This month’s Guest Star is Jeffery X Martin. Read more of Jeffery X Martin’s words about music, movies, and professional wrestling at Biff Bam Pop!

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“Whether we like it or not, the most important scientific problem we’re going to face in the last third of this [20th] century is the explanation of UFOs.” –  Professor Allen Duncan (Robert Vaughn), Starship Invasions (1977)

It is The Year of Someone’s Lord, 2025. All around the world, people are seeing strange lights in the sky. Orbs and drones have been seen all over the United States, including a group hovering over a Target store about six miles away from my house. Viral videos showing SUV-sized aerial vehicles overtook the internet. Military bases are gathering sites for these UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena), particularly bases that hold nuclear material. Citizens are worried. On his first day back in office, President Donald Trump commanded his staff to find out what this drone business is all about.  Prominent people in the UAP field, which is speculative at best, are convinced that 2025 is the year we will all learn the truth about extraterrestrial life after a comprehensive, government-backed full disclosure. 

Say what you want about the whistleblower interviews that have popped up as of late. Whether Mark Barber made spiritual contact with a loving non-human intelligence (NHI) or Lieutenant Colonel Dr. Mark Blitch had a telepathic conversation with a seven-foot-tall mantis being is neither here nor there. 

Maybe a praying mantis, maybe an alien overlord. You decide. 

What matters now, and what has mattered since the 1950s, is how moviemakers interpret the concept of Life Out There. 

There are good aliens and there are bad aliens. 

Filmmakers in the 1950s painted extraterrestrial beings as colonizers, rampaging resource-sucking monsters ready to consume the Earth and its citizens to clear the path for a new society. Spaceships filled the skies. Earth’s powerful military foundered and floundered to keep our planet safe. It took science and an elite group of Top Men (and, often, an obligatory woman as a love interest struggling to be taken seriously in their chosen career) to stop the threat and send the enemies packing back to their familiar cosmic shores.

Byron Haskins’ 1953 adaption of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds depicted a worst-case scenario for humankind. Large alien craft with impenetrable shields roamed the earth, blasting anyone and anything that got in their way. Nothing remained of those hit by the aliens’ heat rays but a shadow of white ash on the sizzled ground. Not even God could help us. In one memorable scene, a clergyman walks towards the invading battleships holding a bible and reciting the Lord’s Prayer. As his horrified daughter watches and screams, the good Reverend Doctor meets his Maker in a stream of sparks and fire.

Three men are about to meet Mr. Heat Ray in 1953’s War of the Worlds.

We all know how War of the Worlds ends. Unprepared for Earth’s airborne disease, the aliens succumb to what the film calls “the bacteria in our atmosphere” before dying in heaps of pitiful mucous. If only they had discovered penicillin before deciding to invade this filthy, infested planet.

If the invaders weren’t out to annihilate us with laser beams and falling debris, they wanted to absorb us. Absolute dissolution was the threat in 1958’s The Blob as a hunk of sentient alien gelatin desired the taste of human flesh. It grew larger as it devoured people like a sickly magenta food baby overstuffed with human burritos. Plants from space were the threat in Don Siegel’s paranoid opus Invasion of the Body Snatchers, released in 1956. Spores from another world made their way to Earth, growing into enormous seed pods full of some kind of cosmic bubble bath. Humans unlucky enough to fall asleep near one of these pods would be usurped as the alien milkweed turned them into emotionless clones. They looked like us, but they were something different. Brainwashed and unified for the common cause of replacing all humanity, the pod people dispersed throughout the world with their blank faces and clean clothes.

Sweaty Kevin McCarthy has had a long night running from the alien threat in 1956’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. 

Perhaps the greatest rejection of the “aliens are bad” idea came in 1951’s The Day the Earth Stood Still. Michael Rennie played an ambassador from space named Klaatu. Stoic as a theater usher, Klaatu was immediately disappointed upon his arrival on Earth when he was shot by the U.S. Army. Surviving that attack after an application of intergalactic ointment, Klaatu hid out with regular folks. Despite his culture shock and affinity for those around him, Klaatu was stonewalled when he attempted to get a message to world leaders. After making electricity stop around the world for half an hour, Klaatu figured he had everyone’s attention. He did, and the military shot him again. After being resurrected by Gort, Klaatu relays his message, which is simple. “Oh, we see you have nukes. Don’t use them. We’re watching you. Play nice.”

Intergalactic bouncer Gort protects his spaceship in The Day the Earth Stood Still.

During the 1970s, the Cold War became old hat. Citizens of the world had grown accustomed to living under the constant threat of nuclear destruction and lived in a fugue state. Every day, we inched closer to the end of everything but, until then, we still had to go to work. Bills had to be paid. Hell, we prayed for the bombs to go off so we wouldn’t have to go to school the next day. 

Lost in the backwash of the Star Wars phenomenon in 1977 was the Canadian movie Starship Invasions, possibly the most mean-spirited science fiction I’ve seen more than twice. Filmed with an innocent ineptitude, Starship Invasions is a grimy low-rent wonder. Filled with aliens who never move their mouths to speak, the movie boasts awful special effects, wooden acting, and more dry ice fog than a Whitesnake concert. Starship Invasions presents the audience with obvious questions. Why do the androids look like human-sized vacuum tubes wrapped in thin, reflective material?  What pressing bills did Christopher Lee have to pay that compelled him to take a leading role in this movie? Was his mortgage overdue?

Christopher Lee in his rad hooded bodysuit with the bitchin’ iron-on decal of Not Quetzalcoatl in Starship Invasions (1977).

Although the movie was the subject of nearly universal panning, Starship Invasions isn’t bad. It’s not good, but it’s not wretched and misshapen. It’s a conglomeration of 1970s ideas about UFOs and spiritualism. Pyramid power is an important element of the movie. When one of the humans aiding the good aliens has a heart attack on the spaceship, one of the aliens places two pyramids on the guy’s forehead. After activating them with a large two-pronged tank, the man is fine. That same alien, bald and big-headed like a Star Trek Tellurian, tells Professor Allen Duncan (the human turtleneck, Robert Vaughn) that their race created the Great Pyramids of Giza. According to the alien, once we understand those pyramids, we’ll understand their culture and the mystery of anti-gravity. 

That’s all well and good, but the hideous part of Starship Invasions is the evil aliens’ plan for taking over the planet. Instead of unleashing squadrons of death ray machines to burn us all in our beds, the Legion of the Winged Serpent uses a kind of foul transmission that makes people kill themselves. No flashy lights, no mysterious explosions. Just a rash of unexplained deaths, violence committed against ourselves. It’s a terrifying plan. Is there a more horrifying and visceral way to take over a planet than to make the inhabitants take each other out?

If there were aliens out there, we had to consider the distinct possibility that they were assholes. Maybe we needed something to come down from the sky besides missiles and acid rain.

Benevolent aliens became the cinematic norm after Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. CE3K presented aliens who weren’t actively trying to destroy Earth. Rather, they wanted to drop in for a jam session, give certain people with backstage passes a photo op, and then take a few human groupies on tour. Tiny grey aliens with awkward prog rock smiles waved goodbye before zooming off in their intergalactic bus to their next stop. In many ways, the climax of CE3K was like a secret desert show by the Electric Light Orchestra.

Spielberg returned to the idea of aliens being galactic sweethearts with E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), in which a small child-like alien with an erection for a neck is left behind on Earth after his chicken-shit crewmates blast off before they can be discovered. E.T., as he came to be known by the suburban kids who discovered him in their backyard, displayed seemingly magical powers. He brought dead flowers back to life. He could levitate objects. He knew enough about communications to call his comrades back to Earth, like setting up a cosmic Uber ride. 

Like his film predecessor, Klaatu, E.T. died and made everyone sad. After that, he came back to life and everybody liked that. Instead of warning Earth people not to destroy themselves with pollution, nuclear weapons, or polyunsaturated fats, E.T. told us he would live in our hearts. That’s the kind of message we needed from a sweet, kind alien who wasn’t above swilling cheap beer on a weekday morning. If you weren’t alive at that time, it’s hard to describe how badly we craved that tiny dram of hope. We were, all of us, so tired. 

I think we still are. 

Besides the natural human instinct of wondering what the weird lights in the sky are, the interest in the latest wave of UAP sightings is based on the movies we’ve seen. Those stories live vividly in our minds, and they are our touchstone when we are confronted with something we do not understand. We’ve watched Star Wars movies a blue zillion times, therefore we know what space creatures look like. Conversely, since we’ve watched Independence Day on basic cable every other Sunday for 10 years, the drones must be coming to strafe the planet clean. Enlightenment, enslavement, or oblivion. Those are the choices we give ourselves. 

Has humanity finally arrived at the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, spurred on by the promise of new information from an advanced race of beings? Are the UAP sightings part of a massive psy-ops campaign to distract us from what’s really going on, whatever that may be? Or are we the next target in a ruthless mission of extermination propagated by the evil Legion of the Winged Serpent from the planet Alpha in the Orion constellation?

I don’t know, man. I just live here. 

Some say we need to find out what those orbs and drones are. They believe we must know where they come from, who is piloting them, and what’s coming next. Nah. We won’t know what’s going on until we know, you know? It’s the mystery that keeps us curious and forces us to ask questions. If everything is solved, nothing is fun anymore. We lose our inquisitiveness. We lose our stories. We’ll stop looking at the sky once we believe the sky isn’t looking at us. 

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Jeffery X Martin saw Starship Invasions in a small neighborhood cinema when he was nine years old. He hasn’t been right since. The argument could be made that he wasn’t right before that, either.   

Read more of Jeffery X Martin’s words about music, movies, and professional wrestling at Biff Bam Pop!