The Triangle

Issue date: 4/28/06 Section: Sci-Tech

Media Credit: Alpha Films

I've made a lot of accusations in my day. Most true, some false, and a few for which I believe the people at the Pabst Brewing Company in Milwaukee should be held personally responsible. However, no accusation I have ever made is as accurate as the one I am about to make: UFO enthusiasts refuse to look at the evidence that is staring them in the face.

I'm thinking specifically about a claim made by that community: that tales of alien abductions can not be the product of media. According to them, no movie has ever contained the things that are reported by "real" abductees, except some movies that were inspired by alien abductions. They say it's never the other way around, that stories of alien abduction are inspired by films. That's why I hope that they read this article: I have found a film wherein is contained every single aspect of the abduction phenomenon, and it was put out about 10 years before aliens supposedly began kidnapping people.

This 1954 film is called Killers From Space. Even other B-movies about alien invasions from that era regard this one as low-budget and hokey. It's the story of a scientist, Dr. Douglas Martin, who is employed by the Air Force to help out with their atomic bomb testing. One day, while flying through a mushroom cloud for some reason, the good doctor spots a mysterious blinking light on the ground. His plane then falls from the sky, the pilot is killed and Martin wanders back to base, alone and with no memory. At the base hospital, they find a mysterious scar on his chest. Later, he recovers his memory with the aid of a truth serum and tells of being brought to a secret underground UFO base where aliens with giant, bulging eyes command him to steal atomic test data and erase his memory. They need the data so that they can harness the energy of atomic blasts to turn lizards into enormous mutants that will soon devour mankind. The aliens will then kill the mutants and claim our world as their own.

This film is so hokey, so absolutely and unbelievably terrible, that it is fantastic. The 71 minutes I spent watching it were the first in quite some time that I forgot my many, many troubles. But the existential quagmire I call life is not the point.

The point is that if you know anything about the stories told by alien abductees, when you read that plot synopsis, your eyes grew wider and wider as you recognized more and more events from the ridiculous tales that the UFO enthusiasts would have us believe actually happened. Let's go through point-by-point and see what Killers From Space can offer us. Remember, all of this happened almost a decade before the first popularized cases of alien abduction, such as the Betty and Barney Hill case.

Continued...

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