Tropes - Flying Saucers

The Saucers Are Coming

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)

On the afternoon of June 24th 1947, pilot Kenneth Arnold flew over the Cascade Mountains not far from Mount Rainier in a CallAir A-2 utility aircraft. The sky was clear, and Arnold had detoured to search for a missing transport plane. He failed to find it and, to my knowledge, it's never been found. What Arnold did observe had a profound cultural impact. Mysterious flashes of light alerted Arnold to nine objects flying erratically and at great speed to his left.

Arnold is reported to have described the objects he saw that day in various ways, but not usually as circular. He said the objects were crescent shaped, or bat-shaped. The way he assessed their flight, however, was as being like a saucer if you skip it across water.

Kenneth Arnold's sighting is viewed as the beginning of the modern UFO phenomenon. Regardless of whether that's so, people have always seen strange things in the sky. Even depictions of disc-like aircraft predate Arnold's sighting. A curious manta ray shaped aircraft, strangely called a 'Bat Plane', appears in 1942 movie serial Spy Smasher. Pulp magazine covers had already shown circular craft from time to time. What Arnold's sighting, and its newspaper coverage, gave the phenomenon was something that crystallised it in a way no mere anecdotal account could; a name  - 'flying saucers'.

Very soon, folk were seeing flying saucers, or flying discs, everywhere. On the 8th of July that very same year, Roswell Army Air Field announced its possession of material from a crashed flying saucer, a statement retracted within a day to be replaced with a now notorious explanation for unexplained aerial phenomena, that being it was just a weather balloon.

Multitudes of flying saucer reports were logged over the following years, but if you weren't lucky enough to encounter one flying over your town or farm, you wouldn't have long to wait before you could go to the cinema and see one.

Flying Saucers Invade the Silver Screen

Bruce Gentry - Daredevil
of the Skies (1949)

In movie serial Bruce Gentry - Daredevil of the Skies (1949), a villain uses a remote controlled flying saucer as a kind of guided missile. Director Spencer Gordon Bennet used the same saucer animation in Atom Man vs. Superman (1950), another movie serial. This saucer spins, which would become common in cinematic flying saucers. The movie The Flying Saucer (1950) is an espionage tale, with the titular aircraft being a scientist's secret invention. This saucer is oval, with a cockpit that clearly indicates a direction of motion. These first two examples, both appearing on the cinema screen within three years of Kenneth Arnold's sighting, were aircraft, the products of human ingenuity, and could dart about at incredible speeds. One thing that these early movies established is that there are two broad categories of flying saucer, in cinema at least. One has radial symmetry, being perfectly round with nothing to indicate a 'bow' or 'stern'. It may even spin, in whole or in part, which must add to the difficulties of piloting flying saucers. The other category is more of a 'saucer-plane'; still disc-shaped, but more likely to be oval, with a distinct direction of motion indicated by thrusters or a visible bridge or cockpit.

The flying saucers had arrived, and were taking off their shoes!

Extraterrestrial Origins

Speculation about the origins of the discs seen by Arnold and subsequent witnesses was rife. Arnold was inclined to think they were experimental aircraft. That's an exciting enough possibility to fuel their first appearances on the silver screen, but the public quickly embraced a more exotic interpretation. 'Are we being visited by entities from other worlds?' 'Perhaps,' responded the screenwriters of the day.

Science fiction had been depicting rocketships of various kinds for some time, but a new, immediately recognisable vehicle of interplanetary travel was thrilling audiences.

In 1951, The Thing from Another World included the now famous scene of men in the frozen arctic standing in a circle as they mark the edges of an alien saucer beneath the ice. This is telling. In the 1938 novella on which the movie is based, Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell, the object is described as shaped somewhat like a submarine. That was almost a decade before Kenneth Arnold's sighting. The flying disc was now the alien conveyance of the film-going public's choice. Imagine, sitting in a darkened theatre, having seen many a sensational news report about flying saucer sightings, watching men trace out this otherworldly spacecraft, and then be attacked in their isolated, arctic environment by an almost unstoppable extraterrestrial menace.

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)

Our next, perhaps most iconic view of alien arrival by flying disc came later in 1951 with The Day the Earth Stood Still. In this movie, an extraterrestrial visitor called Klaatu, played by Michael Rennie, and his menacing robot Gort, played by Lock Martin, land in Washington D.C. in a silver, seamless flying saucer. They bring a warning to humanity that it should mend its destructive ways or face a preemptive strike by the galactic community. The saucer was created by set decorators Thomas Little and Claude Carpenter, collaborating with architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and never before had a flying saucer been so beautifully realised on screen. Director Robert Wise was, and continued to be, an extremely accomplished filmmaker in many genres, going on to direct musicals West Side Story (1961) and The Sound of Music (1965) and science fiction movies The Andromeda Strain (1971) and Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979).

An aesthetic shorthand quickly emerged. Humans were primarily depicted exploring space in sleek rocketships, often cigar or missile shaped, with fins and thrusters spewing fire and smoke from their stern. Alien invaders or explorers, however, crossed interplanetary distances in mysterious saucers, often with no clear means of propulsion. There are two notable exceptions to the trend.

In 1956, Forbidden Planet depicted an interstellar saucer from Earth. The ship of explorers was commanded by John J. Adams, played by actor Leslie Nielson in an early role, years before his deadpan delivery and comedic timing made him a legend in such classic spoofs as Airplane! (1980) and TV's Police Squad! (1982). Rocketships might be adequate for gallivanting about the Solar System, but for exploring distant star systems, such as Altair, even humans have to resort to exotic saucer technology. The United Planets Cruiser C-57D was a thin disk with a large dome on top, and it looks spectacular soaring through the matte painted sky of Altair IV.

Another group of explorers utilising flying saucer technology was made up primarily of the Robinson family, and their adventures appeared on television. Lost in Space (1965-1968) charmed viewers with the exploits of the crew of the Jupiter 2. This spaceship was another silver saucer, but not as sleek as many from the previous decade, being somewhere between a flying saucer and a flying motorhome.

Those examples aside, flying saucers were associated with aliens, especially those who 'regarded this earth with envious eyes.' The model for alien invasion narratives, H. G. Wells' 1898 novel The War of the Worlds, got the big screen treatment in 1953. Although there are no saucer shaped spaceships in this movie, standing in for the Martian tripod war machines of the novel were hovering manta ray like vehicles, topped with almost comical heat rays on stalks.

In 1956, the talents of stop-motion wizard Ray Harryhausen animated the alien invaders' saucers of Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. One of many collaborations between Harryhausen and producer Charles H. Schneer, this movie depicted spinning, silver saucers crashing through buildings.

Popularity in Cinema

Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957)

The movies The Day the Earth Stood Still, Forbidden Planet, War of the Worlds and Earth vs. the Flying Saucers all have something in common; resources. If you can afford Ray Harryhausen to animate your flying saucers, all the better. If not, it doesn't take much talent or money to create a model of a silver flying saucer and hang it from a wire. After all, many think the grainy photographs purported to be genuine flying saucers are nothing but hubcaps or lampshades hanging from wires. Ed Wood's notorious Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) and micro-budget movie Teenagers from Outer Space (1959) both feature cheap saucer effects that are bad, but they get the point across. The relative ease with which a flying saucer can be represented, compared to the pyrotechnics necessary for a decent rocketship, may be a factor in the popularity of this type of vehicle, especially as science fiction was rarely given much serious recognition, and therefore often lacked financial backing.

Another thing that may have contributed to the popularity of flying saucers is the nature of movement suggested by their form. Could you easily imagine a rocketship from an alien civilisation threateningly hovering over a city or landscape? A flying saucer appears made for hovering, scanning for terrified victims, perhaps emitting a monotonous, eerie 'whirring' sound,  and sweeping away people, vehicles and buildings with a heat ray. It's instantly horrific to lone travellers and besieged cities alike. These hovering saucers were symbols of the fear of the oppression of ordinary people by advanced technology; not surprisingly for an image that emerged so soon after the horrors of the Second World War.

The Waning of Saucers in Cinema

Devil Girl from Mars (1954)

Of course, sometimes the traditional saucer would get a shake up. Nyah's spacecraft from 1954's Devil Girl from Mars, with its circular shape and spinning section, was clearly inspired by the flying saucer image, but could hardly have been referred to as a flattened disc. Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957) had its aliens arriving in a relatively flat vehicle, but with a shape and fins that would look more at home on a sci-fi submarine. (If you're interested in underwater 'flying' saucers, i can point you to The Atomic Submarine (1959) and Destination Inner Space (1966).) But mostly, saucer designs had remained quite static, with only minor variations on the theme of the silver disk, frequently domed in the centre on the top,  and sometimes the underside.

As the sixties loomed, flying saucers loomed less, but remained a popular trope. On television, of course, there was Lost in Space. Producer Quinn Martin brought us The Invaders (1967-1968), starring Roy Thinnes as architect David Vincent, living an itinerant life as he tries to thwart the machinations of invading aliens. The aliens' saucers are clearly inspired by those photographed by self-proclaimed alien contactee George Adamski. Once again, they were not flattened discs, but more substantial craft. What we might refer to as 'flying saucers' in some movies and TV shows challenged the use of the word 'saucer'. 

The Invaders (1967-1968)

In the world of UFO encounters, experiencers were reporting a variety of shapes and colours, with luminosities and moving lights not reflected in the silver flying discs of the fifties. Spheres, egg shapes, ovals, cigar shapes and simple lights in the sky were common in sightings, and more varied kinds of alien spacecraft were eventually represented on screen. Some of these could still be referred to as flying saucers, but bore little resemblance to the tableware from which the term 'flying saucer' had become increasingly disconnected.

Star Trek: The Original Series (1966-1969) gave us a vision of interstellar travel that has endured to the present. The forward section of the USS Enterprise, a Constitution class starship, is not so different from a traditional flying saucer, but I don't think anybody would describe the vessel as such.

The crew of a more or less saucer shaped vessel make a landing on the Planet of the Vampires (1965) in Mario Bava's dark movie. However, with its long stern thrusters and bulkier shape, it would be more accurate to say it bears the DNA of earlier flying saucers, but had moved in a more inventive direction.

Queen of Blood (1966) and Mission Stardust (1967) gave us alien spaceships that have a more spherical design. What's interesting is that the humans still travel in rocketships, but the aliens continue to travel in vessels with no clearly perceivable forward direction. They're not saucers, obviously, but they're a development of the saucer with trendy sixties aesthetics. They're still recognisable as alien technology.

Mission Stardust (1967)

Sixties counterculture was in full swing, and it was swinging away from convention. 1968 saw space cinema bifurcate. The crazy, psychedelia of Barbarella was balanced by Stanley Kubrick's extraordinarily realistic depiction of space travel, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Saucers featured in neither. The landscape was changing, and flying saucers just seemed a bit corny for the cinema. They weren't trendy enough for the crazier extreme of cinematic science fiction, or realistic enough for serious representations of space travel. Yet, you could still put a flying saucer on an album cover or box of cereal, and nobody would be in doubt about what it was. Try the same with the spherical alien spaceship from Mission Stardust, and it might be mistaken for a fancy bon bon jar.

Gerry Anderson's UFO (1970-1971) gave us spinning, bell-shaped invading spaceships. Again, the nod to their lineage is clear enough, but the saucer shape has gone.

While space travel remained a popular subject in cinema and on television, science fiction was growing up in the seventies. A far greater emphasis was being placed on social commentary, with dystopian movies such as Soylent Green (1973) and Logan's Run (1976), and technophobia, such as fears around artificial intelligence in movies Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) and Demon Seed (1977).

In the popular phenomenon of unidentified flying objects, the narrative was turning away from fear of aliens themselves towards mistrust of government. Cinema came to reflect the concern that, whatever the reasons the aliens were here, powerful forces were keeping knowledge of them from the public.

A variety of vessels, including saucers, visit Earth in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). In keeping with the reports of the time, these were illuminated with multiple lights, and seemed capable of any desired direction of movement. The government tries to keep control of information regarding these visitors.

But we were now entering the post-Star Wars era, and moulded and kitbashed models with complicated details and sleek starfighter forms were replacing traditional science fiction designs.

Flying saucers didn't go away, though. When John Carpenter crafted a new adaptation of the novella Who Goes There?, previously adapted as The Thing from Another World, he opened The Thing (1982) with a fantastic shot of a flying saucer heading for Earth. Flight of the Navigator (1986) presents an alien spacecraft that more closely resembles a flying almond than a flying saucer, but with its seamless silver hull, it salutes its heritage from the 1950s.

Conclusion

Although the variety of space vehicles in visual media has trended away from the classic saucer image of the fifties and sixties, one fact remains; If you put a flying saucer in a comic book, TV programme or movie, the audience will recognise it as an alien vehicle, and that's largely thanks to those early 1950s portrayals. Sometimes, a saucer may be a parody of, or homage to, a decades old aesthetic, as in the movie Mars Attacks! (1996). Other times, it may be taken seriously, as with the huge saucers floating over cities in TV series V (1983) or the movie Independence Day (1996).

In new age culture, the flying discs and their exotic occupants have been associated with crop circles, circular stone age earthworks like Stonehenge, and the coils of the dragons of legend. I think, perhaps, they represent the forces of nature. While our ancestors feared that wolves and sinister nature spirits were waiting just outside the limits of our settlements, now that our civilisation is global, we look across the mysterious vastness of space and wonder whether, out there, we're still low in the food chain.

Would our fiction be so replete with alien lifeforms were it not for flying saucers? It's hard to say. Speculation on how we'd cope against an extraterrestrial invasion has been a part of our culture since at least H. G. Wells' 1898 novel The War of the Worlds. There's no doubt, though, that the popular image of the flying saucer gave tangible form to the fear that otherworldly beings were visiting Earth, and that was reflected in cinema. In a sense, flying saucers really have transported alien beings into our lives.

 Nebuleena's Thoughts 

'My nephew, Novarus Jr, picked up a second hand Zeta Reticulan saucer after getting his pilot license. He hated it! The whirring noise drove him mental, the interior was dominated by one useless empty round room, and when he came back to it he never knew where the door and ramp were going to appear from.'

All screenshots taken by me for purposes of review. Contact  ptbyrdie@gmail.com if you dispute the fair use of any of the above images.