The Reality Behind ‘Earth vs. The Flying Saucers’
by Robbie Graham March 16, 2018 (mysteriousuniverse.org)
• One of the most significant UFO movies of the 1950s is Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956). The film is loosely based on Donald Keyhoe’s 1953 non-fiction documentary book, Flying Saucers From Outer Space, which drew extensively from the U.S. Air Force’s own investigations. When the movie was released, however, Keyhoe was dismayed to find that that they had made it into a ‘schlock sci-fi B-movie’.
• Nevertheless, the film retains a considerable amount of UFO detail from Keyhoe’s source material. Special effects supervisor Ray Harryhausen received acclaim for his ‘realistic’ design of the alien saucer, with a stationary central dome, a rotating outer-rim, slotted vanes and a high-pitch whirring sound. These were based upon real-life descriptions by Keyhoe and George Adamski. (Watch 3:38 video clip of contemporary film director Joe Dante interviewing Ray Harryhausen with regard to Earth vs. the Flying Saucers below.)
• Another example of similarities to real life were the glowing balls of light that hovered over a house in the film and are casually explained as ‘foo lights’. This is a reference to the anomalous flying fireballs often reported by military personnel known as ‘foo fighters’. The Air Force conducted a two-year program at Holloman AFB known as Project Twinkle to study these types of anomalies.
• In the movie, a dying alien species arrives on Earth seeking a new home. Naturally, the Earthlings take this as an existential threat and use sonar pulses to disable and bring down the alien saucers. The movie’s sonar device closely resembles an invention by Wilhelm Reich that ostensibly would draw orgone energy from the atmosphere through 15-foot long aluminum pipes connected to a body of water by cables which he called the “cloudbuster”. Reich claimed to have used his cloudbuster device to successfully attack and ‘suck the energy’ from ‘hostile’ alien UFOs over Tucson AZ in 1955.
• Finally, when the protagonists remove the space-suit from one of the dead aliens, the being bears an uncanny likeness to the alleged Roswell beings as described by witnesses in 1947, although these testimonies would not come to light until more than twenty years after the release of Earth vs. the Flying Saucers.
One of the most significant UFO movies of the 1950s was Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), which was very loosely based on Donald Keyhoe’s 1953 non-fiction book, Flying Saucers from Outer Space. In the movie, the last of a dying species of aliens arrive on Earth seeking a new home. The aliens request a meeting with world leaders to discuss their plans for occupation, but the US military, assisted by one America’s top scientists (played by Hugh Marlowe), formulates a plan of attack involving the use of sonar canons mounted on trucks to be fired at the alien saucers—the sonar supposedly interfering with their propulsion and navigation systems, and disabling their force fields.
Conspiracy writer Kenn Thomas has noted that the fictional battle strategy in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers seems to have been directly inspired by real-life UFOlogical events which occurred just one year prior to the release of the movie when legendary scientist Wilhelm Reich claimed to have used his “cloudbuster” invention to attack UFOs (which he believed were hostile) by sucking the energy out of them. Reich’s cloudbuster was an atmospheric device constructed from two rows of 15-foot aluminium pipes mounted on trucks and connected to cables that were inserted into water. Its appearance and functionality were strikingly similar to that of the sonar cannons in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. Reich believed that his cloudbusters served to unblock cosmic ‘orgone’ energy in the atmosphere, which he said would be beneficial to human health. Apparently, Reich also found them handy for shooting down alien spacecraft in what he described as a “full-scale interplanetary battle” in Tucson Arizona in 1955.
The production history of Earth vs. the Flying Saucers is intriguing. In 1955, Donald Keyhoe, then a jagged thorn in the side of the US government’s UFO secret-keepers, was approached by a group of Hollywood producers seeking to buy the rights to his aforementioned non-fiction book. The producers told Keyhoe their film was to be a serious documentary about UFOs. Although initially suspicious, Keyhoe eventually went along with the deal. Big mistake. Upon its completion in 1956, the “documentary” turned out to be the schlock sci-fi B-movie of our discussion. Keyhoe was outraged and demanded that his name be removed from the film’s credits, to no avail. Someone, it seemed, had it in for this outspoken advocate for government transparency on UFOs (perhaps the same “someone” who, two years later, censored Keyhoe’s statement on live TV that flying saucers were “real machines under intelligent control”).
FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. ExoNews.org distributes this material for the purpose of news reporting, educational research, comment and criticism, constituting Fair Use under 17 U.S.C § 107. Please contact the Editor at ExoNews with any copyright issue.