The theme of Dark Skies, the lead television series in NBC's 1996 Saturday night "thrillogy," was that history as the viewers learned it in school was a lie. One of the "truths" that the series revealed was that in 1947 President Harry S. Truman ordered an extraterrestrial spacecraft shot down over Roswell, after an alien ambassador had demanded the unconditional surrender of the United States. Subsequently, whatever resources could be recovered from the scraps of the demolished alien craft were doled out to various giants of American industry to be freely incorporated into our own technology--and a sinister and ubiquitous super-secret government agency known as Majestic 12 was created to monitor any undue alien interference in our political and social structures.

Before the series was cancelled, viewers learned that the aliens had the ability to possess human bodies with their larvae, thus allowing them to pass undetected and to accomplish an incredible number of negative historical events--from the assassination of John F. Kennedy to the conflict in Vietnam, from the murder of certain celebrities to popularizing the use of recreational drugs among young people.

The summer blockbuster Independence Day (1996) followed a War of the Worlds plot line in which aliens blow up half the nation, including the U.S. capital, and are about to destroy the world. A tough U.S. President (Bill Pullman) and two heroes (Will Smith, Jeff Goldblum) who manage to pilot the spaceship that a clandestine branch of the government has been hiding in a secret underground base since the Roswell crash in 1947 manage to save the day.

The UFO Contactees

In 1951, the same year that audiences were jumping out of their theater seats watching The Thing, Robert Wise released the classic The Day the Earth Stood Still, which presented a wise and peaceful alien, who came to warn Earth's politicians and scientists that they must cease their experiments with nuclear power or risk annihilation from extraterrestrials who will not tolerate unbridled human aggressiveness. Actor Michael Rennie's portrayal of the soft-spoken alien "Klaatu," provided a model extraterrestrial emissary for generations of UFO contactees yet unborn.

As the film opens, a flying saucer does, indeed, land near the White House lawn, in a baseball field in Washington, D.C. Within minutes, the craft is surrounded by armed military personnel and armored tanks. Klaatu emerges, and as he holds up a gift which he has brought for the President, he is shot and wounded by a soldier who misinterprets the alien's gesture as a hostile movement. At this point, Gort, Klaatu's eight-foot robot, leaves the spaceship and fires a kind of laser beam at the assembled military and instantly melts all weapons and armaments. Klaatu halts Gort before it destroys anything--or anyone--else, and the alien's peaceful intentions convince the officers that he has come in peace. Klaatu is taken to a military hospital where his wound can be treated and he can be placed under guard.

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