An alien abducts five people off the street, hands each of them a box of capsules that can kill every human being within three thousand miles, and says he very much hopes they won't use them. He is not being straight about the odds. He has already decided what humans do with a loaded gun, and he has come to collect the planet afterwards. A year later a different alien turns up on a Californian beach as a glowing brain the size of a football. It says nothing at all. It quietly

Universal wanted a monster movie. Daiei wanted the next Godzilla. Both studios got handed something considerably stranger by writers who had other ideas, and the two films that came out of it sit either side of the Pacific doing almost exactly the same job. It Came from Outer Space lands in June 1953, directed by Jack Arnold, from a story by Ray Bradbury and a screenplay credited to Harry Essex. It is Universal's first 3D picture, shot in the Mojave, and Bradbury's first prop

A flying saucer lands on a baseball field in Washington. A man walks down the ramp holding a gift, says he has come in peace with goodwill, and a nervous soldier shoots him inside a minute. Seventy-five years later we are still working through what that scene set up. The Day the Earth Stood Still arrives in September 1951, five months after The Thing from Another World, and does the opposite of everything else in the flying saucer boom. Robert Wise's alien is not a menace to

New series, new stall to set out. For the next series we're following the history of the friendly alien screen, and as usual we're reaching back as far as we can before our 80s and 90s bias inevitably shows through. Which is how we've ended up starting in 1913. A Message from Mars is the story of Horace Parker, a wealthy man who won't take Minnie to her dance, won't help a friend who's been sent to him for work, and would generally prefer everyone left him alone with his cig