The Twilight Zone FAQ: All That's Left to Know About the Fifth Dimension and Beyond

By Dave Thompson

The Twilight Zone is among the most beloved shows in American television history, a pioneering fantasy behemoth that bridged the cultural gap between the 1950s and 1960s with thought-provoking mystery, mind-boggling theorems, and occasionally outright horror.

The Twilight Zone FAQ takes the reader back to that halcyon era, looking back on the show and its impact as a force for societal change, via reflections on the manifold topics and controversies that the show took on – from the space race to the Red Menace, from paranoia to madness and beyond. Dave Thompson traces the history of the show – from its earliest flowering in the mind of then-unknown Rod Serling through its slow birth, shaky beginning, and breathless five-season run – and he shows how it became the blueprint for so much of the fantasy television that has followed.

Chapters deal with the comic books, novels, and many other spin-offs, including the movie, the TV revamps, and even the amusement park ride. In addition, this FAQ offers a full guide to every episode, providing details on the cast and music and pinpointing both the best and the worst of the series, all adding up to a brightly opinionated time machine that catapults the reader back to the true golden age of American television.

• Language: English
• Publisher: RowmanLittlefield
• Release date: Nov 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781495046117

Dave Thompson

Dave Thompson is the author of over one hundred books, including best-selling biographies of the Sweet, David Bowie and Sparks

Book preview

Copyright © 2015 by Dave Thompson

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, without written permission, except by a newspaper or magazine reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review.

Published in 2015 by Applause Theatre & Cinema Books

An Imprint of Hal Leonard Corporation

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Permissions for photographs can be found on page 373, which constitutes an extension of this copyright page.

The FAQ series was conceived by Robert Rodriguez and developed with Stuart Shea.

Printed in the United States of America

Book design by Snow Creative Services

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Thompson, Dave.

Title: The Twilight zone FAQ : all that’s left to know about the fifth dimension and beyond / Dave Thompson.

Description: Milwaukee, Wisconsin : Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, an imprint of Hal Leonard Corporation, 2015. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015037710 | ISBN 9781480396180 (pbk.)

Subjects: LCSH: Twilight zone (Television program : 1959–1964)—Miscellanea.

Classification: LCC PN1992.77.T87 T48 2015 | DDC 791.45/72—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015037710

www.applausebooks.com

To Sherrill Chidiac (1942–2005): You’d have liked this one!

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Into the Zone

1. The Roots of the Zone: Or, The World According to a Nation Running Scared from Aliens, Communists, Giant Bugs and Atom Bombs

2. Après Moi, Le Deluge . . . As the Atom Bomb Said to the Peacenik

3. Science Fact and Fantastic Television: The Birth of a Genre

4. The World at War: World War II in The Twilight Zone

5. A Writer Writes, a Script Writer Waits: The Search for a First Big Break

6. Patterns and Punch-Ups: A Reputation Is Wrought

7. Out for the Count: Fading Fame in The Twilight Zone

8. I’ve Got an Idea for a Brand New Show: Pitching and Piloting The Twilight Zone

9. Traveling in Time: The Twilight Zone Turns the Clocks Back and Forth

10. A Show Is Born: The Beginnings of The Twilight Zone

11. The Final Frontier: Or, Twilight in the Black of Space

12. The Aliens Have Landed: Tentacled Terrors in The Twilight Zone

13. Perchance to Write: Charles Beaumont in The Twilight Zone

14. His Name Is Legend: Richard Matheson in The Twilight Zone

15. Back in the Saddle: Season Two of The Twilight Zone

16. But Who Are the Monsters Really? Criminals, Con Men and Man’s Inhumanity to Man

17. Cheating Death, Racing the Devil . . . And Other Fortuitous Adventures

18. Sickness and Diseases: Don’t Worry, It’s All in Your Head

19. Dashing Through the Fallout: Christmas in The Twilight Zone

20. The Toddler of Terror: The Twilight Zone at Three

21. Parallel Universes: The Crack in Everyone’s Wall

22. In the Presence of More Masters: Johnson . . .

23. The Inimitable Earl of Hamner: Writer of Weirdness

24. I, Robot: And Other Mechanical Marvels

25. Raygun Fight at the OK Corral: Or, Do Robo-Cows Dream of Electric Rustlers?

26. Your Host for the Next Sixty Minutes: The Fourth Season of The Twilight Zone

27. The Grass Is Often (But Not Always) Grimmer: Or, Home Is Where the Hurt Is

28. Time to Say Goodbye: The Fifth and Final Season

29. The Plane Now Vanishing . . . Or, Further Nightmares at 20,000 Feet

30. The Stories That Never Were: Or, Writing Inside The Twilight Zone

31. The Twilight Zone in the Twilight Zone: The Future Is Unwritten

Epilogue: Another Decade, Another Dream: The Twilight Zone Forever

Appendix One: The Twilight Zone—1959–1964: Complete Cast and Episode Guide

Appendix Two: The Twilight Zone: The Movie—1983: Complete Cast

Appendix Three: The Twilight Zone—1986–1989: Complete Cast and Episode Guide

Appendix Four: The Twilight Zone—2002–2003: Complete Cast and Episode Guide

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, a fleet of flying saucers full of thanks to all the family and friends who passed through time and space to tell me their favorite moments of The Twilight Zone television. Even those who, as we will discover elsewhere, have never watched an episode but still know the one about the gremlin. Who, according to William Shatner, was actually a Czechoslovakian acrobat in a furry suit. Cool.

Especial thanks to Amy Hanson; Chrissie Bentley; Jo-Ann Greene; everyone at Captain Blue Hen in Newark; Chloe Mortenson; and anyone else who received a frantic text, asking, Do you remember the one where . . . ?

To all at FAQ Central Headquarters, but most especially John Cerullo, Marybeth Keating, Wes Seeley, Jessica Burr, and Gary Morris; to Karen and Todd; Linda and Larry; Betsy, Steve and family; Jen; Dave and Sue; Tim Smith; Gaye Black; Oliver, Trevor, Toby; Barb East; Bateerz and family; the gremlins who live in the heat pump; and to John the Superstar, the demon of the dry well.

Other people should be mentioned, I’m sure.

You’ll find them filed under Sorry, I forgot . . . in the twilight zone.

Introduction:

Into the Zone

Considering just how all-pervading a hold that The Twilight Zone exerts over modern popular culture . . . and has exerted, for as long as many people can recall . . . it is instructive to look back at what it actually was.

A prime-time network television series that ran for just five seasons, more than half a century ago.

It was shot in black-and-white; the majority of the episodes were just thirty minutes long inclusive of commercials; and—considering how much of the show was rooted in sci-fi or fantasy concerns—the special effects were next to negligible.

Yes, it drew both inspiration and story lines from some of the most gifted writers in those fields: Charles Beaumont, Robert A. Heinlein, Richard Matheson, Earl Hamner Jr. and Ray Bradbury among them. But how often does the simple process of adapting a story for a television show succeed in stripping away any hint of quality or genius that established the original as worthy of adaptation in the first place? And, though each episode was littered with grandstanding guest stars, how often is that a guarantee of quality, either?

Particularly when that television show is, again, thirty minutes of prime-time black-and-white flicker, conceived in an age when sitcom married couples still slept in single beds, when cinematic aliens were generally badly disguised Communist bogeymen and computers were room-sized behemoths fired by magnetic tape, Talking Clock voices and spools the size of wagon wheels.

In terms of anything that even remotely represents what a modern audience would regard as watchable thrills and chills, The Twilight Zone is to the mid-2010s what J. Hartley Manners’s 1910 comedy Girl in Waiting was to audiences of 1960; a half-remembered, fifty-year-old flash in a now very rusty, vintage pan.

Yet it has survived. More than that, it has triumphed. Today, as much as ever before, The Twilight Zone is one of the yardsticks by which great television of all eras is measured; a rare (some might even say unique) example of what happens when all of the necessary stars align—great writing, great scripting, great casting, great direction, of course.

But also—a great premise, great promotion, great time slot, great theme music. Fill a room, or a convention hall, with a hundred different Twilight Zone fans, and ask each one to nominate a single quality that has assured the show’s continued glory. You will probably receive a hundred different responses.

Rod Serling, The Twilight Zone’s indefatigable creator and show-runner (to conjure that thoroughly modern, and utterly hateful, term for the job he undertook), described his dream child thus, in a TV Guide interview published as the series made its debut in 1959.

Here’s what The Twilight Zone is: It’s an anthology series, half-hour in length, that delves into the odd, the bizarre, the unexpected. It probes into the dimension of imagination but with a concern for taste and for an adult audience too long considered to have I.Q.s in negative figures.

The Twilight Zone is what it implies: that shadowy area of the almost-but-not-quite; the unbelievable told in terms that can be believed. It would not, on the other hand, be a monster rally or a spook show. There will be nothing formula’d [sic] in it, nothing telegraphed, nothing so nostalgically familiar that an audience can usually join actors in duets.

And it was for that audience to add all the other descriptions.

This book does not intend adding its own voice to that particular chorus. If you agree with any of Serling’s observations, you already know why you are reading this book—and if you haven’t answered it, then The Twilight Zone FAQ will hopefully set you on your way to formulating an opinion, for the inevitable moment when you are expected to have one. Which could be at a convention, could be at the movies, could be in a book store, a comic store, in any of myriad places that have been illuminated by The Twilight Zone.

For, although it certainly started life as a television show, it was never going to be limited to the cathode screen alone. As early as July 1958—that is, before even a pilot episode had been shot, while negotiations with the network were still ongoing—the Boyd Specialty Company of Columbus, Ohio, was writing to Rod Serling to ask whether he was interested in cross-marketing a game they were in the process of creating, called Twilight Zone.

He turned them down, sensibly pointing out that it was far too early to be thinking of such spin-offs. But, soon enough, there would be a board game adapted from the television series, courtesy of the Ideal Toy Corporation. There would be novels and comic books, movies and video games. Audio books and television remakes. DVD box sets, CDs and toys. Disneyland rides. Action figures. You may not require a Talky Tina Bobble Head that threatens to kill you, but someone does, and there’s one out there for them. There’s a gremlin, too, which looks a lot like Kim Fowley; a Kanamit and a Mystic Seer. Come on, admit it. You want them all.

In these days when even a first-run television series seems to be marketed out of all proportion with its popularity, while established shows are positively multimedia extravaganzas, we should not perhaps be shocked to see The Twilight Zone popping up in every conceivable marketable medium.

But take yourself back to the late 1950s, with the show on the drawing board and its future still airborne; or march ahead to the end of its five-year run, with cancellation looming and viewing figures plummeting, and look again at the show’s modern ubiquity. Yes, other shows did provoke a sea of opportunist merchandising . . . board games, books and comics abounded, and it was a sorry child indeed who did not receive at least one die-cast Monkeemobile for a mid-1960s birthday.

Few of those opportunities were more than fleeting, however. A handful of shows from within (or just beyond) the approximate life span of The Twilight Zone . . . Star Trek, Batman and the British Doctor Who . . . were early adherents to the mass-marketing boom, and they would retain sufficient popularity and visibility to see that boom survive the passing years.

They were called lunch boxes back in the day, but this is what a Twilight Zone tin tote looks like now. And you can still carry your lunch in one.

Officially licensed product. TM & © 2015 A CBS Company. THE TWILIGHT ZONE and TELEVISION CITY and related marks are trademarks of A CBS Company. All Rights Reserved. © JLA Direct, LLC. d/b/a Bif Bang Pow!

But therein lies the difference. In one form or another, and with the odd hiatus notwithstanding, all three of those shows remained a part of our living culture. Barely a decade separated the original Star Trek television series from the first smash-hit spin-off movie, and syndication had kept it alive in between times. Doctor Who left the screens for seventeen years, but was sustained by novels and audio dramas. And Batman is Batman, the star of comic books from almost before TV was even invented, and still the star long after the networks lost interest in his BIFF ZAP KER-SPLATTTT adventuring.

The Twilight Zone, on the other hand . . . The Twilight Zone survived not because you could still see it, or read it, or throw a six to start. It survived because you remembered it, or because other people remembered and told you about it.

Long before Telly Savalas was sucking lollipops and demanding, Who loves you, baby, he was being menaced by a walking, talking windup doll, with murderous intent and a knack for getting what it wanted. The man was killed by his stepdaughter’s dolly; let’s see Kojak solve that one.

Three years before she learned that a twitch is worth a thousand incantations, Elizabeth Montgomery was bewitching America and Charles Bronson in a postarmageddon vision of The Twilight Zone.

And William Shatner was a long way indeed from the starship Enterprise that night he watched panic-stricken as a monstrous gremlin cavorted on the wing of an inflight airliner. Yet that image has become so much a part of our shared cultural memory that even people who have never watched an episode of The Twilight Zone in their lives know everything about it.

Based on a short Richard Matheson story (Alone by Night), directed by Richard Donner, and aired early into The Twilight Zone’s fifth and final season in 1963, Nightmare at 20,000 Feet is still routinely ranked among the most terrifying moments in television history, and that despite a half-century’s worth of shocks and horrors piling up to displace it.

For it is not only the gremlin that was so grim. It is the plight that ignites the gremlin to begin with. As Serling’s original introduction explained, thirty-seven-year-old salesman Robert Wilson was on his way home, freshly discharged from the sanitarium where he had spent the last six months recovering from a nervous breakdown. Now he was about to undergo another one. The difference is, this time he was 20,000 feet up in the air.

Think about that. Did people actually have nervous breakdowns on television in 1963? At least within the realm of popular entertainment? Maybe they did. But not many people remember those other ones. They often don’t recall Mr. Wilson’s either. But they do remember the gremlin. In the popular imagination, Mr. Wilson’s mental problems were all in his head. But what he saw . . . that was real.

Gremlins have their own proud history too, of course. At least as far back as the 1920s, members of the British Royal Air Force muttered darkly of supernatural beings that messed with aircraft; according to some experts, they christened them Gremlins from a conflation of Grimm’s fairy tales and the old English favorite Fremlin beer. That should tell you something about them, but few people wrote off gremlins as the fault of one beer too many. Not after they watched Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, anyway.

Neither is this single episode The Twilight Zone’s sole contribution to popular culture’s morbid memory. In 2014, the website IGN.com lined up its choice of the show’s ten most memorable episodes, and again one didn’t need even to have seen them to identify with the horrors that unspooled across them.

Nick of Time, with William Shatner, again, becoming obsessed with a fortune telling machine. The Masks, with the family of a dying millionaire being forced to don the hideous masks that their scion has prepared for them, each one reflecting the true nature of its wearer’s personality. It’s a Good Life, with a spoiled brat child who possesses the power to banish the people who displease him to an altogether unpleasant alternate reality. The Hitch-Hiker, reprising the old urban legend about the ghost who thumbs its way into a motorist’s nightmare. Five Characters in Search of an Exit; The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street; Living Doll; The Eye of the Beholder; Time Enough at Last; and Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, of course.

Other polls cite other shockers. Time magazine added Walking Distance, in which a businessman’s car breaks down just outside the town he grew up in. He sets out to walk to the nearest gas station, when he realizes he’s walked back not only to where he grew up, but to when he grew up as well. The Invaders, with a pre-Bewitched Agnes Moorehead bedazzled by a miniature flying saucer crewed by terrifying tiny aliens. More aliens, bearing with them a book titled To Serve Man. Humanity sees only one meaning to that title. The aliens, culinary adventurers that they are, have another.

Other favorites. A feature on CBS News’s website recalled being haunted by The Lonely and also by Twenty-Two, a small-town woman’s recurring dream of a long walk down a corridor to the morgue, where a sinister nurse speaks just five words: Room for one more, honey.

To which we might add . . . Person or Persons Unknown, in which a normal guy wakes up on a normal day, to discover that none of his friends or family members recognize him, or even recall his existence. The After Hours, on a department store floor that doesn’t actually exist; In Praise of Pip, revisiting a favorite old amusement park within a pioneering questioning of the Vietnam War; The Odyssey of Flight 33, in which an airliner travels back in time; Long Distance Call, with a dead grandmother who is just a phone call away; and all of these begotten by the single story on which the entire Twilight Zone dynasty was founded, the still captivating series pilot, Where Is Everybody?

Again, however, we stalk subjective vistas. Those are the greatest Twilight Zone episodes in someone else’s opinion. But you and I might well have our own ideas, our own notions of what the stuff of nightmares truly comprises, and our own fear-filled fragments of adrenalined astonishment. And therein lies another facet of The Twilight Zone’s modern ubiquity. The fact not only that its very name has become synonymous with any inexplicable happenstance, but that story lines from other shows . . . and, lest we forget, The Twilight Zone is simply one in a long line of television chillers . . . are often misremembered as being perched among the outer limits of Rod Serling’s so vivaciously vivid night gallery.

DVD box sets allow us to revisit some of those other shows today and thrill to some of their stories, too. It’s an instructive exercise. Not because it detracts from the purity of The Twilight Zone’s own imagery and madness, but because it amplifies it. It places the show within the cultural context that it demands, and it illustrates its lofty haunt in the hierarchy of American horror. There have been a lot of shows like The Twilight Zone. But there has never been one that surpasses it.

"The Twilight Zone is damn near immortal," declared author Stephen King in 1981’s Danse Macabre—assuredly one of the finest, if most delightfully idiosyncratic, studies of science fiction, fantasy, and horror fiction ever published. Here, for once, was something Completely New and Different, he continued. For me and those of my generation . . . [it] was like a thunderclap of revelation, opening a million entrancing possibilities.

Merely by adhering to the genre that first brought him fame, King has never tired of repaying his early debt to The Twilight Zone, and he is not alone in doing so, both within his own generation and among all of those that have followed. J. J. Abrams, creator of the postmillennial thriller Lost, admitted that his show, and in particular its finale, was intentionally created to feel like something Serling might have served up to his audience—and more than a handful of TV historians stepped forward to point out that he had, in fact, already done it, in 1969’s The New People. A series about the survivors of an air disaster finding themselves marooned on a mysterious desert island.

An index of the television shows that have homaged The Twilight Zone in the course of their own tales could devour a small town’s telephone directory. (For those of us old enough to actually remember such things.)

The Simpsons, whose Tree House of Horror felt sometimes as though it was peopled only by refugees from The Twilight Zone. Hannibal mentioned the show in an episode of The A-Team; it was invoked in an installment of B.J. and the Bear; and again in The Muppet Babies: The Next Generation.

The South Park story The Simpsons Already Did It could as easily have been titled "And The Twilight Zone Did It Before Them, as it looks back to the episode The Little People." Moonlighting, The Wonder Years, Freaks and Geeks, Northern Exposure, All in the Family, ALF (okay, no surprise there), Frasier, Seinfeld, Weird Science, Family Guy . . . Futurama, that madcap animation in which an entire show within a show, The Scary Door, is an unapologetic parody of The Twilight Zone.

Perhaps even dedicated fans and collectors can live without hunting down the September 2005 edition of the BBC’s Eastenders soap opera, in which Gary Hobbs is heard to declare, For crying out loud, we’re back in the twilight zone!

But The Gilmore Girls the following year placed poor Lorelai into a looming wedding that felt like an episode of the show; and the year after that, in the Canadian vampire series Blood Ties, we hear the truly unforgettable plea, Oh dear Mother of God, say this is not gonna be another trip into the twilight zone.

These examples alone (and there are many more) are evidence enough that The Twilight Zone is rightfully ranked among the most important, and the most influential, television shows ever broadcast in the United States—and in many other countries too—and that influence is certainly one of this book’s guiding beacons.

More than that, however, The Twilight Zone FAQ is about a vision, a genius, and a set of often-unrelated circumstances that came together with such alchemical energy that there really can be only one explanation for all that happened next; one phrase that thoroughly embraces every nuance.

Do you want to know where The Twilight Zone came from?

It came out of the twilight zone.

1

The Roots of the Zone

Or, The World According to a Nation Running Scared from Aliens, Communists, Giant Bugs and Atom Bombs

There is a fifth dimension . . . beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space, and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow—between science and superstition. And it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call The Twilight Zone.

—Rod Serling, 1959

Looking back on the decade or so that followed World War II from a comfortable berth over sixty years later, one thing seems very clear. The United States might have won the war, but it had also lost its mind.

Culturally, no. The fifties and early sixties represent a golden age in so many respects. Rock ’n’ roll was born. Superhero comics were reborn. The movies discovered science fiction, and there was a B-movie boom that still enthralls viewers today. From Elvis Presley to Spiderman, from Mister Ed (a talking horse! How Twilight Zone is that?) to They Saved Hitler’s Brain, via forward motion in the arenas of both science and fiction themselves, a nation that had spent a large part of the century-so-far head-buried in the sands of political isolationism was now competing for the widest frontier imaginable—a space race that not only reached for the stars, but also delved deep into its population’s psyche, to entertain on a level that had never been attempted before. The age of mass communication had arrived, and that meant just one thing. The need to communicate with the masses.

Step further back, however, and inspect the impetus behind this explosion of imagination and technology, and the picture becomes darker. Isolationism, too, had fathered some enduring life forces. Hollywood, the blues, the jazz age, Woody Guthrie and F. Scott Fitzgerald were all children of the prewar years during which the U.S.A. effectively ignored the fact that there was a rest-of-the-world out there.

Not even the League of Nations could draw the United States into the global community; the pan-continental watchdog that was founded following World War I in the hope of preventing international crises from ever again erupting into warfare had to do so without the Western world’s most influential and powerful nation at its side. And when the second war broke out in Europe in September 1939, the U.S.A. remained firmly on the sidelines for the next twenty-seven months, or around one-third of the conflict’s total duration. Which was a marked improvement on World War I, where Uncle Sam sat out virtually the first three-quarters of the fighting. But it still indicated a nation that had no interest in anyone else’s kerfuffles.

What a difference a decade made. World War II was barely over than the United States was leading the United Nations into a Korean War against Communism, and as the 1950s got underway, so did an age of rampant paranoia: of Communist Reds beneath every bed; of espionage and intervention; and, inevitably, of allegorical art that reflected the political angst with perfection.

The perils of serving your country but appearing to be doing quite the opposite. I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951) captures the mindset of the early ’50s Red Scare. From left: Frank Lovejoy, Philip Carey and Richard Webb.

© Warner Bros./Photofest

The Most Indelicate Probe of All

Among the manifold anniversaries that the UFOlogy community might choose to celebrate over the next few years, 2017 is certainly a red-letter year. For not only does it mark the seventieth anniversary of what is widely regarded as mankind’s first true encounter with spacecraft from another world, it is also the sixtieth anniversary of the first-ever case of alien abduction—or, at least, the first to truly capture the popular imagination.

As with so many other of the phenomena that we might conveniently bundle beneath the overall banner of Fortean . . . so named for the researcher Charles Fort, whose life’s work involved the collecting and classification of inexplicable occurrences all over the world . . . alien spacecraft were by no means a twentieth-century invention.

Manuscripts dating back a full millennium reveal tales of mysterious, and seemingly powered, craft in the sky. Travel back further and even the Bible is not immune to similar interpretations, while the late Victorian age saw several widely publicized public furors brought on by the apparent appearance of unidentifiable flying machines.

Indeed, 1896–1897 saw the United States experience so many sightings that they amounted to a nationwide epidemic, with theories ranging from the commonplace (Thomas Edison was forced to issue a public denial that he was experimenting with another of his legendary inventions) to the mind-boggling.

While unimaginable beings soared across the skies in unimaginable dirigibles, every witness had another theory as to who might be on board. Kidnappers! Martians!! People who talked backwards!!! The lost tribe of Israel!!!! And, most ghastly of all to the staid folk of that time, the pair of nudes whose craft allegedly crash-landed near Springfield, Missouri, and who, when asked from whence they came, pointed skywards and, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, uttered something that sounded like the word ‘Mars.’

You can begin humming the theme to The Twilight Zone right now, if you choose.

Mankind’s own conquest of the skies was not to halt the sightings. No matter how fast and far humanity’s own aerial innovations developed, those pesky mysterious craft moved faster.

We had kites, they had fireballs. We had balloons, they had powered airships. We had planes, they had rockets; we had jets, they had flying kitchenware. Almost as if they were watching Earth’s advances and then deliberately going one step beyond.

When Orson Welles produced his now-legendary radio adaptation of near-namesake H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds in 1938, restaging the Martian invasion in suburban New Jersey, he created a panic that is itself now the stuff of legend. People genuinely believed that alien beings had come to land at Grover’s Mill, New Jersey. That their great metal craft had opened to disgorge terrifying blobs of squirming tentacles whose heat rays incinerated all who were in range. That they had constructed vast, three-legged fighting machines that were striding across the American countryside, laying waste to all they encountered.

John Houseman, the broadcast’s producer, picked up the story in his memoir Run Through.

The following hours were a nightmare. The building was suddenly full of people and dark-blue uniforms. Hustled out of the studio, we were locked into a small back office on another floor. Here we sat incommunicado while network employees were busily collecting, destroying or locking up all scripts and records of the broadcast.

Finally the Press was let loose upon us, ravening for horror. How many deaths had we heard of? (Implying they knew of thousands.) What did we know of the fatal stampede in a Jersey hall? (Implying it was one of many.) What traffic deaths? (The ditches must be choked with corpses.) The suicides? (Haven’t you heard about the one on Riverside Drive?) It is all quite vague in my memory and quite terrible.

And if people were that scared when the country was at peace, how much more warily did they watch the skies once war broke out and both of the prime belligerents, the Japanese in the East and the Germans in the West, made it clear that their objectives included raining down bombs on American cities.

It was during World War II, a seven-year span during which the combatants’ combined air forces conspired to render the skies a busier place than they had ever been before, that the unidentified flying object first intruded into military thinking, thanks to the so-called foo fighters . . . not the appallingly mundane pop group of recent inexplicable renown, but a recurring aerial phenomenon that plagued flyers on both sides of the war.

Superfast, glowing red, highly maneuverable, exquisitely elusive . . . foo fighters looked a little like some strange form of natural phenomena, so researchers insisted that that’s what they were. St. Elmo’s Fire, ice particles, electromagnetic activity, all manner of possibilities were raised.

But they behaved with intelligence, with stealth and cunning. No blind, bland blob of electrical freakery, foo fighters flew like they knew where they were going, and beginning in November 1944, when the first unidentified flying, glowing, objects were sighted over Germany by the USAAF’s 415th Night Fighter Squadron, and continuing on through the last months of the war, it swiftly became apparent that mankind had no way to explain them.

The theories flew and were shot down. Early fears that they represented some new supersecret weapon devised by the embattled Nazis were swiftly discounted by the fact that German pilots, too, were encountering them, and their high command was as baffled as the Allies’. Postwar, it transpired that German scientists were actually working on even further-fetched craft than the foo fighters, but in terms of actually putting them into flight, Hitler’s war machine was proven not guilty.

Vertigo! Experimentation proved that the condition could cause all manner of hallucinatory tricks. It didn’t explain why so many airmen seemed to be seeing the exact same objects, but—as science still likes to remind us—the human mind is a very mysterious thing. Give them time, and they were sure they’d find an answer.

Unknown atmospherics enjoyed their day in the sun, justified by the quite reasonable explanation that man was still a relative newcomer to the heavens. Who knew what new phenomena awaited discovery up there?

That question took on a whole new meaning in 1947.

On June 24 of that year, while flying past Mount Rainier in Washington State, the businessman pilot Kenneth Arnold witnessed no less than nine unidentified objects flying in the skies. Flat like a pie pan, they were . . . half-moon shaped, oval in front and convex in the rear; bizarre objects that ducked and dived like a fish flipping in the sun.

There was a moment of stunned silence, as listeners debated what to call these things. Flying pie pans? Flying fish-things? Or, what was that other term Arnold employed? Saucer-like objects? Flying saucers were born.

It is important to remember that it was the term that was new, not the sighting. Arnold’s reports, once they hit the newspapers, were swiftly corroborated by fellow eyewitnesses from all over the country . . . all over the world. Flying saucers had chased people down roads, or hung out above their homes. Flying saucers had landed in gardens and buzzed other aircraft. And once they slipped out of the newspapers and into the movie theaters, of course their behavior became even more unpredictable.

On the evening of October 16, 1957, a Brazilian farmer named Antônio Vilas-Boas was plowing one of his fields, just outside São Francisco de Sales, when he glimpsed what appeared to be a red star in the sky. A red star that was growing closer with every passing moment until it was poised above him, a circular craft with a rotating cupola, a red light and three legs, which were suddenly extending outwards as the saucer prepared to land.

Vilas-Boas gunned his tractor into life, preparing to flee, only for the vehicle’s lights and engine to inexplicably fail. Leaping to the ground, he started to run, but was grabbed by a short, five-foot humanoid wearing gray overalls and a helmet. Its speech was a series of yelps, its eyes were small and blue, and it was not alone. Three other of its kind emerged from the saucer, subdued the wildly struggling farmer, and hauled him inside their strange vehicle.

Once inside, Vilas-Boas was stripped naked and coated in gel, then hauled into a vast, semicircular-shaped room, where the inspection began. Blood was drawn from his chin, before he was taken to another room and, seated alone, was subjected to a gas that made him violently sick.

Another of the aliens joined him, female, naked and beautiful, with platinum hair and bright red pubes. They had sex, following which Vilas-Boas was handed back his clothes, and after a quick tour of the spacecraft, he was released. The saucer departed and Vilas-Boas went home. The entire experience had lasted just four hours, but his story has intrigued for decades since, not only for its own strangeness, but also as the blueprint for a second, similar episode just four years later.

This time, their victims were the strangely Flintstonian-named Barney and Betty Hills, an American husband and wife who were returning to their home in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, following a vacation in Montreal. It was September 19, 1961, around 10:30 p.m., and they were a little south of Lancaster, New Hampshire, on Route 3, when Betty Hills spotted what she thought was a falling star. A falling star unlike any she had ever seen before, because it appeared to be moving upwards.

Barney, driving, stopped the car at a picnic area, and they watched the glowing orb through their binoculars. Flashing multicolored lights confirmed that it was no ordinary star; reminded Betty, in fact, of a story her sister had told her a few years earlier, about having seen a UFO. Could this be another one?

Returning to their 1957 Chevy Bel Air, the Hills decided to follow the craft’s course as much as they could, passing through Franconia Notch, watching the craft pass over Cannon Mountain, and drawing closer as it passed the Old Man of the Mountain. And then it happened. About a mile south of Indian Head, the craft suddenly descended toward their car. Barney slammed on the breaks, and the mysterious object, too, halted, hovering about a hundred feet above them, so vast that it filled the windshield.

Barney stepped out of the car, clutching his revolver, and this is where things went hazy . . . so much so that it was only later, under hypnosis and further examination, that he and Betty were able to piece together everything that now happened to them. How anything up to a dozen humanoids, wearing shiny black uniforms and caps, were visible, communicating with them telepathically; how the craft emitted a series of buzzes and beeps that seemed to shake the entire car.

They’re going to capture us, Barney warned Betty, and he was correct. But they would not initially remember any of what befell them. The couple’s own next waking memory found them around thirty-five miles farther down the road, with just a vague sensation of unease and discomfort to alert them to anything untoward having occurred.

Their wristwatches no longer worked. The strap of the binoculars had torn, Barney’s shoes were scraped; Betty’s dress was torn and covered in a strange pink powder. There were mysterious, concentric circular marks on the trunk of their car. Barney had an overpowering urge to inspect his genitals.

Betty phoned the air force to report a UFO sighting, and the following day, the pair sat through their first official interview. She devoured the available literature purporting to examine the UFO phenomenon and contacted the author of one such book, a retired Marine Corps major named Donald E. Keyhoe.

He passed her on to another expert, but in the meantime, Betty had started having vivid dreams about what had happened. The five-foot-tall hairless gray humanoids with enormous eyes, tiny ears and minuscule noses. The medical examination that began with her hair and then proceeded down her entire body. The needle that was thrust into her navel. The star chart that one of the aliens showed her, when she asked where they were from.

Then it was Barney’s turn. Under hypnosis, he recalled the aliens inspecting his mouth and ears . . . scraping samples from his skin . . . collecting a sperm sample with the aid of a cup-like device that was laid over his genitals. And then they produced the anal probe.

Like Arnold’s flying saucers, and Vilas-Boas’s sexual encounter, Barney and Betty’s so-intimate examination has become one of the foundation stones of subsequent alien encounters—the subject as much of learned study and speculation as it is of ribald commentary and humor.

In earlier times, devils and demons frequently visited the earth to have sex with the living. Now it was aliens who found humanity irresistibly attractive. But you did not need to be a psychologist to realize that, just as the medieval witch hunts were rooted in an entrenched social and religious hierarchy’s fear and loathing of new notions, theories and sciences that might challenge the established order of things, so the aliens were simply the modern era putting a face on the amorphous bogeyman of its own age—the cancer of Communism.

Creatures in the Kremlin—or, Demon Stalins from Outer Space

In 1948, in a novel that simply transposed the final figures of the current date