Topic
The books, broadcasts, films, podcasts and reporting that shaped what the public knows. 495 events, newest first.
Media11 Mar 2011
Sony's alien-invasion film Battle: Los Angeles opened with marketing tied to the real February 1942 air raid false alarm over Los Angeles, when anti-aircraft guns fired at unidentified objects. The studio's press junket even included a UFO panel.
Photo: Unknown author, Public domain
Media2011
Swedish treasure hunters of the Ocean X Team publicized a sonar image of a northern Baltic seafloor feature that some likened to a crashed spacecraft. Stockholm University geologist Volker Bruchert said their rock samples were what a glacial basin would be expected to hold.
Media12 Nov 2010
Universal released Skyline, directed by visual-effects specialists Greg and Colin Strause, in which partygoers wake to find alien ships over Los Angeles drawing people up with pulses of light. Trade critics panned the story but noted its effects.
Photo: donabelandewen (Flickr), CC BY 2.0
Media28 Oct 2010
Jacques Vallee and Chris Aubeck published Wonders in the Sky, a sourced catalog of more than 500 aerial-anomaly reports from antiquity through 1879, arguing each era read such sightings through its own beliefs.
Photo: Cmichel67, CC BY-SA 4.0
MediaSep 2010
British press reported that Mazlan Othman, head of the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs, would coordinate humanity's response to alien contact. She denied it to the Guardian, and at an October 2010 UN press conference said she had not been and would not be appointed.
Photo: US Mission/Bednarzek, Public domain
Media10 Aug 2010
Journalist Leslie Kean's book, published by Harmony Books with a foreword by John Podesta, collected first-person chapters by military pilots, generals and former officials from several countries, including France's Jean-Jacques Velasco and Belgium's Wilfried De Brouwer.
Media15 Jul 2010
Syfy launched Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files, in which a team led by former FBI agent Ben Hansen tried to recreate viral photos and videos, including UFO footage, to judge whether they were hoaxes or unexplained.
Media4 Jun 2010
Rosie Jones's documentary Westall '66 premiered on the Sci Fi Channel on Foxtel. It follows teacher Shane Ryan as he tracks down former students and staff who say they saw an object land near a Melbourne school in April 1966.
Photo: Effluvium1, CC BY-SA 4.0
MediaJun 2010
New Page Books published 'Science Was Wrong' by nuclear physicist and UFO lecturer Stanton Friedman and Kathleen Marden, a survey of cures, theories and inventions once declared impossible, used to argue that scientists also dismiss UFO evidence too quickly.
Photo: AllenS, Public domain
Media2010
Gareth Edwards' very low-budget film Monsters is set in Mexico six years after a NASA probe returning from space crashed, leaving creatures in an 'infected zone' near the U.S. border. Edwards, a former BBC effects artist, created its effects himself.
Photo: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0
Media2010
NBC ordered The Event in May 2010, a conspiracy thriller in which a man's search for his missing fiancee exposes 'the biggest cover-up in U.S. history' involving a mysterious group of detainees. NBC cancelled it after one season.
Photo: Greg Hernandez, CC BY 2.0
Media20 Nov 2009
Planet 51, a computer-animated comedy from Madrid's Ilion Animation Studios, opened in U.S. theaters through Sony's TriStar. It reverses the flying-saucer formula: a human astronaut lands on a world of green beings living in a 1950s-style suburbia gripped by fear of alien invaders.
Media3 Nov 2009
ABC premiered a new version of V, the 1983 miniseries about outwardly friendly alien visitors. The first episode drew about 14.3 million viewers, according to Nielsen figures reported at the time.
Photo: Kristin Dos Santos, CC BY-SA 2.0
MediaNov 2009
Universal agreed to pay the Alaska Press Club after promotion for The Fourth Kind, a film about alleged abductions in Nome, used fabricated news stories attributed to real Alaska papers. The deal included removing the fake articles from the web.
Photo: Sir Mildred Pierce , from North Augusta, South Carolina , USA, CC BY 2.0
MediaOct 2009
A Colorado couple said their 6-year-old son had floated away in a homemade saucer-shaped helium balloon, setting off a chase and search costing at least $62,000. The boy was found at home; the parents pleaded guilty to charges over the staged stunt and were sentenced.
Photo: Sgt. Benjamin Crane, Public domain
Media14 Aug 2009
TriStar released Neill Blomkamp's District 9 in the U.S., a film about stranded aliens confined to a Johannesburg camp. It received four Oscar nominations, including Best Picture.
Photo: Natasha Baucas at https://www.flickr.com/photos/sdnatasha, CC BY 2.0
MediaJul 2009
Torchwood's five-part third series, Children of Earth, aired on consecutive nights in July 2009 on the BBC and then BBC America. Children around the world start chanting 'We are coming', and a Home Office official manages the crisis in a story critics compared to The X-Files.
Media27 Mar 2009
DreamWorks Animation's 'Monsters vs. Aliens' opened in the U.S., an animated comedy in which government-held monsters fight an alien invasion, built as an affectionate parody of 1950s monster and flying-saucer films.
Photo: Casey Kennelly, CC BY 2.0
Media20 Mar 2009
Summit Entertainment released Alex Proyas's 'Knowing', with Nicolas Cage as an MIT astrophysicist decoding a 50-year-old list of disaster dates. Mysterious 'whisper people' prove to be benevolent aliens who carry chosen children away before a solar flare ends life on Earth.
Photo: Sachyn, CC BY-SA 3.0
Media12 Dec 2008
20th Century Fox released a remake of the 1951 alien-visitor film The Day the Earth Stood Still, with Keanu Reeves as the visitor Klaatu. Critics such as the Christian Science Monitor found it weaker than the original.
Photo: Y! Musica's photostream, CC BY 2.0
