Culture and science
Movies, series and documentaries, from Close Encounters to Skinwalker Ranch on TV. 240 events, newest first.
Media27 May 1953
Universal's first 3-D film, directed by Jack Arnold from a Ray Bradbury story, premiered in Los Angeles. Its stranded visitors want only to repair their ship and leave, a contrast to the hostile invaders of other saucer-era films.
Photo: Universal Pictures, Public domain
Media9 Apr 1953
William Cameron Menzies' color film, distributed by 20th Century-Fox, premiered in Detroit. A boy sees a saucer land behind his house and finds Martians controlling townspeople, including his parents, through devices implanted in their necks.
Photo: Twentieth Century-Fox, Public domain
GovernmentOct 1952
An FBI memo from V. P. Keay to A. H. Belmont relayed Air Intelligence's view that about 90 percent of saucer reports were explainable but a small share of credible ones were not, citing a film studied by the Air Technical Intelligence Center and officials weighing 'interplanetary ships'.
Military1 Aug 1952
An Air Defense Command radar near Bellefontaine tracked a fast target north of Dayton, and two Wright-Patterson F-86 pilots photographed a silver sphere on gun-camera film. Blue Book first carried it as unknown, then attributed it to a jet and a weather balloon.
Photo: USAF photo 82042 AC, Public domain
Military2 Jul 1952
Navy photographer Delbert Newhouse filmed a group of bright points milling in the sky north of Tremonton while driving with his family. The Robertson Panel concluded the images were sunlight off seagulls; the Condon study found the film consistent with birds.
Photo: Project Blue Book, Public domain
Military1952
After the Air Force photo lab failed to identify the Tremonton, Utah film, Navy photo analysts at Anacostia spent about two months on it and told the Robertson Panel the lights were not aircraft or birds. The panel rejected this and concluded the images were sunlight on seagulls.
GovernmentNov 1951
Starting in November 1951, the reactivated Project Grudge, renamed Blue Book in March 1952, issued a series of 12 classified status reports on its work. They were declassified in 1960 but, per the Condon Report, were hard to obtain until NICAP published them in 1968.
Photo: US Air Force, 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
Sightings15 Aug 1950
Baseball manager Nick Mariana filmed two bright lights crossing the sky over Great Falls on 16mm film. The 1953 Robertson Panel attributed them to sunlight off two Air Force interceptors; the 1969 Condon study left the case unexplained, though it said aircraft could not be ruled out.
Photo: parkerdonaldmusic, 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.
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.
