Culture and science
Movies, series and documentaries, from Close Encounters to Skinwalker Ranch on TV. 240 events, newest first.
Close encounters25 Oct 1965
The Boston Traveler began a five-day series by reporter John H. Luttrell, opening on its front page, on the Hills' claim that they were taken aboard a craft in 1961. The Hills had not consented; the series made them nationally known and preceded John G. Fuller's book on the case.
Media1965
Toho released Invasion of Astro-Monster, the Godzilla film in which astronauts exploring the mysterious Planet X encounter the monster known as Monster Zero, setting off a battle between kaiju and humankind.
Military22 Sep 1964
Former Air Force Lt. Robert Jacobs claimed from 1982 that telescope film of a September 22, 1964 Vandenberg Atlas launch, shot from Big Sur, showed a craft circling the warhead and hitting it with a beam. Project engineer Kingston George said it showed decoys and debris, not a UFO.
Photo: SDASM Archives, Public domain
Media1964
Terence Fisher's low-budget British film 'The Earth Dies Screaming', from Lippert, shows a few survivors in an English village after alien-controlled robots wipe out most of the population and reanimate the dead.
Media1964
Tinto Brass directed Il disco volante, an Italian comedy in which a Carabinieri sergeant investigates reports of a saucer landing in a Veneto village. Alberto Sordi plays four roles, and the film uses the scare to satirize provincial society.
Photo: Gorupdebesanez, CC BY-SA 3.0
Media29 Sep 1963
CBS premiered the sitcom My Favorite Martian on Sept. 29, 1963, with Ray Walston as a Martian posing as the uncle of a reporter played by Bill Bixby. It ran 107 episodes over three seasons, bringing the visitor-from-space idea into family TV.
Photo: CBS Television, Public domain
Media16 Sep 1963
ABC premiered Leslie Stevens' science fiction anthology The Outer Limits with The Galaxy Being, about a radio engineer who contacts an alien made of energy. Its February 1964 episode The Bellero Shield was later cited by skeptic Martin Kottmeyer in discussing the Hill abduction account.
Photo: ABC Television, Public domain
Media2 Mar 1962
CBS aired To Serve Man, Rod Serling's Twilight Zone adaptation of Damon Knight's 1950 story about seemingly benevolent aliens, the Kanamits. Its 'It's a cookbook!' twist became one of television's best-known lines about trusting visitors from space.
Photo: CBS Television, Public domain
Media3 Oct 1961
BBC Television began 'A for Andromeda', a seven-part serial by Fred Hoyle and John Elliot in which a radio signal from the Andromeda galaxy carries instructions for a computer that goes on to create a living being.
Photo: Rights NRAO/AUI/NSF Photographer Woodruff T. Sullivan III Photo Credit NRAO/AUI Archives,..., CC BY 4.0
Media30 Mar 1960
Paramount's Visit to a Small Planet, adapted from Gore Vidal's play, opened in Los Angeles. Jerry Lewis plays Kreton, an alien student who flies a spaceship to Earth and lands at a suburban home. It was Lewis's last film under his contract with producer Hal Wallis.
Photo: Paramount Pictures, Public domain
Media1960
MGM released Wolf Rilla's British film Village of the Damned, adapted from John Wyndham's novel The Midwich Cuckoos. A whole English village falls unconscious, and the women later bear telepathic children; the BFI describes it as tapping fears of alien invasion and mind control.
Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Public domain
Media1960
Rod Serling's Twilight Zone episode shows a suburban street turning on itself after a power failure, as neighbors accuse one another of being disguised aliens. TIME later ranked it among the series' ten best episodes and noted its echo of the Red Scare.
Photo: CBS Television, Public domain
Media2 Oct 1959
CBS premiered Rod Serling's anthology series The Twilight Zone with the episode Where Is Everybody? The original series ran five seasons to 1964, and several of its stories about alien visitors became reference points in later popular culture.
Photo: CBS Television via the Bureau of Industrial Service, Public domain
MediaJul 1959
Ed Wood's low-budget film, in which saucer-flying aliens raise the dead to stop Earth's nuclear weapons, was released by Distributors Corporation of America. Long mocked, it became a cult emblem of 1950s flying-saucer cinema.
Photo: Distributors Corporation of America, Public domain
MediaDec 1958
BBC Television began Nigel Kneale's six-part serial Quatermass and the Pit just before Christmas 1958. In the story, London builders unearth an ancient Martian craft, and Professor Quatermass concludes Martians once altered early human ancestors. It is fiction, not a reported case.
Media10 Sep 1958
The Blob, a low-budget film in which a jelly-like alien mass arrives inside a meteorite and terrorizes a small town, opened in Los Angeles ahead of its October 1958 general release by Paramount. Steve McQueen played the teenage lead.
Photo: Paramount Pictures, Public domain
MediaJun 1958
Paramount released Jack Arnold's film in which an alien presence on a California beach takes control of children at a missile project and uses them to sabotage a launch. The AFI Catalog lists a June 1958 release.
MediaDec 1957
Howco International released this low-budget science fiction film, in which a criminal alien brain from the planet Arous takes over a scientist's body and threatens Earth. The AFI Catalog lists a December 1957 release with a Los Angeles opening on Christmas Day.
Photo: Howco International, Public domain
MediaJul 1957
Columbia released William Asher's 'The 27th Day', in which an alien gives five people from different nations capsules able to wipe out humanity, testing whether they keep the peace for 27 days. The film mirrored Cold War nuclear fears.
Photo: trailer screenshot (Columbia Pictures), Public domain
Media1957
American International Pictures released Edward L. Cahn's teen comedy-horror film about small, bulbous-headed aliens who land in a flying saucer. Designed by Paul Blaisdell, its creatures fed the popular image of big-headed saucer occupants.
Photo: American International Pictures, Public domain
MediaJul 1956
Columbia released Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, a science fiction film with saucer effects by Ray Harryhausen. Its credits say it was suggested by Donald Keyhoe's book Flying Saucers from Outer Space.
Photo: american film trailer screenshot (Columbia Pictures), Public domain
Media30 Mar 1956
MGM released Forbidden Planet, a big-budget science fiction film loosely based on The Tempest in which a future human crew travels by space cruiser to a distant world. The Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 2013.
Photo: Loew's International (MGM), Public domain
Media10 Jun 1955
Universal-International's Technicolor science-fiction film, in which an alien recruits Earth scientists for his war-torn planet Metaluna, had its world premiere in New York. It was one of the bigger-budget entries in the 1950s alien-film cycle.
Photo: Universal-International, Public domain
Media25 Mar 1954
At the 26th Academy Awards, held at the RKO Pantages Theatre in Hollywood, Paramount's 1953 Martian-invasion film The War of the Worlds won the award for Special Effects.
Photo: Illustrator unknown; Paramount Pictures, Public domain
Media23 Jan 1954
RKO released Killers from Space, a W. Lee Wilder film in which a scientist whose plane crashes near an atomic test wakes in an underground lair of bug-eyed aliens who have operated on him. It is an early screen version of a medical-examination abduction story.
Photo: film screenshot (RKO Radio Pictures), Public domain
