Recovered Memories of UFO

I was intrigued by the photo illustrating my recent article “Sending Extraterrestrials a Message.” Chosen by Splice Today editors, it looked familiar, but I couldn’t place it: an indistinct object amid vapor and sky. Google Lens revealed it was the shot-down Chinese spy balloon of early-2023. That put me in mind of the early-1970s British sci-fi show UFO, which I watched as a kid, in which humanity, under the auspices of SHADO (Supreme Headquarters Alien Defence Organization), would blow flying saucers out of the sky. The humans did this in a shoot-first, ask-questions-later manner, as I recalled.

An online viewing of UFO’s first episode, “Identified,” showed it wasn’t quite as knee-jerk a reaction as I’d presumed. The extraterrestrials’ hostility is established early, as they beam explosive rays at a British official’s Rolls-Royce. Aided by an autopsy of a downed alien, SHADO concludes that harvesting human organs is on the intruders’ agenda, possibly because their own planet has suffered environmental degradation that’s left the aliens sterile. Human virility, by contrast, is not in short supply, as SHADO’s employees flirt amid jaunty music, the women in form-fitting pantsuits or shiny minidresses. The SHADO females who staff a moon base all have purple hair.

I recalled, and have now looked up, a 2004 National Review article that lauded SHADO and its commander, Ed Straker, as models for conducting the War on Terror. The writer, John A. Barnes, noted that “Straker is a career military officer who ‘connects the dots’ between seemingly unrelated events and concludes that only aliens from outer space could be responsible. Putting his career on the line, he battles disbelief and tightfisted politicians to create SHADO, a process that consumes nearly ten years.” Pondering why the series lasted only a single season, Barnes wrote: “Simply put, UFO was too realistic,” with an elusive enemy and ambiguous or downbeat plot developments.

Straker, the writer posited, was part of the problem, too, in that audiences weren’t in tune with his tough-minded approach: “His job was to kill (or, if possible, capture) the aliens before they could do harm to any human, and that was that,” including by injecting a dangerous drug into a captured alien, or shooting down a spaceship known to be carrying his friend, a SHADO officer, to the alien planet. “To Straker, individuals mean nothing. All that matters is stopping the aliens,” Barnes lauded. Straker’s “kind of single-minded determination was in short supply in the 1970s, which may explain why the series appealed to people of a conservative sensibility,” he added. “In real life, however, we sure could use someone like Ed Straker for the new post of national intelligence director.”

Two decades later, whether Tulsi Gabbard fits that bill is debatable. Her foreign policy views may not appeal to the conservative hardliners of two decades ago, but she’d look great in a SHADO outfit. 

I wanted to watch more of this series, but a search on my TV relegated it to a “watchlist.” This search tool only skims what’s available across multiple subscription services, while more detailed results require searching within apps. In response to my UFO query, it recommended The Man from Earth, a 2007 film I’d never heard of, and which I watched with enjoyment. It has no aliens, but bears a similarity to UFO in demonstrating the psychological discomfort humans may feel in confronting an enigmatic phenomenon outside their normal experience.

The Man from Earth’s about a professor named Oldman, whose academic friends throw a goodbye party amid concerns over why he’s leaving his job when he’s on track to be department head. He says he gets “itchy feet” and has moved on before, but they think he’s too young to have done that much, while noting he’s not seemed to age in the 10 years they’ve known him. He has some possessions that surprise them, such as a 19th-century painting that could pass for a Van Gogh, and a prehistoric stone tool, which he says he got at a thrift shop.

Oldman says he wants to tell them something he’s never shared before, then gradually unveils a story that boggles the mind. He’s a 14,000-year-old Cro-Magnon man who, it turns out, also was Jesus Christ. This upsets his friends, one of whom calls in a psychiatrist, who has his own issues, even pulling a gun on Oldman. The friends, despite their intellectualism, don’t realize that Oldman’s story, which one calls “untestable,” could be evaluated through any familiarity he might have with ancient languages or sites. Oldman calms things down by saying it was all a hoax, though his prospective girlfriend wonders whether “Oldman” is a play on words, and he acknowledges using other names suggestive of a long past.

Unfortunately, the psychiatrist overhears this, recognizes the name of his own father, a Harvard chemistry professor who’d left when he was a child, and on learning that Oldman knows his childhood dog’s name, dies of a heart attack. (The editors of Splice Today are not enthusiasts of “spoiler alerts,” once informing me that one I’d included in a manuscript was unneeded since the movie I was writing about was from 1963.)

—Kenneth Silber is author of In DeWitt’s Footsteps: Seeing History on the Erie Canal. Follow him on Bluesky