Topic
The books, broadcasts, films, podcasts and reporting that shaped what the public knows. 495 events, newest first.
Media1952
Republic Pictures released the 12-chapter serial Zombies of the Stratosphere, in which Martian invaders, one played by a young Leonard Nimoy, plan to blow Earth out of orbit with a super H-bomb and are stopped by a hero in a rocket suit. Despite the title, no zombies appear.
Photo: Republic, Public domain
Media27 Apr 1951
United Artists released The Man from Planet X, an Edgar G. Ulmer film in which a visitor from an approaching planet lands its spaceship on the moor of a remote Scottish island. It was one of the earliest U.S. features about a landed alien craft.
Photo: film trailer screenshot (United Artists), Public domain
MediaApr 1951
RKO and Howard Hawks's Winchester Pictures released The Thing from Another World, directed by Christian Nyby. Air Force men find a saucer frozen in Arctic ice and a hostile creature that the military must destroy. Critics count it among the first films to merge science fiction and monster movies.
Photo: RKO Radio Pictures, Public domain
Media1951
Twentieth Century Fox released Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still, in which the visitor Klaatu lands a flying saucer in Washington with his robot Gort to warn humanity against violence. The Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 1995.
Photo: "Copyright 1951 by Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp. ", Public domain
Media1951
Engineers and writers led by North American Aviation employee Edward J. Sullivan formed Civilian Saucer Investigation in Los Angeles in late 1951. It collected sighting reports, shared many with the Air Force, issued four bulletins and folded in 1954; its files later passed to NICAP.
MediaSep 1950
Columnist Frank Scully's book claimed government scientists had recovered crashed saucers with small occupants, citing oilman Silas Newton and a 'Dr. Gee'. In 1952 Denver authorities charged Newton and the man said to be Dr. Gee in an oil-device swindle, discrediting the story.
Photo: Unknown author, Public domain
Media7 Apr 1950
On April 7, 1950, CBS broadcast an Edward R. Murrow radio documentary on flying saucers, including Kenneth Arnold recounting his 1947 sighting. Time magazine described it as neither pro nor con.
Photo: US Information Agency, Public domain
Media4 Jan 1950
Mikel Conrad's independent film The Flying Saucer opened in New York; general release followed Jan. 10. In it an agent races Russian agents to a saucer hidden in Alaska. The AFI Catalog calls it the first saucer feature and found none of the real saucer footage Conrad claimed in its print.
MediaJan 1950
Retired Marine Maj. Donald Keyhoe argued in True magazine's January 1950 issue that flying saucers were interplanetary craft and disputed Air Force explanations. Radio and press amplified the claim, and Keyhoe expanded it into a 1950 book of the same name.
Photo: Donald Keyhoe, Public domain
Media1950
Fawcett Publications issued Donald Keyhoe's 'The Flying Saucers Are Real', a paperback expanding on his January 1950 True magazine article. Keyhoe argued the Air Force knew more about flying saucers than it admitted.
Photo: Donald Keyhoe, Public domain
Media1950
During a lunchtime walk at Los Alamos, physicist Enrico Fermi joined a talk about flying saucer reports and a New Yorker cartoon, then asked where everybody was. A 1985 Los Alamos report gathered the participants' recollections; the question became the Fermi paradox.
Photo: Department of Energy-Office of Public Affairs, restored by Yann, Public domain
Media30 Apr 1949
The Saturday Evening Post published a two-part article by Sidney Shalett, written with Air Force cooperation, that mostly explained saucer reports away while conceding a few were unexplained. Ruppelt called it the first time the Air Force reported on UFOs officially.
Media12 Feb 1949
Radio Quito aired an unannounced Spanish adaptation of The War of the Worlds describing a Martian invasion. When listeners learned it was fiction, a crowd set fire to the building housing the station and the newspaper El Comercio, and several people died.
MediaJun 1947
The East Oregonian in Pendleton broke Kenneth Arnold's sighting report and the Associated Press carried it nationally. Within days other newspapers were calling such objects 'flying saucers', a label that stuck for decades. The paper itself says its own reporters did not coin the phrase.
Photo: UPI, Public domain
MediaMar 1945
Amazing Stories editor Ray Palmer ran Richard Shaver's 'I Remember Lemuria!' in the March 1945 issue, promoting the tales of an underground race as based on fact. Palmer later founded Fate magazine and became a leading promoter of flying saucer stories.
Photo: Ziff-Davis Publishing / Robert Gibson Jones, Public domain
