ON THE EVENING OF NOVEMBER 20, 1952, GEORGE Adamski led two women and two couples out into the California dessert in the hope that they might make contact with space visitors. He asked his companions to wait while he went on ahead. While alone he claimed to have met a man from Venus named Orthon. One of the women, Alice Wells, made a drawing of Orthon, based on Adamski's description. The drawing is of a tall very human looking being wearing a jump suit remarkably like that worn by the actor Michael Rennie in the role of Klaatu, the benign alien who came to warn the human race of the threat of nuclear war in the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still. (1)

Were this the only example of a "close encounter" with aliens that reflected imagery and themes previously appearing in films, television and other media, the resemblance of Orthon to Klaatu could by explained as mere coincidence. Likewise the assertion that Adamski based Orthon on Klaatu could be easily refuted as an example of the logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc ("after this, therefore because of this"). After all, Orthon's shoulder length blond hair is nothing like Klaatu's fairly short dark hair.

However, every major trope of the modern UFO mythos can be traced to previous media images and themes. The three major types of aliens of UFO literature--Nordics, grays, and reptilians--can all be traced to media prototypes, as can tales of alien abductions, alien implants, and the imagery of flying saucers. The chief media sources of these tropes are movies, television, pulp magazines, and comic strips. But earlier literature and even ancient myths were also precursors of the modern UFO myths. That this new mythology came into being in the 20th century reflects the greater emotional and visceral impact of film and television compared to that of the written word. Particularly in the 1950s, film and television focused primal fears activated by the threats of nuclear war and brainwashing through the medium of science fiction.

The Threat of Nuclear War

Klaatu, a wiser version of a human being representing all that is noble in our species, landed on Earth to warn humanity that if it failed to find a solution to the threat of nuclear war, an interstellar robot police force, over which Klaatu and his fellow advanced aliens had no control, would annihilate the people of Earth. The United States had destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs in August 1945 but had then lost its monopoly on nuclear weapons when the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb in 1949, just two years before the release of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Thus, the movie reflected the growing fears generated by the nuclear arms race.

On November 1, 1952, the United States detonated its first large-scale thermonuclear weapon, or hydrogen bomb, with an explosive yield of 10.4 megatons (million tons of TNT) at the Enewitok Atoll in the Marshall Islands...