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With all the buzz the last few weeks about UFO sightings at O’Hare (more online hits for that particular tidbit than any other news story in recent memory, per Eric Zorn’s column in last Sunday’s Trib), it’s hard not to consider briefly where it all began, SF film-wise, in the 50s aftermath of Roswell. At the upscale end there’s inevitably The Day the Earth Stood Still, with uberalien Michael Rennie striding purposefully down his celestial ramp (or whatever those gangplank things are called) from the alien craft, with both an invitation and a warning: live peacefully among yourselves, earth mortals, or we’ll turn your planet into a cosmic cinder (sounding for all the world like a certain someone we know in Iraq . . . some shock-and-awe peacemonger he turned out to be!). But downscale is where the real scruffy action was taking place: with Invasion of the Saucer Men (whose main idea of invasion involved slashing a few tires in a high school parking lot) or Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (and why does Ray Harryhausen still get slagged for this one?) or It Conquered the World (a Roger Corman special, transpiring mostly in a cave) or It! The Terror From Beyond Space, another neutrally pronouned visitation involving a guy in a lizard suit rampaging through a disabled space probe (one of ours, as it turned out), though maybe, for that reason, not a legitimate flying saucer movie at all . . .
