring Richard Crenna and Mare Winningham about people who believe they were abducted by aliens. The network promoted it as drawn from hundreds of case histories; critics found it slow and exploitative.
Photo: John Mathew Smith & www.celebrity-photos.com from Laurel Maryland, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0
MediaMar 1992
Ballantine Books published Jacques Vallee's account of his 1990 trip to the Soviet Union, where under glasnost he met Soviet scientists and researchers and interviewed people reporting UFO encounters.
Photo: Christopher Michel, CC BY-SA 4.0
Media1992
Nuclear physicist turned UFO lecturer Stanton Friedman and Don Berliner published Crash at Corona (Paragon House), arguing the U.S. military recovered a crashed UFO in New Mexico in 1947 and hid it. Air Force reports in the 1990s instead tied the Roswell accounts to balloon projects.
Photo: AllenS, Public domain
Media1992
Jacques Vallee published Forbidden Science (North Atlantic Books), his personal journals from 1957 to 1969, recounting his early UFO research and why he felt mainstream science treated the topic as off-limits. Later volumes covered the following decades.
Photo: Cmichel67, CC BY-SA 4.0
Media1992
The International UFO Museum and Research Center opened in Roswell, founded by Walter Haut, the 1947 base public information officer, with Glenn Dennis and Max Littell. It became a fixture of the town's UFO tourism and its annual UFO festival.
Photo: AllenS, Public domain
MediaOct 1991
Ballantine Books published Jacques Vallee's 'Revelations', the last book of his alien contact trilogy. Vallee argued that many UFO stories were deliberate hoaxes or manipulation by private groups or government psychological-warfare efforts, and that researchers had been misled.
Photo: Christopher Michel, CC BY-SA 4.0
MediaSep 1991
Two Englishmen, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, told the press in September 1991 that they had been making crop circles in southern England for years, starting as a joke about UFO 'saucer nests'. Their account undercut claims that the circles marked UFO landings.
Photo: Jabberocky, Public domain
Media1991
Bob Brown and Wendelle Stevens started the International UFO Congress, an annual convention mixing researchers, witnesses and enthusiasts. Held for years in Laughlin, Nevada, it drew nearly 1,000 people by 2009 and moved to the Phoenix area in 2011.
Photo: Stan Shebs, CC BY-SA 3.0
Media25 Oct 1990
Fox aired the first Simpsons 'Treehouse of Horror' Halloween episode. In its segment 'Hungry Are the Damned', tentacled aliens Kang and Kodos abduct the family for a feast, a riff on the Twilight Zone's 'To Serve Man'. The pair became recurring characters in later Halloween episodes.
Media27 Apr 1990
Disney released 'Spaced Invaders', in which a tiny Martian crew picks up Orson Welles's 'War of the Worlds' broadcast, lands in a small Illinois town to join the supposed invasion, and is mistaken for trick-or-treating children.
Media1990
NBC's Unsolved Mysteries revisited the 1965 Kecksburg fireball case in a 1990 segment, helping the local story reach a wider audience. A mockup of the reported object made for the program is displayed by the Kecksburg Volunteer Fire Department.
Photo: Ryright, CC BY-SA 3.0
Media1990
Jerome Clark published UFOs in the 1980s, the first volume of The UFO Encyclopedia, a multi-volume reference that ran from 1990 to 1996 and later grew into a larger edition titled The UFO Encyclopedia: The Phenomenon from the Beginning.
Media1990
Jacques Vallee published 'Five Arguments Against the Extraterrestrial Origin of Unidentified Flying Objects' in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, arguing that the reports did not fit a simple visiting-spacecraft explanation.
Photo: Cmichel67, CC BY-SA 4.0
Media1990
Jacques Vallee published Confrontations (Ballantine), the second book of his alien contact trilogy, describing his own field investigations of some forty UFO cases around the world.
Photo: Cmichel67, CC BY-SA 4.0
Media9 Aug 1989
20th Century Fox released James Cameron's The Abyss, in which oil-rig divers helping the U.S. Navy reach a lost nuclear submarine encounter a non-human intelligence living deep in the ocean, an early big-screen take on underwater unidentified craft.
Photo: Towpilot, CC BY-SA 3.0
Media12 May 1989
Vestron released Julien Temple's 'Earth Girls Are Easy' after a year's delay. Three furry aliens, played by Jeff Goldblum, Jim Carrey and Damon Wayans, crash their spaceship into the San Fernando Valley pool of a manicurist played by Geena Davis.
Photo: Alan Light, CC BY 2.0
Media1989
The International Academy of Astronautics adopted a Declaration of Principles for what to do if a signal from extraterrestrial intelligence is found: verify it first, notify other observers and the UN, announce openly, and send no reply before international consultation.
Media1989
Philippe Mora's film Communion, adapted by Whitley Strieber from his bestselling 1987 account of alleged abduction experiences, starred Christopher Walken as Strieber. The Deseret News called it a disappointment despite solid lead acting; it put Strieber's visitors on cinema screens.
Photo: John Harrison, CC BY-SA 3.0
Media1989
Dean Alioto made UFO Abduction, a low-budget found-footage film of a family menaced by aliens. Copies circulated without credits and were shown at a UFO convention, and some viewers treated it as genuine; Alioto later remade it for UPN in 1998.
Media1989
Fox turned the 1988 film Alien Nation into a weekly police series about a human detective and his Newcomer partner, a thinly veiled satire on race relations. Fox dropped it after one season in 1990; TV movies followed from 1994.
Photo: Keith McDuffee from Northborough, MA, USA, CC BY 2.0
