Alien Universe

by Don Lincoln

  Meanwhile, we find the Nazi scientist in the Andes, having replicated his earlier equipment using money and supplies from the KGB. He is unable to contact Mars himself but can monitor the American’s transmissions. The KGB finds him and threatens him if he is unsuccessful in his own attempts to contact Mars.

  FIGURE 3.4. Red Planet Mars (1951) clearly shows the ongoing impact of Lowell’s Martian canals (see figure 1.2) , even decades after they were scientifically discredited. In this image from the movie, we see the canals and the polar icecap that was subsequently melted and the canals filled. Melaby Pictures Corporation.

  Things get weirder when Martians speak of their philosophy, going so far as quoting the Christian Sermon on the Mount. This has a huge impact on Western society, but an even bigger one behind the Iron Curtain. A resurgence of religion in the Soviet Union brings down the government.

  Later, the Nazi scientist makes his way to the American’s laboratory to reveal that it wasn’t Martians with whom the Americans were communicating but rather the Nazi using his equipment in the Andes. His motivation was to bring down the governments of the West and of the Soviet Union. However, it turns out that he only made the economic communications. The philosophical and religious ones actually had come from the Martians. In a bit of a muddled plot twist, the laboratory is exploded by a gas leak from the hydrogen valve that is shot by the German scientist.

  Red Planet Mars does not show Martians and is uncharacteristic in that it portrays them as peaceful people. Many other films of the era depicted Martians as invaders or at least potential adversaries. With the exception of communication. with Mars as a plot device (and the nod to Lowell’s impact), the movie is more about the earthly cares of the 1950s than about Aliens.

  Invaders from Mars

  Invaders from Mars (1953) is much more subtle in its depiction of the era’s worries and introduces the ideas of infiltrators: people who look familiar but are clearly enemies. A young boy sees a glowing flying saucer land in his backyard in the middle of the night. His father goes out to see what he’s talking about and doesn’t come back until the morning. When the father returns, he is a changed person. We don’t know it yet, but the Martians have implanted an electrode into his neck that controls his behaviors.

  Several additional people are eventually altered. We see this indirectly, as the saucer is now buried under a sand pit and when people walk over the sand, a hole appears and they fall underground and are presumably captured. The boy is unable to convince anyone that something is going on until an attractive female psychologist and her male astrophysicist friend listen to him. It turns out that the astrophysicist is aware of recent flying saucers being spotted on radar. They speculate that the Martians might be invading as a preemptive strike against Earthlings starting to develop rockets, and so they contact the army.

  Eventually the army is able to establish that there is a saucer under the ground and they break into it with a commando team. Naturally, the little boy and the psychologist also end up in the saucer and are kidnapped by Aliens, which are large, lumbering humanoids. The humanoids are perhaps not sentient, as they seem to respond to the direction of a different form of Alien, one that can be described as a rather human-like head, set on top of a mass of tentacles. This Alien lives in a big, clear globe and is carried by the lumbering Aliens (figure 3.5). This Alien is interesting in that it isn’t strictly humanoid, although it clearly has human-like features. Ironically, these human-like features drive home the point that it is an Alien leader and a huge head indicates its intelligence. Had it looked like a tree, a squid, or a lump of moss, the audience would have had a harder time identifying it as an Alien.

  The commando team finds the psychologist and boy and everyone escapes but not before setting demolition charges. The Alien attempts to escape by flying away, only to have its saucer explode in midair.

  Invaders from Mars shows the paranoia of the time of not knowing who among your neighbors might be an enemy. It also showed humanoid and human-derivative Aliens and a classic flying saucer of the sort that had appeared in the press just a couple of years before. The saucer reports in the newspapers had told the screenplay writers what an Alien ship should look like. This movie was remade in 1986.

  FIGURE 3.5. The dominant Alien from Invaders from Mars has a large head, indicative of intelligence and possibly telepathic control over the lumbering worker Aliens. He has a small body and tentacles. Note the strings to make the “hand tentacles” wiggle. National Pictures Corporation.

  Forbidden Planet

  Forbidden Planet (1956) has been called “Shakespeare’s Tempest set in space,” but it could easily have been a pilot show for the 1966 television series Star Trek. A spaceship had landed some years before on Altair 4 and communication was lost. Earth sent a military spacecraft, the United Planets Cruiser C57-D, to check it out. This spaceship is a classic UFO, exactly as you’d imagine a flying saucer to look, except it is a ship from Earth (figure 3.6).

  When they arrive at Altair 4, the military team makes radio contact with the surface, where they are warned away. The planet is dangerous. Ignoring this advice, the saucer lands (no transporters) and the captain, first officer, and doctor are driven by a robot named Robby, who takes them to meet the only surviving passenger of the first spaceship, a brilliant scientist, along with his beautiful daughter, who was born after leaving Earth. He tells them how something killed all the other passengers and blew up the original spacecraft when it was trying to escape.

  After some romantic tension between the beautiful daughter and the captain, it is revealed that Altair 4 was once inhabited by a race called the Krell. The Krell’s technology was far superior to anything developed by mankind, although they had been somehow destroyed by their technology in a single night, more than two thousand centuries before. However the scientist had figured out how to work some of their equipment that he had found.

  FIGURE 3.6. The United Planets Cruiser C57-D from the movie Forbidden Planet is a textbook example of a flying saucer. When it lands it sits on three legs that double as staircases. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios.

  Meanwhile, something is killing the crew. Eventually, a large flame-like creature tries to get through the C57-D’s force fields. The captain decides to evacuate the planet and returns to collect the scientist and his daughter. The scientist’s compound is attacked, and it is eventually revealed that the monster is the unconscious mind of the scientist, amplified and personified by the immense power of the Krell. The scientist is overcome by remorse for what he did to the passengers on the original spaceship, so he sets a self-destruct sequence that the Krell had put into place and then dies. The captain is able to escape with the daughter and Robby and the C57-D makes it just far enough away to avoid being destroyed by the detonation that shatters the planet.

  Fans of Star Trek will recognize Forbidden Planet as a story that follows a typical Star Trek plotline. Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, admitted in his official biography that Forbidden Planet was one of the inspirations for his popular television series. For our purposes, we never encounter the Krell, except that we know that they were an ultra-powerful race, undone by their own technology and hubris. And the C57-D is an iconic example of a flying saucer, cementing in the audience’s mind the image that originated in a headline writer’s creative interpretation of Kenneth Arnold’s first UFO report.

  Earth vs. the Flying Saucers

  Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956) is another example of the presence of flying saucers in the public mind. As the title suggests, this movie was a classic shoot ’em up between Earth and Aliens. The movie starts with a newlywed couple driving on a deserted highway, when they were buzzed by a flying saucer. This is somewhat reminiscent of Betty and Barney Hill, although the movie preceded their experiences by five years, and no amnesia was involved. The husband is the lead scientist of a government program called Project Skyhook, which involves launching artificial satellites into space, and he is driving while dictating
his notes into a tape recorder. As the saucer buzzes the car, it emits a high-pitched insect-like sound, which is recorded on the tape.

  The two continue to the base from which the satellites had been launched. After being informed that the previous ten satellites had been shot down, the scientists launch the eleventh satellite, which also gets lost. Shortly after the launch of this last satellite, a flying saucer lands at the base, and three humanoid Aliens come out. One of them is shot by a soldier, and the Aliens retaliate with ray guns that kill. The flying saucer then devastates the base hosting Project Skyhook. The husband and wife become trapped underground, and, as the air grows stale, he records what he thinks will be his last words. As the batteries die, he plays the sound the saucer makes, only to find out that it was a sped-up verbal notification that the Aliens would be landing at Project Skyhook.

  The husband and wife are rescued and go to Washington, D.C., where they tell their story. The Aliens radio the scientist how to contact them and, against orders from U.S. officials, he goes off to meet them. His wife notifies an army major who had been detailed to watch them, and the two follow the scientist driving at high speed. The scientist is joined by his wife and the major, and the three enter the saucer. The Aliens reveal that they intend to take over the world and show that they can read peoples’ minds and learn everything the person knows.

  The scientist is given 56 days to bring together the leaders of the world to Washington, D.C., to surrender to the Aliens. Then the scientist, his wife, and the major are released. The scientist builds two weapons, first a sonic ray of minimal destructive power and then an electric beam that disrupts the flying saucer’s magnetic propulsion system. Many versions of this electric beam are built and installed in army trucks.

  On the appointed day, the flying saucers approach the U.S. capital and start blowing stuff up (figure 3.7). The earthlings fight back and eventually shoot down the saucers. It seems that the battle scenes of the much later movie Independence Day might owe a creative debt to Earth vs. the Flying Saucers in how the Aliens damage Washington, D.C.

  FIGURE 3.7. In the movie Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, a fleet of classic flying saucers wreak havoc on Washington, D.C. Here they fly over the Lincoln Memorial. Clover Productions.

  Earth vs. the Flying Saucers is not an overtly political movie, but it is a classic conflict between good guys and bad guys. The flying saucers are quite stereotypical in design and demonstrate yet again how deeply the saucer image had permeated the culture. Aliens and flying saucers were now solidly mainstream.

  Wrap Up

  The glut of 1950s UFO movies began to taper off before the end of the decade, shortly after the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957. The desire for imaginative depictions of flying saucers was over, replaced with the very real earthly space race. Mankind realized that we could conquer space ourselves, and the idea of talking about Aliens in space somehow seemed passé. In the next chapter, we will discuss the period from 1960 to the present. Even though this spans more than half a century, the character of science fiction had changed. The era of the high-impact blockbuster had come. From the period of the 1970s onward, science fiction was a mainstream staple in the television and movie industry. Aliens were everywhere, although not always intended to be taken seriously. The filmmaking and moviegoing culture had changed to consciously treating Aliens as a way to express our own, earthly, concerns. Essentially, Aliens were no longer alien. Instead, the past few decades have resulted in a handful of high impact movie and television franchises that have extensively infiltrated the psyche of humanity. In the next chapter, we will talk about them.

  FOUR

  BLOCKBUSTERS

  But please remember: this is only a work of fiction. The truth, as always, will be far stranger.

  Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey

  In the 1950s dozens of movies were made that reflected the influence of the flying saucer craze that began in 1947 and the worries that came with the beginning of the Cold War. Blockbuster movies of recent decades have a different flavor. Accompanied by huge advertising budgets and professional marketing campaigns, this new type of science fiction film began to shape the public’s view of Aliens. In recent years, the ubiquity of cable television and the need to fill hundreds of channels has led small budget science fiction film producers to easily connect with the niche audience of science fiction enthusiasts; for instance the ungrammatical SyFy network shows newly made movies that would have made Ed Wood blush. (If you’re not a fan of the genre, Ed Wood was notorious for making very bad science fiction movies.) However, these new “B-movies” have but a modest impact on the public. Most of us saw modern-day Aliens on the big screen. In this chapter, we’ll discuss the high impact movies and television shows of the past few decades.

  The 1960s were a relative desert for movies about Aliens of any kind. The biggest movie of that decade was the artistic 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, which only hinted at Aliens, in that they created obelisks that keep popping up in the movie. The first one appears in front of a group of plant-eating and timid hominids and alters them. They kill a rival group’s leader and this is the start of the lineage ending with Homo sapiens. The movie then jumps ahead to 2001 when an obelisk is found on the moon. When explorers get to the lunar obelisk, it sends a signal to Jupiter. The rest of the movie details a journey to Jupiter with a recalcitrant computer named HAL. Another obelisk is found near Jupiter, and, when activated, it brings an astronaut through a time sequence of aging and a tremendous light show, ending up with his being enclosed fetus-like in an orb of light staring at Earth. The idea is conveyed that perhaps mankind has again been altered and is entering a new stage of development.

  The Aliens in 2001: A Space Odyssey are never shown. This is in part due to advice from Carl Sagan, who suggested to the film’s creators that a realistic Alien would not be humanoid. Given the constraints of movie making of the era, in which computer graphics were quite primitive and therefore Aliens would need to be shown using human actors, the directors opted to not show the Aliens at all. This technique was copied in the 1997 movie Contact, penned by Carl Sagan and his wife, Ann Druyan. Sagan was famous for reminding people that Aliens won’t look like us. Contact had religious overtones but also told a tale of Aliens that were so far advanced from us as to appear godlike.

  The rest of the 1960s really was a low point in film depictions of Aliens. This was the era of Betty and Barney Hill, and it would take some time for these new ideas of Aliens to trickle into Hollywood. Television was another matter. The 1960s saw such series as Britain’s long-running Doctor Who and cult classics Lost in Space and The Twilight Zone (which occasionally featured Aliens). But arguably the most famous science fiction dynasty was Gene Rodenberry’s Star Trek.

  Star Trek

  “SPACE: The final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: To explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.” These are the opening words to one of the longest-lived science fiction television franchises to date. Star Trek began in 1966 with a modest three-season production. Ordinarily that would signify a briefly successful television series, which would be quickly consigned to obscurity. But not Star Trek. The show’s fans became known as Trekkies. After years of existing only in syndication, the franchise was rebooted in 1979 with a full-length film, followed by five more. The series was introduced to a new set of viewers in 1987 with Star Trek: The Next Generation, which took place about a century after the first show.

  Trekkies now refer to the 1966 version of Star Trek as Star Trek: The Original Series (or TOS). The show that followed it, Star Trek: The Next Generation, is referred to as NextGen or TNG (1987–1994). In addition to these two series, there was also Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (DSN, 1993–1999) and Star Trek: Voyager (Voyager, 1995–2001). The plotlines of DSN and Voyager were contemporaneous with NextGen, and the story lines would occasionally cross. Finally, another pre
quel series called Enterprise (2001–2005) detailed the early years of mankind’s experience with interstellar flight in the same universe. Combine this with twelve feature films, a cartoon series (1973–1974), hundreds of books, comic books, and other products, and you have a marketing behemoth.

  With such a tremendous amount of material, there is no way it can all be described in a few pages. So the summaries below are just representatives of the Alien types and plotlines in the Star Trek universe.

  The Original Series

  The original Star Trek was born in the political tumult of the 1960s, a world in which racial integration, questions of gender equality, and Cold War proxy wars were dominant concerns of the American public. The series showed fresh alternatives to dealing with these problems. The starship Enterprise flew around the galaxy at speeds faster than light, captained by midwesterner James T. Kirk, but it also had a black female communications officer named Uhura, an Asian helmsman named Sulu, a Russian pilot named Chekov, a Scottish engineer named Scotty, a doctor from the American South named McCoy, and a first officer, Spock, who was an Earth-Vulcan hybrid. Vulcans were a warrior race that had tamed their violent tendencies through veneration and practice of logic. Vulcans rejected emotion as “illogical,” and the show had recurring subplots with McCoy and Spock crossing verbal swords over the proper role of emotion. The crew of the Enterprise was ethnically mixed, highly functional, and happy. This was but the first implicit comment made by the show on the problems of the American 1960s.