Topic
The books, broadcasts, films, podcasts and reporting that shaped what the public knows. 495 events, newest first.
Media29 Nov 1988
Donald Keyhoe, a retired Marine Corps officer whose 1950s books and articles argued that flying saucers were real and that the Air Force was withholding what it knew, died in Virginia at 91.
Photo: CBS, "The Mike Wallace Interview" 1958 March 8, Public domain
Media7 Oct 1988
20th Century Fox released Alien Nation, in which alien 'Newcomers' from a crashed slave ship settle in Los Angeles and a human detective is partnered with one of them. It opened at number one in the U.S. with about $8.4 million.
Photo: User:Bearian, CC BY-SA 3.0
MediaOct 1988
A Michael Seligman-produced TV special, with actor Mike Farrell reporting from Washington, presented claims of a government UFO cover-up, including scrambled messages from a disguised military informant called 'Condor'. A New Zealand review called it a schlockumentary that said nothing new.
Photo: Mercury at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0
Media12 Aug 1988
Orion Pictures released 'Mac and Me', in which a NASA probe collecting soil on Mars accidentally brings a family of aliens to a California desert lab. The youngest escapes, befriends a boy who uses a wheelchair, and is pursued by federal agents.
Photo: Orion Films, Public domain
Media27 May 1988
Stephen Chiodo's horror comedy Killer Klowns from Outer Space, about clown-like alien invaders, opened in limited U.S. release through Trans World Entertainment.
Photo: John Manard for Super Festivals /GalaxyCon from Ft. Lauderdale, USA, CC BY 2.0
Media1988
Jacques Vallee published Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact (Contemporary Books), the first of his alien contact trilogy, comparing modern UFO reports with older folklore and visionary accounts and arguing the extraterrestrial idea did not explain them.
Photo: Cmichel67, CC BY-SA 4.0
Media18 Dec 1987
Universal released *batteries not included, produced by Steven Spielberg's Amblin, in which small living flying saucers help elderly tenants resist eviction from their New York building. Effects delays pushed the opening from June to December 1987.
Photo: Alan Light, CC BY 2.0
Media20 Jan 1987
NBC aired the first Unsolved Mysteries special, hosted by Raymond Burr, from Cosgrove/Meurer Productions. Under later host Robert Stack it became a long-running series whose segments included UFO cases such as the 1965 Kecksburg incident.
Photo: Alan Light, CC BY 2.0
Media1987
British author Timothy Good published Above Top Secret, a long compilation of official documents and testimony arguing that governments worldwide were hiding what they knew about UFOs. A 1997 CIA history cited it as a source of cover-up claims, and skeptic reviewers faulted its rigor.
Media1987
Night Siege: The Hudson Valley UFO Sightings by J. Allen Hynek, Philip Imbrogno and Bob Pratt was published by Ballantine after Hynek's 1986 death, collecting accounts of the large lights reported over New York's Hudson Valley in the 1980s.
Photo: United States Government, Public domain
Media1987
The Society for Scientific Exploration began publishing the Journal of Scientific Exploration in 1987, a peer-reviewed outlet for research on anomalies outside established fields. Its papers have included work by UFO researchers such as Jacques Vallee.
Media1987
Peter Jackson's low-budget New Zealand splatter comedy, shot on weekends over about four years, has aliens invade a small seaside town to harvest humans for an intergalactic fast-food chain.
Photo: Phillip Capper from Wellington, New Zealand, CC BY 2.0
Media1 Dec 1986
Georgiy Daneliya's Mosfilm satire Kin-dza-dza!, in which two Muscovites are carried by an alien device to a desert planet called Pluke, opened in Soviet cinemas and became a cult comedy.
Photo: Alexey Yushenkov/, CC BY-SA 3.0
Media22 Sep 1986
NBC premiered ALF on Sept. 22, 1986, a sitcom about a furry alien who moves in with a suburban family after his spaceship crashes into their garage. It ran four seasons to 1990.
Photo: Unknown author, Public domain
Media1986
Disney released Randal Kleiser's Flight of the Navigator, in which a 12-year-old returns home to find eight years have passed while he has not aged. He learns he was aboard an alien craft, a missing-time premise familiar from abduction accounts.
Photo: Almagordo; derivative work by Keraunoscopia, Public domain
Media1986
Cannon released Tobe Hooper's remake of the 1953 film Invaders from Mars, written by Dan O'Bannon and Don Jakoby, with Hunter Carson, Karen Black and Louise Fletcher. As in the original, a boy sees a saucer land and aliens take over the minds of the adults around him.
Photo: Dark Attsios, CC BY-SA 3.0
Media29 Sep 1985
Physicist Paul Horowitz's Project META, an 8.4-million-channel receiver listening for radio signals from other civilizations, came online at Harvard's Oak Ridge field station. Steven Spielberg gave $100,000 for the equipment, and The Planetary Society sponsored the search.
Photo: ServiceAT, CC BY-SA 3.0
Media12 Jul 1985
Paramount released Joe Dante's Explorers, starring Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix as boys who build a small spacecraft and meet aliens whose idea of Earth comes from its TV broadcasts.
Photo: nicolas genin, CC BY-SA 2.0
Media3 Jul 1985
After years on the shelf, John Binder's 'UFOria' opened in Los Angeles. Cindy Williams plays a desert-town checkout clerk sure a flying saucer is coming for the faithful, with Harry Dean Stanton as a fake evangelist who tries to cash in and Fred Ward as a drifter.
Photo: John Mathew Smith & www.celebrity-photos.com from Laurel Maryland, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0
Media21 Jun 1985
Twentieth Century Fox released Ron Howard's Cocoon, in which visitors from the planet Antarea retrieve cocoons off St. Petersburg, Florida, and residents of a retirement community are rejuvenated by them. Don Ameche won a supporting-actor Oscar and the film won for visual effects.
