If there’s something strange in (or over) your neighborhood … who ya gonna call? If it looks like a UFO or a part from one, don’t call 9-1-1 or MUFON – call SpaceX. Numerous recent reports of mysterious lights in the sky and weird objects washing up on beaches are being positively identified as either SpaceX launches or SpaceX pieces. Hello, Elon? Yes, I’ll hold.

They‘re happening so often that the mystery should have worn off, but it seems people, especially Californians, are still being fooled by bright lights with colorful and ever-expanding trails. Two such “UFO” sightings that received a lot of attention occurred in October and December of 2017 in the sky over Los Angeles and southern California. Both were quickly identified as SpaceX launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base north of LA. For non-believers (and there seemed to be plenty of them), experts were accessed by SpaceX and the media to explain rocket contrails and the “twilight phenomena.”

The trailing plumes (a great name for a band) or condensation trails are caused by exhaust made up of water vapor, smoke and miscellaneous particles of burnt rocket fuel. The water vapor freezes at the tropopause boundary between the troposphere and the stratosphere and the ice crystals and minute particles give the contrail its visibility. The bright colors come courtesy of the setting sun (in California) or the rising sun on Florida launches. Because of the altitude of the rocket, the sun can be below the horizon and still illuminate the trail.

What about the bright lights that make it look like a UFO mothership sending off landing parties? That’s SpaceX successfully landing the first stage of the rockets. Here’s the real question – is SpaceX launching at twilight just to mess with us? Hello, Elon? Yes, I’ll hold.

Some of those first stages are landing but others are not, which means they’re ending up, along with the second stages and miscellaneous other parts, in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. With Falcon 9 rockets being launched 63 times over the past 8 years, that’s a lot of space litter. Which brings us to North Carolina and other east coastal states where people are mistaking giant pieces of unidentifiable metal found on beaches for parts of alien spaceships. The latest was discovered this past Tuesday along the Outer Banks in the Cape Hatteras National Seashore. The object measured 10 feet by 6 feet and was heavy enough to require a front-end loader to remove it. SpaceX quickly claimed it as its own and probably took it to where it put another rocket piece from the nosecone found in October. What about that giant foam object that washed up on a South Carolina beach in October? SpaceX was mum on that one and its source appears to still be a mystery.

As movies like First Man remind us, rocket launches were once big events announced loudly by NASA and covered extensively by the media. While a non-military government agency may have an obligation to notify the public of launches certainly has an obligation to clean up its mess, does a private launch company? The answer should be “yes,” especially if the owners want us to buy their electric cars or order stuff from their online store. (Hello, Jeff? Yes, I’ll hold.)

So, it’s fun but unfair to  just blame SpaceX. With these launches being mistaken for UFOs and even causing small “panics”; with space junk washing up on beaches and causing similar concerns; and the recent abort of a manned launch, perhaps it’s time to go back to treating these launches as a big deal and alerting the public beforehand.

Hello, somebody? Yes, I’ll hold. Could you play another song by The Trailing Plumes?

Flying saucers have been part of our cultural landscape for over 70 years. For most of this time, they have teetered precariously on the fringes of acceptable debate, widely considered to be the stuff of fantasy and paranoia.

But it may be that attitudes are gradually beginning to shift. In December 2017, the US government broke its decades of silence on the UFO issue through its proxy acknowledgement of a Pentagon UFO project called the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program (AATIP). The conclusions of the project, which ran from 2008 to 2012 at a cost of $22 million (and which continues quietly to this day), were that “aircraft” of apparently unearthly origin are routinely penetrating America’s airspace.

These aircraft, according the former head of the Pentagon project, Louis Elizondo, exhibit flight characteristics that defy the laws of our known physics. They do not belong to the United States of America, nor, apparently, to any other nation on Earth. Moreover, it also emerged that the Pentagon has recovered metal alloys from UFOs which are currently being stored and studied under lock and key by billionaire defense contractor Robert Bigelow.

Since then, a number of videos have surfaced of UFOs being tracked and pursued by military aircraft in cases investigated by the Pentagon’s AATIP program. The military officers involved in these cases were later interviewed on primetime news shows and treated by their hosts on Fox, CNN and others with the utmost respect. Could it be that the corporate media are fast recognising as legitimate a subject that for so long has served as little more than tabloid fodder? If so, we must ask ourselves a question: is it still considered kooky to believe in UFOs?

As someone who has carved himself a semi-career in the weird world of “UFOlogy,” I would of course argue that it has neverreally been kooky to believe in UFOs. Indeed, I would argue that “belief” in UFOs has never really been required. Unidentified Flying Objects, whatever they truly represent, exist. This much is clear. They are real, and governments around the world have known this for many decades.

UFOs and national security around the world

The US government’s interest in UFOs dates back to the summer of 1947 when America’s national security apparatus was besieged by hundreds of reports from concerned citizens and military personnel of what appeared to be metallic disc-shaped objects traversing the nation’s skies, sometimes in formation and often at impossible speeds. On 24 June 1947, a private aviator and businessman, Kenneth Arnold, reported seeing a chain of nine unusual objects over the Cascade Mountains in Washington State. He described the objects’ movement as being “like a saucer if you skip it across the water,” inspiring the press to dub the mystery objects “flying saucers.” Many hundreds of saucer sightings were reported worldwide in the months to follow.

In 1948 the US Air Force produced its top secret and highly controversial “Estimate of the Situation,” an official report concluding flying saucers to be “interplanetary” in origin. Other factions within the Air Force, however, favoured the more palatable idea that the saucers were the product of technological innovations in the Soviet Union. Either way, secrecy regarding the issue was of paramount importance as the question of whether the objects were physically real had already been affirmatively answered in the minds of America’s military leaders. In a once secret letter to Air Force Headquarters dated 23 September 1947, General Nathan Twining, head of Air Materiel Command (AMC), stated that flying saucers were “real and not visionary or fictitious,” that they had “metallic or light reflecting surface[s],” were “circular or elliptical in shape, flat on bottom and domed on top,” and were sometimes sighted in “well-kept formation flights varying from three to nine objects.” In a previously top secret Canadian government document dating from 1950, Wilbert Smith, head of the Canadian government’s UFO research project, noted of UFOs that “The matter is the most highly classified subject in the United States government, rating higher even than the H-bomb.”

Today, numerous governments worldwide maintain dedicated and costly UFO study projects, collating and often investigating what collectively amount to thousands of UFO sighting reports made annually to authorities. In South America alone, the governments of Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, Chile, and Brazil, either operate UFO investigations units or actively collect UFO sighting reports through their militaries. Other governments, including those of France, New Zealand, Denmark, Canada, and Russia, have, in recent years, released to the public thousands of pages of previously classified UFO files.

The UK government has engaged with its citizenry through a process which has seen the release of thousands of previously classified UFO files through the National Archives. According to the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD), UFOs (or UAPs—Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) “certainly exist,” but are “still barely understood.” In a formerly secret 400-page assessment of the UFO phenomenon released in 2006 under the Freedom of Information Act, the UK Defence Intelligence Staff acknowledged that:

“The phenomena occur on a daily, world-wide basis. That UAP exist is indisputable. Credited with the ability to hover, land, take-off, accelerate to exceptional velocities, and vanish, they can reportedly alter their direction of flight suddenly and clearly can exhibit aerodynamic characteristics well beyond those of any known aircraft or missile—either manned or unmanned.”

The report also notes that “attempts by other nations to intercept the unexplained objects, which can clearly change position faster than an aircraft, have reportedly already caused fatalities,” and warns that, with the increasing density of UAP reports in the UK air defence region, “a small possibility may exist… of a head-on encounter with a UAP.”

There appears, then, to be a broad consensus among the governments cited above: UFOs are objectively real, albeit currently not fully understood by science. They are worthy, at best, of focused study, and, at the very least, of sustained monitoring in the interests of aviation safety and national security.

It seems that UFOs, regardless of their precise nature and origin, are objectively real. Moreover, it would seem that at least some UFOs are the product of non-terrestrial intelligences and that various governments, or military and intelligence groups within them, are well aware of this fact. Let us address this preceding sentence in two parts. First, why should we indulge the notion that some UFOs may be otherworldly in nature?

We are not alone

In 2015, NASA Chief Scientist, Ellen Stofan, announced her conviction that signs of primitive alien life will be discovered within just ten years from now. “We know where to look. We know how to look,” she said while speaking at a panel discussion broadcast on Nasa TV. “In most cases we have the technology and we’re on a path to implementing it. And so I think we’re definitely on the road.”

Stofan was discussing the discovery of rudimentary alien lifeforms. However, renowned theoretical physicist Professor Mickio Kaku has gone considerably further with his suggestion that alien life may already be visiting us and that some UFOs could indeed be extraterrestrial spacecraft. According to Kaku, considering the age of the universe (13.82 billion years), many, if not most extraterrestrial civilizations will be technologically thousands or even millions of years more advanced than our own (ours is so young it barely registers on the cosmic timeline). If such civilizations exist, certain physicists, including Kaku, consider it likely that they will have developed hyperspatial technologies that enable their spacecraft to circumvent the light speed barrier, thereby opening the gates for interstellar travel.

The popular assumption in the UFO community is that true UFOs are extraterrestrial vehicles—an assumption undoubtedly reinforced by Hollywood, which prefers a simplistic approach. However, while the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (ETH) is appealing on many levels, some have argued that it fails to account for all aspects of UFO phenomena as reported by witnesses. Certainly, it has been my own experience that the closer one looks at UFOs, the harder it becomes to reconcile the phenomenon solely with visits from outer space. Indeed, in a puzzling amount of cases, the phenomenon seems to tailor its manifestations to the expectations of the individual perceiver based on spiritual or ideological values. Extraterrestrial intelligences may play some role in all of this, but it would be a mistake to consider ETs as a definitive solution to the UFO riddle.

Still, the ETH has considerable merit on the face of it. Extraterrestrial life in primitive forms almost certainly exists. If it exists, then the laws of evolution dictate that extraterrestrial intelligences far in advance of our own probably exist. As has been stated very recently by military personnel linked to the Pentagon’s UFO study program, structured craft exhibiting performance characteristics well beyond Earth’s most advanced technologies definitely exist, and have been quietly studied for years. It therefore seems not unreasonable to suggest that at least some UFOs may be of non-human origin, despite historical assertions to the contrary.

As for my suggestion that various governments—or military and intelligence groups within them—are quietly aware of the possible non-human nature of UFOs, this is a logic based not on Hollywood movies or TV shows such as Men In Black or The X-Files, but on tens-of-thousands of pages of declassified government documentation which, collectively, paints a surprisingly clear (though certainly not explicit) picture of a decidedly unearthly phenomenon that for over six decades has held, vice-like, the attention of the powers that be, not only in the United States, but around the world.

The real X-Files: UFOs and officialdom

On 31 January 1949, the FBI issued a memo on UFOs entitled “Protection of Vital Installations.” The classified document was sent to the Army’s G-2, the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, the Office of Naval Intelligence, and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. The memo reveals that a meeting between these authorities had recently taken place concerning UFOs, and states that “the matter of ‘Unidentified Aircraft’ or ‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,’ otherwise known as ‘Flying Discs,’ ‘Flying Saucers,’ and ‘Balls of Fire,’ is considered top secret by intelligence officers of both the Army and the Air Forces.” The FBI document catalogues a list of incursions by unknown objects into restricted airspace surrounding the Atomic Energy Commission’s highly sensitive research installation at Los Alamos, New Mexico, throughout December 1948 and into early 1949.

The memo goes on to explain that “the unidentified phenomena travel at the rate of speed estimated at a minimum of three miles per second and a maximum of twelve miles per second, or a mean calculated speed of seven and one-half miles per second, or 27,000 miles per hour.” Needless to say, such speeds are well beyond the capacity of any terrestrial aircraft of the 21st Century, never mind the 20th. Even more eye-popping are the memo’s statements that “on two separate occasions a definite vertical change in path was indicated,” and that the appearance of the object was “round in a point of light with a definite area to the light’s source.” Some of the lights were “a diamond shape,” while others were “elongated.”

It should be noted that this memo came at a time when the US government was insisting to the public that flying saucers were of no defence significance and that all UFOs could be explained away either as conventional aircraft, hallucinations, misidentifications of natural phenomena, or outright hoaxes. And yet, as the document makes clear, behind the scenes, the phenomenon was deemed to be of extreme defence significance and considered “top secret.”

Almost four years later, on 2 December 1952, another jaw-dropping UFO-related document was produced, not by the FBI, but the by CIA. In a secret memo to CIA Director, General Walter Bedell Smith, the Agency’s Director of Scientific Intelligence, H. Marshall Chadwell, wrote of UFOs:

“At this time, the reports of incidents convince us that there is something going on that must have immediate attention…. Sightings of unexplained objects at great altitudes and travelling at high speeds in the vicinity of major U.S. defense installations are of such nature that they are not attributable to natural phenomena or known types of aerial vehicles.”

In other words, in the absence of other satisfactory explanations, these objects were, in all likelihood, intelligently controlled craft not belonging to the United States government, nor presumably, to any other terrestrial power. Reading between the lines, it seems that Chadwell was seriously considering the possibility that these objects were of non-terrestrial origin, but he knew better than to state so explicitly in official documentation. Such discussions are better held in a quiet office, face-to-face.

To this day, despite the Pentagon’s proxy acknowledgement of its shadowy UFO study program (AATIP), the United States government remains reluctant to officially acknowledge the underlying exotic nature of UFOs (official acknowledgement opens an enormous can of worms). Other governments, however, have been relatively vocal about the phenomenon and are becoming more so with each passing year.

South American officials in particular have been especially forthright regarding military encounters with UFOs. Speaking on the direct authority of the President of Equador, Rafael Correa, Colonel Wilson Salgado of the Ecuadorian Air Force stated in an interview for the 2010 documentary UFOs in South America: Disclosure Has Begun:

The information we have available—not just our information, but also that coming from abroad, in particular the United States—makes me confident that we are dealing with… Unidentified Flying Objects. In real terms, these are extraterrestrial objects, and I’m sure of it. We share the universe with other beings.

In February 2012, Colonel Ariel Sanchez, head of the Uruguayan Air Force’s Commission for the Reception and Investigation of UFO Reports (known as “Cridovni”), told American journalist Billy Cox of the Sarasota Herald Tribune, “I believe that Uruguay, as well as Argentina, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, and of course, Brazil, all have declassified only the smallest part of their files.” Sanchez said that the UFO information thus far released by these governments is but “the tip of a huge iceberg.”

Some of the most remarkable statements from military officers on UFOs have come from France, a country in which these phenomena been actively investigated at an official level since 1977. In 1999, the Institute of Higher Studies for National Defence—a military think tank—prepared a ninety-page report detailing the results of an independent study on UFOs. The white paper, now commonly referred to as The COMETA Report,was compiled by a group of thirteen retired top-tier generals, admirals, and government scientists (including the former head of the French Tactical Air Force, General Bernard Norlain, and the former head of CNES [the French equivalent of NASA]), Andre Lebeau. The report documented the existence of unidentified flying objects and their implications for national security. Copies were received by President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. The report concluded that, for a small percentage of UFO sightings, the extraterrestrial hypothesis was valid. It stated that some UFOs represent “completely unknown flying machines with exceptional performances that are guided by natural or artificial intelligence” and noted that, although the extraterrestrial hypothesis “has not been categorically proven… strong presumptions exist in its favour.” The report then goes on to consider in detail the likely consequences of open extraterrestrial contact for politics, science, and religion.

Concerning the US government’s historical UFO research, the COMETA report states:

“It is clear that the Pentagon has had, and probably still has, the greatest interest in concealing, as best it can, all of this research, which may, over time, cause the United States to hold a position of great supremacy over terrestrial adversaries, while giving it a considerable response capacity against a possible threat coming from space. Within this context, it is impossible for them to divulge the sources of this research and the goals pursued, because that could immediately point any possible rivals down the most beneficial avenues. Cover-ups and disinformation (both active as well as passive) still remain, under this hypothesis, an absolute necessity. Thus it would appear natural in the minds of U.S. military leaders, secrecy must be maintained as long as possible.”

In addition to the reams of official documents and scholarly white papers hinting at a non-terrestrial origin for UFOs, there are also many retired, and in some cases serving, government, military, and intelligence officials who have testified publicly to their own knowledge of UFOs and/or the intelligences behind them, and to the extreme secrecy surrounding these issues. Notable among these individuals are former CIA Director Roscoe Hillenkoetter; former Special Assistant to Deputy CIA Director Richard Helms, Victor Marchetti; Senator Barry Goldwater; Gemini astronaut Col. Gordon Cooper; former UK Chief of Defence Staff and Chairman of the NATO Military Committee, Admiral of the Fleet The Lord Hill Norton; billionaire financier Lawrence Rockefeller; Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell; former Governor of Arizona Fife Symington; and Japanese Defense Minister Shigiru Ishiba.

And all of this is to say nothing of the literally millions of individuals from all walks of life and from every corner of the globe who, over the past seven decades, have reported seeing not only structured craft unlike anything known to have been built by man, but also—and crucially—non-human entities in the vicinity of, and inside said craft.

So, what are we to make of all this? It may very well be that our reality is drastically stranger than we have been led to believe, and that certain organisations—or certain individuals within them—are only too aware of this. The UFO phenomenon—whatever it is—shows no signs of disappearing anytime soon. In fact, mainstream media platforms are now more willing than ever to cover the UFO subject without the once-obligatory references to The X-Files and throwaway jibes about little green men and anal probes. If UFOs ever do shape up to be an ongoing hard news story, a topic of legitimate debate, will this change the social status of the UFO believer? Or, indeed, will “belief” finally be removed from the UFO question altogether?

This past week, the field of ufology lost two of its well-known members – UFO investigator Robert Dean and whistleblower Karl Wolfe.

Robert Dean is best known for revealing that, while a member of the U.S. military stationed at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) in the 1960s, he was able to read a document entitled “UFO Assessment: An Evaluation of a Possible Threat” because his security clearance allowed him access to documents labeled “Cosmic Top Secret.” While Dean could not obtain a copy, he remembered the contents of the papers and revealed them to the public after retiring from a 28-year career in the Army. Those contents, according to Dean, included detailed information on UFO sightings, ET encounters and alien autopsies. Dean claimed the research was approved by NATO and exposed (at least internally) that Earth was inhabited by four alien species that looked like humans and were secretly interacting with us.

Dean spoke often both within the ufology community and to the general public about what he saw in “The Assessment” and, while he was unable to offer proof, lived long enough to see the US government finally admit it has investigated UFOs and release videos of encounters. Robert Dean was 89.

Karl Wolfe was another former military officer (Air Force sergeant) who also claimed to have a special security clearance in the 1960s while working in the Tactical Air Command at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia. In 2001 at the now-famous Disclosure Project event held at the National Press Club in Washington DC and organized by ufologist Steven Greer, Wolfe revealed that, while working as a technician processing photographic surveillance from the war in Vietnam, he was sent to a building filled, to his surprise and suspicion, with non-English-speaking civilians and interpreters. In a darkroom used for processing photos from the first lunar orbiter mission in 1966, another technician allegedly showed him pictures of structures on the far side of the moon. He descried it in his testimony:

“He pulled out one of these mosaics, and showed this base which had geometric shapes – there were towers, there were spherical buildings, there were very tall towers and things that looked somewhat like radar dishes, but they were very large structures.”

While he had no evidence, Wolfe spoke about his experience at subsequent ufology events. He died this week in a tragic traffic accident that is still under investigation. Karl Wolfe was 74.

As expected, some are trying to link the accident to Wolfe’s revelations about  }alleged secret moon base and others to the coincidental passing of two UFO whistleblowers with a week of each other. The circumstances of each man’s passing seem to suggest otherwise, but actual information about such a connection is as likely to be disclosed as is evidence of what both men claimed they saw and told to anyone who would listen.

“Space … the final frontier.”

That, of course, is the opening line from the first “Star Trek” series. No one (outside of China, as we will soon see) would watch if the line was, “Space, the next street light.” Yet that’s exactly what the Chinese space program is saying. In 2020, it plans to launch a satellite with a reflective coating that it claims will be capable of beaming sunlight at night on a 50 square mile area that apparently hasn’t yet heard of street lights. Or Las Vegas. Or what animals and humans do when they can’t sleep. What could possibly go wrong?

“The satellite light will be like a twilight glow.”

Kang Weimin – the director of the Institute of Optics at the Harbin Institute of Technology’s School of Aerospace – gave that very non-technical description after the announcement by Wu Chunfeng — chairman of Chengdu Aerospace Science and Technology Microelectronics System Research Institute Co. – that Chengdu, a city 0f 14 million residents in southwestern China, will soon get a second moon “eight times brighter than the Moon” (please update your definition of “twilight” to ‘reflect’ this). At a technology conference in Chengdu, he told the audience that the beam from this satellite will be bright enough to entirely replace street lights.” (Better update “twilight” again.) Why? Chengdu Business Daily gives one answer:

“According to reports, in the civilian sector, the project can replace night street lighting, saving a lot of infrastructure electricity consumption. In view of the 50 square kilometers of Chengdu, providing radiation, for example, can save electricity costs of about 1.2 billion yuan ($173 million USD) per year.”

People’s Daily reports that Chengdu officials also expressed that the artificial moon would increase tourism (see Las Vegas and New York City) while Asia Times points out that the light can be directed to specific locations such as construction sites or disaster areas.

What could possibly go wrong? Ask the people who live in far northern or southern areas with summers filled with midnight suns. Or ask their psychologists who say perpetual sunlight affects internal clocks, creates a feeling of perpetual jet lag and contributes to insomnia and all of its associated serious problems (see Insomnia). The artificial moon will certainly upset astronomers who will be able to see it as its light blocks their view, and it will affect businesses that depend on night darkness. (Note to self: sell stock in nightlight company.)

Then there’s the animals. Kang Weimin says the all-night “twilight” won’t affect them, but that’s not the case in midnight sun areas, which report the animals are out hunting longer, birds are chirping and crowing at all hours, bears are cranky from not hibernating and those all-important nighttime insect-eating bats are eating less often. And those are just the obvious signs.

What could possibly go wrong? Plenty. Enough to offset the profits of a billionaire space entrepreneur, his rich business friends and money-hungry government officials? What do you think?

“Space … the final profit center.”

Hollywood’s alien movies have been drawing inspiration from UFO stories since the dawn of the modern UFO era over seventy years ago, but only a handful have been based directly on real-life UFO incidents. Here are 5 of the best…

Left: the real Betty and Barney Hill. Right: the Hills as portrayed onscreen by Estelle Parsons and James Earl Jones.

1. The UFO Incident (1975)

One of the first cases of alien abduction on record — and arguably the most famous — is that of Betty and Barney Hill, a middle-aged couple who encountered a UFO on the night of 19 September 1961 while driving late at night in New Hampshire. The couple claimed to have witnessed a disc-shaped craft low above the road directly ahead of them. Barney even described seeing a number of humanoid figures staring back at him through its windows. Little else was recalled consciously. The rest of their account would surface later through dramatic hypnosis sessions with respected Boston psychiatrist Dr. Benjamin Simon, who published a popular book about the incident in 1966.

In 1975, the Hill abduction story became even more famous when it was adapted for television as a feature-length movie starring Estelle Parsons and James Earl Jones as Betty and Barney. With a teleplay based directly on Dr. Simon’s taped hypnosis sessions with the couple, The UFO Incident was remarkably faithful to the Hill’s actual account of capture by grey-skinned saucer occupants in September of 1961.

Another film, the little-known Italian production Eyes Behind the Stars, had touched on the theme of abduction three years prior in 1972, but The UFO Incident was the first direct treatment of a real-life case and the first to bring together many of the now-common themes and motifs of abduction experiences, including medical examination, missing time, and hypnosis. The movie’s aliens, although smallish with large eyes and bald heads, are of normal proportions, and are quite different to Greys as they would later be realized onscreen in Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind as decidedly smaller, more spindly beings with significantly larger heads and larger, blacker eyes.

The UFO Incident remains one of Hollywood’s best treatments of a true life abduction experience. It works first and foremost as a powerful human drama, propelled by the obvious commitment of Parsons and Jones in excellent central performances as the Hills. Despite its fantastical subject matter, the film remains sober throughout.

2. Communion (1989)

Whitley Strieber’s 1987 book about his claimed encounters with non-human entities was an instant bestseller, and, to date, has sold more than two million copies worldwide. The 1989 movie adaptation starred Christopher Walken in a compellingly manic performance as Strieber, and Lindsay Crouse as his late wife, Anne.

Both book and movie are primarily focused on an experience which occurred 26 December 1985, when Strieber believes he was abducted from his cabin in upstate New York while on a short break with his family and some close friends. Strieber had almost no conscious recollection of what had happened to him, but in the months that followed he began to suffer an untraceable emotional and psychological toll.

In the movie, we follow Strieber as he reluctantly agrees to be hypnotically regressed by psychiatrist Janet Duffey (played by Frances Sternhagen). It is through these sessions that the bizarre events of that night come back to confront him – events involving small, spindly, beings with oversized oval heads and large hypnotic black eyes.

Communion was the first Hollywood entertainment product to engage thoughtfully with the more surreal aspects of the abduction phenomenon. With a screenplay penned by Strieber himself, the movie captures the tonal essence of his book, if not its deeply layered psychological and metaphysical complexity. It’s a flawed film, but it dares to show abduction for the baffling, hallucinatory, deeply troubling, intellectually challenging, and spiritually transformative phenomenon it is reported to be. This is a film, which, for the most part, is rooted firmly in our own mundane world. The thought of non-human intelligences breaking through into this reality from a strange realm is psychologically jarring, both for Strieber and for the viewer.

Despite its flaws, Communion remains a deeply creepy movie. It’s an important one too, not only for its ambition, but for further popularizing the image of the now iconic Grey alien—an image which first came to prominence on the cover of Strieber’s own bestselling book and would later feature on the movie’s VHS cover, staring hypnotically into the eyes of millions of freaked-out customers in video rental stores worldwide.

3. Intruders (1992)

1987 saw the publication of Budd Hopkins’ Intruders: The Incredible Visitations at Copley Woods. The book investigated the claims of a number of alleged alien abductees, but was more specifically concerned with the case of Debbie Jordan-Kauble (known in the book as “Kathie Davis”). Jordan-Kauble described having been abducted from her parents’ home in June of 1983 and being taken aboard an egg-shaped craft which had landed outside. She claimed to have been impregnated by her alien captors, who later removed the fetus and eventually introduced her to her human-alien hybrid child.

Hopkins’ Intruders book would later be very loosely adapted for television by screenwriter Tracy Tormé—son of legendary jazz singer and musician Mel Tormé. The 1992 mini-series (later broadcast back-to-back as a movie) was concerned less with the Jordan-Kauble story and more with the broader abduction phenomenon as it was then understood by the leading researchers in the field, namely Hopkins and Harvard psychiatrist John Mack, both of whom served as consultants on the production.

Intruders was broadcast by CBS through 17–19 May 1992 and was generally well received by critics. It remains significant for its thoughtful and sympathetic treatment of the abduction phenomenon, and for grounding itself convincingly in a normal world occasionally intruded upon by a profound and sometimes terrifying non-human intelligence. It explored many themes and motifs common to abduction accounts, including intrusive examinations, alien impregnation, hybrid children, screen memories, and hypnotic regression. Tormé is convinced that his show had considerable cultural impact, bringing a previously obscure UFOlogical facet to the masses. He told me of Intruders: “I really believe this project was part of the process of people becoming aware of how these things [abductions] allegedly work.”

4. Fire in the Sky (1993)

In 1975, Travis Walton, a logger from Snowflake, Arizona, famously claimed to have been taken aboard a flying saucer and to have interacted with two different species of aliens. What distinguishes Walton’s story from innumerable other accounts of cosmic kidnapping is that his apparent abduction was witnessed, in part, by the six other men on his logging crew. They sped back into town that night to inform bemused authorities of how a UFO had zapped Travis in front of their very eyes. Assuming he was dead, the terrified loggers had left their colleague where he lay, the saucer looming above his lifeless body.

A swirling storm of confusion, anger, and allegations was soon to descend on the sleepy town of Snowflake. The loggers, having reported to police that their friend had been taken by a UFO, immediately were considered suspects in Walton’s disappearance and possible murder. After no less than five days, Walton returned. He was found in a telephone box some three miles outside of Snowflake, huddled and shivering. As he was taken back into town he began babbling about strange creatures with large eyes. He assumed he’d been gone just a couple of hours and was stunned into prolonged silence when he was told almost a week had passed.

Featuring solid performances from D.B. Sweeney as Travis, and Robert Patrick as logging-crew-leader Mike Rogers, the Fire in the Sky movie was a reasonably faithful accounting of the Walton experience—that is until its final act, which notoriously pummeled the meat of Walton’s encounter out of all recognition. The human-looking beings described by Travis and their walkabout with him in a spaceport were nowhere to be seen in the movie. Walton’s skittish Grays were replaced with frightful goblin-like beings who literally drag the logger like a sack of spuds through their pestilent, rotting spaceship—all dank tunnels and dripping embryonic sacks—before gluing him to a table with a suffocating membrane and subjecting him to graphic torture with a thick needle to the eyeball.

The movie divided opinion upon its release. It made back its budget, but little more. The legendary Roger Ebert praised the film’s final sequence for its believably, writing: “The scenes inside the craft are really very good. They convincingly depict a reality I haven’t seen in the movies before, and for once I did believe that I was seeing something truly alien, and not just a set decorator’s daydreams.” However, Ebert was left deflated as the credits rolled, adding: “The movie ends on an inconclusive and frustrating note.”

5. Roswell (1994)

This 1994 TV movie was the first in-depth Hollywood treatment of the infamous Roswell Incident of July 1947, in which an alien spacecraft and bodies are alleged to have crashed in the New Mexico desert and been recovered by the US military. For writer/producer Paul Davids, the purpose of his movie was not just to entertain, but to educate—to bring what many regard as the ultimate UFO cover-up to wider public attention as a powerful and comprehensible narrative.

Roswell was also one of the first movies to feature a direct reference to Area 51. The secret base shows up fleetingly in a sequence in which a mysterious government insider (played by Martin Sheen) describes to Roswell whistle-blower Jesse Marcel (Kyle MacLachlan) the events that unfolded in the months and years following the saucer crash.

In a 2014 interview, I asked Davids if the word “Roswell” would be so culturally resonant today had he not so memorably contextualized it in his 1994 movie. “Not as much,” he replied, although he acknowledged that The X-Files, which premiered a year before his movie, also played a major role. “But The X-Files wasn’t just about Roswell,” he stressed, “it was all over the place dealing with a lot of different things. Roswell was just a little part of it.”

Today, Davids considers the Roswell Incident to be a “national institution… massively ingrained into the public consciousness, as much as any other story from the history of our country.” It is hard to argue with that statement, and it is harder still to underestimate the seminal role Davids’ movie played in that ingraining process.

After the recent passing of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, there was much coverage of the billionaire’s many notable accomplishments and activities – inventor, investor, philanthropist, private rocket builder, shipwreck hunter, brain researcher and owner of sports teams, yachts and an island. However, one major achievement that didn’t get much press was his early and substantial financial contributions to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). That’s right – the other half of the IBM side of the personal computer revolution was also a key member of the SETI revolution … and the evidence starts with the Allen Telescope Array, located in the Cascade Mountains in California.

“The chance that we are going to pick up the phone and an alien is going to be on the other end is small, but it is certainly worth—on a modest scale, for me—seeing if we can enable some of that research.”

Paul Allen

In a 2007 interview with Discover magazine, Paul Allen describes how his interest in space and extraterrestrials began with the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. However, a little thing called software got in the way of that interest and Allen didn’t give it much thought until he had had made some of his billions and one day received a call from a fellow computer industry pioneer. According to Motherboard, Allen, along with Hewlett-Packard founders Bill Hewlett and David Packard and Intel founder Gordon Moore, received a call from Hewlett Packard laboratories founder Barney Oliver asking each to invest $5 million in Project Phoenix, which scanned for signals from 800 stars within 200-light years of Earth.

Allen Telescope Array

When Project Phoenix ended, astronomers interested in SETI designed a large array of radio telescopes and convinced Allen to contribute the $25 million (he later invested $5 million more) needed to build what became the Allen Telescope Array – the first array in the U.S. built specifically for SETI. While it has received 200 million signals from thousands of stars and recently scanned the Oumuamua intergalactic space rock, a definitive ET message hasn’t been identified yet. Despite that, Allen never lost his excitement for the search.

“That would be such a life-changing thing, for us all to know that there are other beings out there who we could potentially communicate with, or maybe we are listening to a signal that they transmitted hundreds of millennia ago.”

While Paul Allen had many other successes, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence wasn’t one of them. However, his quest lives on in the Allen Telescope Array. While we wait for a message, perhaps Allen has finally received it.