Topic
The books, broadcasts, films, podcasts and reporting that shaped what the public knows. 495 events, newest first.
Media14 Dec 1980
Episode 12 of Carl Sagan's PBS series Cosmos, 'Encyclopaedia Galactica', opened with a dramatized retelling of Betty and Barney Hill's 1961 abduction claim, which Sagan then picked apart, before turning to the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
Photo: NASA/JPL, Public domain
MediaSep 1980
Yorkshire Television began the 13-part ITV series Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World. Its UFO episode covered cases including the Robert Taylor incident and an interview with Kenneth Arnold, with Clarke weighing the reports cautiously.
Photo: ITU Pictures, CC BY 2.0
MediaAug 1980
Columbia released a recut Special Edition of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The studio funded the reissue on condition that Steven Spielberg add a scene inside the alien mothership; he later said the interior should have stayed a mystery and dropped it from his 1998 cut.
Photo: Sanjay Acharya, CC BY-SA 4.0
Media1980
Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore's book The Roswell Incident revived the 1947 debris story as a crashed-saucer cover-up. The Air Force's 1997 report called Roswell essentially a non-story until the late 1970s and cited the book among sources for later claims.
Photo: Unknown author, Public domain
Media1980
Linda Moulton Howe's 1980 TV documentary 'A Strange Harvest' presented cattle mutilations as possibly linked to UFOs, bringing that idea to a wide audience. Official inquiries such as the 1980 Rommel report attributed the carcass damage to predators.
Photo: Larry W. Howe, CC BY 4.0
Media1980
Carl Sagan, Bruce Murray and Louis Friedman founded The Planetary Society, a member-funded space advocacy group. By its own account members began funding SETI research in its first year, and it later sponsored Harvard searches such as Project META.
Photo: credit NASA JPL, Public domain
Media1980
Sunn Classic Pictures released Hangar 18, directed by James L. Conway, a drama in which the Air Force hides a crashed saucer at a Texas base while the White House chief of staff keeps it quiet before an election. Its title echoes a claim made at a 1974 symposium about a stored crashed craft.
Media31 Jan 1979
Jean Girault's comedy Le Gendarme et les extra-terrestres opened in French cinemas. Louis de Funes plays gendarme Ludovic Cruchot, who sees a flying saucer and struggles to convince others that extraterrestrials have arrived around Saint-Tropez.
Photo: Rolf Gebhardt, CC BY-SA 4.0
Media1979
The Fund for UFO Research was founded in 1979 to give grants for UFO research and public education rather than investigate cases itself. Physicist Bruce Maccabee chaired it from the start; it was later led by Richard Hall and Don Berliner.
Photo: Jacques Poulet ( Jacquespoulet at en.wikipedia ), CC BY-SA 3.0
Media1979
The Center for UFO Studies, founded by astronomer J. Allen Hynek, began publishing the Journal of UFO Studies in 1979 as a scholarly outlet. The first series ran to 1983 and a second series from 1989 to 2006.
Photo: United States Government, Public domain
Media14 Sep 1978
ABC premiered Mork & Mindy on Sept. 14, 1978, a spinoff of Happy Days starring Robin Williams as an alien from the planet Ork living in Boulder, Colorado. Its first season ranked third in the ratings, a peak for the friendly-alien sitcom.
Photo: ABC, Public domain
Media30 Jun 1978
Disney released 'The Cat from Outer Space', a family comedy about an alien cat whose spaceship makes an emergency landing on Earth and is seized by the military, forcing him to seek human help to repair it.
Media3 Apr 1978
At the 50th Academy Awards, Vilmos Zsigmond won the cinematography Oscar for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The film also received a Special Achievement Award for sound effects editing, credited to Frank E. Warner.
Photo: Attilaphoto at Hungarian Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0
Media19 Feb 1978
NBC premiered Project U.F.O., a Jack Webb series in which Air Force investigators looked into sightings. Webb drew episode ideas from Project Blue Book files; the show ran until July 1979.
Photo: Photographer not credited, Public domain
Media1978
After a mid-1970s run of local UFO reports, including a 1976 police officer account, the village of Elmwood began an annual UFO Days festival, one of the longest-running small-town UFO celebrations.
Photo: Unknown author, Public domain
Media1978
Robin Williams first played the alien Mork from Ork in a Happy Days episode titled 'My Favorite Orkan'. The response led Garry Marshall to build the spin-off series Mork & Mindy around the character.
Photo: ABC, Public domain
Media26 Nov 1977
Around 5:10 pm, a distorted voice claiming to speak for an alien intelligence replaced Southern Television's news sound for almost six minutes, apparently by jamming the Hannington transmitter. The IBA investigated; no culprit was ever identified, and it is generally treated as a hoax.
Photo: Matthew Prior, CC BY-SA 4.0
Media15 Nov 1977
Steven Spielberg's film Close Encounters of the Third Kind had its premiere in New York. Its title uses a term coined by Northwestern University astronomer J. Allen Hynek, who was credited as a technical adviser. The Library of Congress added the film to the National Film Registry in 2007.
Photo: Sanjay Acharya, CC BY-SA 4.0
Media20 Jun 1977
Anglia Television's 'Science Report' aired 'Alternative 3', a spoof documentary with actors claiming missing scientists were being taken to a secret Mars colony. Meant for April Fools' Day, it ran on June 20; viewers flooded Anglia with calls, and some still treat it as real.
Photo: Spudgun67, CC0
Media1977
J. Allen Hynek, the Air Force's longtime scientific consultant on Project Blue Book, published The Hynek UFO Report, drawing on Blue Book material to criticize how the Air Force handled UFO reports. MUFON reissued it in 2020.
Photo: United States Government, Public domain
