Culture and science
Movies, series and documentaries, from Close Encounters to Skinwalker Ranch on TV. 240 events, newest first.
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.
Media1989
Fox turned the 1988 film Alien Nation into a weekly police series about a human detective and his Newcomer partner, a thinly veiled satire on race relations. Fox dropped it after one season in 1990; TV movies followed from 1994.
Photo: Keith McDuffee from Northborough, MA, USA, CC BY 2.0
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
Media1 Dec 1986
Georgiy Daneliya's Mosfilm satire Kin-dza-dza!, in which two Muscovites are carried by an alien device to a desert planet called Pluke, opened in Soviet cinemas and became a cult comedy.
Photo: Alexey Yushenkov/, 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
Media1983
Mike Gray's low-budget New World Pictures film Wavelength follows a woman who traces telepathic cries to child-like aliens held at a military installation in the Los Angeles hills. In 1985 critics said Starman borrowed its spherical spaceship.
Media12 Oct 1982
PBS's NOVA broadcast 'The Case of the UFOs', which its listing presents as a scientific television inquiry sorting genuine reports from fiction and hoaxes. The program drew on film and eyewitness testimony, astronauts among them, and weighed arguments on both sides.
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
Linda Moulton Howe's 1980 TV documentary 'A Strange Harvest' presented cattle mutilations as possibly linked to UFOs, bringing that idea to a wide audience. Official inquiries such as the 1980 Rommel report attributed the carcass damage to predators.
Photo: Larry W. Howe, CC BY 4.0
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
Media19 Feb 1978
NBC premiered Project U.F.O., a Jack Webb series in which Air Force investigators looked into sightings. Webb drew episode ideas from Project Blue Book files; the show ran until July 1979.
Photo: Photographer not credited, Public domain
Media1978
Robin Williams first played the alien Mork from Ork in a Happy Days episode titled 'My Favorite Orkan'. The response led Garry Marshall to build the spin-off series Mork & Mindy around the character.
Photo: ABC, Public domain
