Topic
The books, broadcasts, films, podcasts and reporting that shaped what the public knows. 495 events, newest first.
Media2 Mar 1962
CBS aired To Serve Man, Rod Serling's Twilight Zone adaptation of Damon Knight's 1950 story about seemingly benevolent aliens, the Kanamits. Its 'It's a cookbook!' twist became one of television's best-known lines about trusting visitors from space.
Photo: CBS Television, Public domain
Media3 Oct 1961
BBC Television began 'A for Andromeda', a seven-part serial by Fred Hoyle and John Elliot in which a radio signal from the Andromeda galaxy carries instructions for a computer that goes on to create a living being.
Photo: Rights NRAO/AUI/NSF Photographer Woodruff T. Sullivan III Photo Credit NRAO/AUI Archives,..., CC BY 4.0
Media26 May 1961
CBS aired Rod Serling's episode in which state troopers follow up a report of a crashed spaceship and question snowbound bus passengers at a roadside diner, trying to work out which one is from another world.
Photo: CBS Television-CBS Portrait by photographer Gabor Rona-mark is faint in spots., Public domain
Media27 Jan 1961
CBS's The Twilight Zone aired 'The Invaders', a nearly wordless episode in which Agnes Moorehead plays a farm woman fighting off intruders from a landed flying saucer. The twist reveals the crew came from Earth, making humans the alien invaders.
Photo: RKO Pictures, Public domain
Media1961
Ten scientists, including Frank Drake, Carl Sagan and Philip Morrison, met at the Green Bank radio observatory for the National Academy of Sciences' Space Science Board. Drake's equation, used to frame the talks, became the standard way to estimate how many civilizations might exist.
Photo: Raphael Perrino, CC BY 2.0
Media30 Mar 1960
Paramount's Visit to a Small Planet, adapted from Gore Vidal's play, opened in Los Angeles. Jerry Lewis plays Kreton, an alien student who flies a spaceship to Earth and lands at a suburban home. It was Lewis's last film under his contract with producer Hal Wallis.
Photo: Paramount Pictures, Public domain
Media8 Jan 1960
CBS aired Rod Serling's adaptation of a Richard Matheson story in which two families steal an experimental saucer-shaped craft to flee a coming nuclear war. The closing twist reveals that the world they are heading for is Earth.
Photo: Bureau of Industrial Service. This was a division of ad agency Young & Rubicam which was widely..., Public domain
Media1960
The second edition of former Blue Book chief Edward Ruppelt's The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects added three chapters reviewing later cases and ending with a far more skeptical view, closing on the phrase 'our Space Age Myth - the UFO'.
Photo: Associated Press, Public domain
Media1960
MGM released Wolf Rilla's British film Village of the Damned, adapted from John Wyndham's novel The Midwich Cuckoos. A whole English village falls unconscious, and the women later bear telepathic children; the BFI describes it as tapping fears of alien invasion and mind control.
Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Public domain
Media1960
Rod Serling's Twilight Zone episode shows a suburban street turning on itself after a power failure, as neighbors accuse one another of being disguised aliens. TIME later ranked it among the series' ten best episodes and noted its echo of the Red Scare.
Photo: CBS Television, Public domain
Media26 Dec 1959
Toho released Ishiro Honda's 'Battle in Outer Space' (Uchu Daisenso), with effects by Eiji Tsuburaya, in which a fleet of alien flying saucers attacks Earth and its space stations. Columbia later released a dubbed version in the U.S.
Media2 Oct 1959
CBS premiered Rod Serling's anthology series The Twilight Zone with the episode Where Is Everybody? The original series ran five seasons to 1964, and several of its stories about alien visitors became reference points in later popular culture.
Photo: CBS Television via the Bureau of Industrial Service, Public domain
Media19 Sep 1959
Cornell physicists Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison argued in Nature that radio telescopes could detect deliberate signals from other civilizations, suggesting a search near the 21 cm hydrogen line. The paper is widely regarded as the scientific starting point of SETI.
Photo: NASA, Public domain
MediaJul 1959
Ed Wood's low-budget film, in which saucer-flying aliens raise the dead to stop Earth's nuclear weapons, was released by Distributors Corporation of America. Long mocked, it became a cult emblem of 1950s flying-saucer cinema.
Photo: Distributors Corporation of America, Public domain
Media1959
Warner Bros. released Tom Graeff's low-budget 'Teenagers from Outer Space', in which young aliens land a flying saucer to raise giant monsters on Earth and one of them rebels to protect a local girl.
Photo: Reynold Brown, Public domain
Media1959
Allied Artists released 'The Atomic Submarine', in which a nuclear sub investigating ships lost under the Arctic finds an underwater flying saucer piloted by a one-eyed alien scouting Earth for colonization.
Photo: Reynold Brown, Public domain
Media1959
Allied Artists released 'The Cosmic Man', in which a white globe-shaped craft hovers near a California resort and the military and scientists argue over the intentions of its shadowy alien visitor, played by John Carradine.
Photo: Allied Artists, Public domain
MediaDec 1958
BBC Television began Nigel Kneale's six-part serial Quatermass and the Pit just before Christmas 1958. In the story, London builders unearth an ancient Martian craft, and Professor Quatermass concludes Martians once altered early human ancestors. It is fiction, not a reported case.
Media10 Sep 1958
Paramount opened I Married a Monster from Outer Space, in which a young bride finds that her new husband and other men in town have been replaced by aliens. It opened in Los Angeles the same day as The Blob, with general release in October 1958.
Photo: Paramount Pictures, Public domain
Media10 Sep 1958
The Blob, a low-budget film in which a jelly-like alien mass arrives inside a meteorite and terrorizes a small town, opened in Los Angeles ahead of its October 1958 general release by Paramount. Steve McQueen played the teenage lead.
Photo: Paramount Pictures, Public domain
