Culture and science
Movies, series and documentaries, from Close Encounters to Skinwalker Ranch on TV. 178 events, newest first.
MediaMar 1993
Director Robert Lieberman's film Fire in the Sky, starring D.B. Sweeney as Travis Walton, opened in March 1993. It dramatized Walton's claim that he vanished for five days in 1975 after a UFO encounter in Arizona, and the suspicion that fell on his co-workers.
Photo: SMG2019, CC BY-SA 4.0
Media1993
Art Bell's overnight talk show Coast to Coast AM, broadcast from his home studio in the Nevada desert, became syndicated nationwide and turned into a leading outlet for listener calls about UFOs and the paranormal. Bell died in 2018.
Media17 May 1992
CBS aired Intruders, a two-part prime-time miniseries starring Richard Crenna and Mare Winningham about people who believe they were abducted by aliens. The network promoted it as drawn from hundreds of case histories; critics found it slow and exploitative.
Photo: John Mathew Smith & www.celebrity-photos.com from Laurel Maryland, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0
Sightings20 May 1991
Soviet TV's Vremya newscast on 21 May 1991 showed a glowing object filmed near the Mir station the previous evening. Cosmonaut Musa Manarov, who was filming a docking, said he saw it come off the spacecraft; the report said its nature was unclear.
Photo: UR3IRS at Russian Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0
Whistleblowers15 May 1989
Las Vegas station KLAS aired George Knapp's live interview with a man called 'Dennis', who said alien technology was being tested at a hidden site near Area 51. Months later he went public as Bob Lazar. His account and background have never been independently verified.
Photo: Doc Searls from Santa Barbara, USA, CC BY 2.0
Media1989
Philippe Mora's film Communion, adapted by Whitley Strieber from his bestselling 1987 account of alleged abduction experiences, starred Christopher Walken as Strieber. The Deseret News called it a disappointment despite solid lead acting; it put Strieber's visitors on cinema screens.
Photo: John Harrison, CC BY-SA 3.0
Sightings1989
The civilian group Ufology Research began its annual Canadian UFO Survey with a tally of UFO reports from 1989. The series has continued every year since, giving Canada a running national count of reports.
Media1989
Dean Alioto made UFO Abduction, a low-budget found-footage film of a family menaced by aliens. Copies circulated without credits and were shown at a UFO convention, and some viewers treated it as genuine; Alioto later remade it for UPN in 1998.
MediaOct 1988
A Michael Seligman-produced TV special, with actor Mike Farrell reporting from Washington, presented claims of a government UFO cover-up, including scrambled messages from a disguised military informant called 'Condor'. A New Zealand review called it a schlockumentary that said nothing new.
Photo: Mercury at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0
Media20 Jan 1987
NBC aired the first Unsolved Mysteries special, hosted by Raymond Burr, from Cosgrove/Meurer Productions. Under later host Robert Stack it became a long-running series whose segments included UFO cases such as the 1965 Kecksburg incident.
Photo: Alan Light, CC BY 2.0
Close encounters1987
Horror novelist Whitley Strieber published Communion, a first-person account of beings that he said probed him at his cabin in upstate New York. The book became a bestseller and a 1989 film, and made Strieber a widely known and widely doubted figure.
Photo: RobertoTenore, CC BY-SA 3.0
Media22 Sep 1986
NBC premiered ALF on Sept. 22, 1986, a sitcom about a furry alien who moves in with a suburban family after his spaceship crashes into their garage. It ran four seasons to 1990.
Photo: Unknown author, Public domain
Whistleblowers1986
Ralph Noyes, a retired senior Ministry of Defence official, wrote to the MoD in 1986 that in 1970 he had been shown RAF Venom gun-camera film of UFOs at a secret screening in MoD Main Building. The letter is among MoD UFO files released by The National Archives.
Media1986
Cannon released Tobe Hooper's remake of the 1953 film Invaders from Mars, written by Dan O'Bannon and Don Jakoby, with Hunter Carson, Karen Black and Louise Fletcher. As in the original, a boy sees a saucer land and aliens take over the minds of the adults around him.
Photo: Dark Attsios, CC BY-SA 3.0
Media12 Jul 1985
Paramount released Joe Dante's Explorers, starring Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix as boys who build a small spacecraft and meet aliens whose idea of Earth comes from its TV broadcasts.
Photo: nicolas genin, CC BY-SA 2.0
Media21 Jun 1985
Twentieth Century Fox released Ron Howard's Cocoon, in which visitors from the planet Antarea retrieve cocoons off St. Petersburg, Florida, and residents of a retirement community are rejuvenated by them. Don Ameche won a supporting-actor Oscar and the film won for visual effects.
MediaMay 1983
NBC aired Kenneth Johnson's two-part miniseries V on consecutive nights, about friendly-seeming visitors who are secretly reptilian invaders. The premiere drew about a 40 share and led to sequels and a 2009 remake.
Photo: ArquiWHAT, Public domain
Media11 Jun 1982
Steven Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial opened across the U.S. after closing the 1982 Cannes Film Festival. Its story of a gentle stranded alien befriended by a boy became a huge box office success and cemented a benevolent image of aliens in popular culture.
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
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.
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
Sightings31 Dec 1978
A TV crew aboard a Safe Air Argosy cargo flight filmed lights off the Kaikoura coast, with returns reported on Wellington radar and the plane's own radar. An Air Force inquiry concluded natural but unusual phenomena; UN-post files released in 2021 show DSIR scientists left them unidentified.
Photo: Richard Goring, CC BY-SA 2.0
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
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
