Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) developed the theme of aliens possessing family and friends to a high degree of paranoia. While in Invaders from Mars, the extraterrestrials attached themselves to their victims' body, in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, they brought strange pods with them from their world which grew into likenesses of those humans whom they replaced.

Some social historians argue that the UFO craze began when the threat of nuclear war with the Soviet Union hung like a black cloud over the world and many people were desperate to believe that some force from the skies could appear and deliver Earth from nuclear annihilation. Still other scholars suggest that it may have been the U.S. government itself that began the rumors of flying saucers in order to divert public attention from the development of its own secret weapons. Perhaps such a prevailing atmosphere of national distrust contributed to the horror of films about UFO invaders, but the unsettling concept of aliens slowly taking over Earth through the possession of human bodies became firmly implanted in the psyches of millions of men and women who now looked even more suspiciously at the skies above them. Invasion of the Body Snatchers has been remade twice; the third version is about to open in theaters early in 2008.

Such television series as The Twilight Zone (1959-1964) and The Outer Limits (1963-1965) occasionally featured episodes concerning alien invaders, but it was a series aptly named The Invaders (1967-1969), starring Roy Thinnes, that focused on the paranoid concept that evil aliens might be living undetected among humans and conspiring to conquer them. Thinnes was David Vincent, an architect, who happened to be the only human witness of a UFO landing. No one believed his account, so once he discovered that the extraterrestrials had arrived with the sole intent of taking over the planet, it became his mission to stop them, alerting and enlisting whomever he could to assist him. Vincent's task became all the more difficult because whenever he managed to kill one of the invaders, their physical body disintegrated, leaving no evidence to convince the authorities that aliens were walking and plotting among them. When the series ended in 1969, Vincent had not been able to stem the tide of alien invasion, and the stories of extraterrestrials posing as humans had received more substantiation from a television series that many insisted was telling the truth disguised as a fictional presentation.

In 1993, Chris Carter, creator of the television series The X-Files for Fox, fashioned a blend of UFO mythology, increasing public distrust of the government, and a growing interest in the paranormal that during its peak season in 1997 attracted an estimated 20 million viewers per episode. According to the mythos developed by Carter, the alien invasion had begun in prehistoric times and had been rediscovered by the U.S. military and a secret branch of the government in 1947 after the crash of a flying saucer at Roswell.

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