It Came From Outer Space!

2017 is a year of many anniversaries - STARBURST is 40 for one (as is a certain film set in a galaxy far, far away), but one incident happened 70 years ago that arguably shaped sci fi cinema forever - or at least the depiction of alien spacecraft! Join us as we get to the bottom of the birth of the FLYING SAUCER as we know it...

- Nigel Watson

Flying saucers hit the headlines after civilian pilot Kenneth Arnold saw nine silver craft travelling in formation over Mount Rainier, Washington, USA, on June 24th, 1947. This opened a floodgate of sightings of discs and strange objects in the sky throughout the world, and speculation about their origins ranged from misidentifications and hysteria to secret experimental aircraft or extraterrestrial spaceships.

This was at the very start of the Cold War and it was not surprising that many people immediately thought Arnold had seen remote controlled, unmanned guided missiles sent from the Soviet Union to show off their technological superiority.

The first feature film to cash in on the craze, The Flying Saucer, directed by Mikel Conrad in 1950, reveals that the ‘saucer’ is the secret invention of an American scientist based in Alaska, and Russian agents are keen to capture it. The weird thing is that the craft looks like the tear-drop craft described by Arnold with two jet engines either side of its central dome, and isn’t actually a flying saucer as advertised in the title.

The very first saucer movie series was the 15-part Bruce Gentry - Daredevil of the Skies directed by Spencer Gordon Bennet and Thomas Carr, released in 1949. The story involves Dr Andrew Benson (Forrest Taylor), who is abducted by a villainous enemy agent called ‘The Recorder’ who uses his secret flying saucer to attack the Panama Canal. Fortunately, Bruce Gentry (Tom Neal) prevents this attack by crashing his aircraft into the remote controlled saucer, causing it to explode in mid-air.

Unlike The Flying Saucer, the secret craft in Bruce Gentry is a high-speed, remote controlled, spinning disc with a stationary central dome. This image conjured up by the term ‘flying saucer’ had a much higher impact on eyewitnesses and filmmakers.