In an interview called "The Extraterrestrial Is My Brother" published in the Vatican newspaper (L'Osservatore Romano) Funes explained that ruling out the existence of aliens would be like "putting limits" on God's creative freedom. He also assured doubters that it doesn't contradict with their faith as Aliens could be among God's creatures.

So do Aliens have to be Christians as well? What if the aliens are Jewish? Or believers in Eckankar? Is there an Alien heaven? I just hope this means that all Sunday schools have to add little alien children to the "hands across the world" murals. It's only a matter of time before the CBC starts airing commercials for galactic cruisers for missionaries in space, just like South Parks "Starvin' Marvin in Space." Maybe Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow, about Jesuits making first contact with extraterrestrial intelligences, was more prophetic than anyone realized? [AP]

E.T. is penis-shaped for no reason. His face looks like a genital. His neck elongates. And there is NO good reason. You think kids won't notice the penis thing? Give me a break. When I was a kid, that was like all we talked about. I'm fine with throwing penis jokes and fart jokes into kid movies — that's the stuff of life. But doing it without any self-consciousness? Makes director Steven Spielberg look like an amateur. Makes the movie even dumber because kids can actually legitimately make fun of it for containing penises that the grownups DIDN'T EVEN REALIZE WERE THERE. C'mon grownups — get with it.

E.T. is too cute and too ugly at the same time. We've already established that E.T. looks like an unattractive genital. At the same time, he is way to freakin cute. What the hell with the waddling and cutsey voice and big giant eyes. Big beating heart? Gross. I am barfing now. Plus that egregious "looks like a toy" scene, where he hides in with the dolls? Puh-leez.

To make matters worse, the 20th Anniversary Edition of ET was redone with CGI and censorship. OK, look, grownups — trying to fix up an already too-cute/too-ugly E.T. by adding crappy CGI ain't going to cut it. Seriously, he just looks way lamer. Meanwhile, Spielberg decided to clean up the movie by replacing the bad guy's guns with radios in one scene (what? you think kids don't know those are really guns?) and then taking out the ONE funny line in the whole movie, where Elliot calls his brother "penis breath." So you take out the one intentionally-funny penis reference, but leave in the penis-shaped alien? WTF, people?

Power of healing sucks. E.T.'s one super-power is healing and making flowers grow. LAME. Healing is totally great and all, but how about combining it with the power to blow shit up or shoot giant knives through his long froggy fingers? Or maybe the power to build big lasers that kill the bad guys with their "radios."

Too similar to Old Yeller. Does it really count as a scifi movie if all you've done is take the plot of Old Yeller — boy meets dog, boy loses dog, boy learns life lesson — and transpose it onto an alien crash-landed on Earth plot? Why not just go see Old Yeller if you want to see cute little boys crying over nonhuman creatures? Just because E.T. helps Elliot fly on his bicycle doesn't make him a better dog than Old Yeller, OK?

Spawned worst videogame ever made. The E.T. videogame wasn't just the most hideous thing ever mde for the Atari 2600 — it was the worst game ever made in the entire world. Rumor has it that it sold so badly that most of the cartridges were turned into landfill.

Product placement frenzy makes movie dated and ridiculous. In their craven desire to get commercial sponsors for E.T., producers decided to use very specific brands in the movie. Elliot feeds E.T. Reeses Pieces (at that time a new candy), and E.T. uses a Speak and Spell handheld "game" (also new in the early 80s) to communicate with his alien buddies. Having these very 80s-specific products in the movie pushes it into retro-cheese territory rather than "movie for all ages" like, well, Old Yeller. I got a hint for you: If you want kids to enjoy your movie for decades, don't use it to advertise products that will look so retarded to kids twenty years later that they won't be able to decide whether to laugh at the penis-headed alien or the lameass Speak and Spell toy.

Two decades worth of kid-alien space movies I blame E.T. for all those crappy kid-alien movies (and ALF), but not for XTRO, which is like the very best alien-kid movie ever.

Neil Diamond wrote a song about E.T. called "Heartlight." Did Nirvana write a song about E.T.? Did Black Sabbath or Big Daddy Kane or Run DMC? No. Neil fucking Diamond, people. I rest my case.

To hear his explanation as to why such a commission is necessary, it almost makes sense:

It is important because if you're driving down the highway and you saw a crash of a small spaceship and a car or a bus full of kids, you really wouldn't know what to do... Do you wait for the hazardous materials experts to show up because of potential contaminants from another solar system? What do you do? People really don't know.

Man pushes creation of panel to prepare city for space aliens [The Rocky Mountain News]

For Better Or Worse, SciFi's Most Adorable Sidekicks

Stitch: Lilo and Stitch

He burps and eats everything. A cross between a bug and a dog, he was sort of sweet... until he did the whole Elvis impersonation, and then I was out the door. I can't stand animals dressed as people (alien animals or otherwise).

R2-D2: Star Wars

An obvious choice, but possibly the cutest bucket of bolts in the history of robots. Despite being a giant trash can, he was surprisingly expressive — you could tell when he was mad by his fussing and futtering. If you took a vote on which robot you wanted to be stuck on a deserted Tatooine with, hands down it would be R2. While C-3PO is wonderful, if I had to chose it'd be R2 based on the fact that, "goodness gracious me," would get old after about five minutes. Sorry C, He's the droid I'm looking for.

Rebecca "Newt" Jorden: Aliens

Oh no, an adorable girl is left on an alien infested planet! Surely she won't be a massive hindrance at all. Too late, she's fallen into an air vent. Once I found out that the dirty blonde girl nickname was "Newt," I lost all my love for this character. You could make a case against Bishop as well, but he was OK in my book.

Hud: Cloverfield

He had me at, "I'm just saying how freaky would it be if a flaming homeless guy came out of no where." His innocence and one-liners completely humanized this story. I don't even remember any of the other characters' names really. Hud was a great mix of that 20-something guy that is part idiot and part child, which was most evident any time he tried to talk to Marlena.

Robin: Batman

He thinks everything Batman does is totally yay, which is valuable because one thing you don't want from a sidekick is questions. Especially when you say, "Robin go check out that scary cave with no light, I'll be right behind you." He makes a great victim when there aren't any ladies around for you to save. His boyish good looks play in his favor but, his naivete demeans him. Robin get a 50/50 split on annoying versus lovable.

Hurley: Lost

Not all people can pull off charming with that much going on, but Hurley manages to. His whole "cursed by the numbers" schtick and his ridiculous bad luck in his first flashback were borderline annoying, but once he went bananas his charm became more of a quirk. He's the heart of the island and a lot of people forget that as he follows orders from chiseled jawline Sawyer or smarty-pants face-stubble Jack.

Arthur: The Tick

The shy little moth to The Tick's massive ego. His nervous stammer and mutterings are the perfect compliment to The Tick. And let's not forget the fact that he's often mistaken for a bunny, that's cute laugh out loud.

Gizmo: Gremlins (2)

Another coin toss here, because don't we all like to get drunk and sing the mogwai song? And yet the need to dress him up as Rambo totally crosses the line from cute to crappy.

Short Round: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

One line, "YOU CALL HIM DOCTOR JONES." Everything about this character was harnessing the power of cute for good. From the boxes he tied on his shoes for driving to his open-eyed screams, all charming.

Wicket: Ewok Adventure, Star Wars

Who else could level out Mace's wild tantrums. Good cute, like the kind of teddy bear I would actually want to own.

Elliot: ET

After watching this movie who didn't dress up in an orange hoodie and bike around with a white alien bundle for Halloween, or Saturdays? Elliot is a spot on example of the right amount of child-like/charm wonder in a great sidekick.

The 3-D film, which was originally supposed to be distributed by New Line but is now coming out on Warner Bros., is about astronaut Capt. Charles "Chuck" Baker, who leads an expedition to the title world, which is inhabited by those human-fearing aliens, who dress like humans from the 1950s. Says Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson:

I go on their planet, and I'm actually the alien... Of course, I befriend a little boy [to try to] get back to my spaceship. It's really great.

Planet Due in Late 09 [Sci-Fi Wire]

Baas is known for making neat pieces of furniture by repurposing different materials like clay, waste from giant furniture plants, and IKEA stools. The only drawback of these alien creatures is that you can't always tell, at a glance, what function they're supposed to serve. Until it's too late, that is. Images by Mike Goldwater

Maarten Baas main page via Dezeen

This is a holiday center in the Ukraine.

This government building in Georgia was inspired by a sketch of an imaginary city. Images by Frederic Chaubin

Frederic Chaubin main page via PingMag

At the end of this scene — which is totally worth watching in its entirety to see the full, beautiful goofiness of UFO representations — you can see the three lights in the sky separating and zooming into the clouds. Looks amazingly similar to the video of the Phoenix lights above.

I have never understood why people assume that UFOs will be covered in lights when they visit Earth, unless it's because Steven Spielberg's vision in Close Encounters basically convinced them that it makes the most sense for aliens to arrive covered in visible light spectrum. I sure hope the next Phoenix encounter includes some music too! Bee bee bee boop boop!

The Drake Equation is a series of decreasing fractional probabilities that end up estimating the chance that there are other intelligent civilizations somewhere in the universe. The enormous scale of the universe virtually guarantees that a decent probability will come out of that equation. Professor Andrew Watson of the University of East Anglia has recalculated the odds, factoring in the age of the Earth. He claims that Earth is in the latter stages of its life as a planet, meaning that it took a long time for intelligent life to develop here. Therefore, such life doesn't happen easily, and must be quite rare.

I say bollocks. Watson fails to take into account a number of factors. For one thing, not every solar system follows the same life pattern as ours. Other planets may have far longer habitable periods than Earth, increasing the odds of intelligent life developing there. He also fails to consider that different environments could lead to very different evolutionary rates.

In the end, it comes back to the scale of the universe (how many galaxies can you spot in the Hubble image above?). It doesn't matter how improbable the odds of intelligent life evolving are. We know for a fact it happened once. It is almost inconceivable to think that among the unfathomable numbers of stars and planets scattered across the universe, it happened only once. Photo by: ESA and NASA.

Is there anybody out there? [University of East Anglia]

At the Astrobiology Science Conference 2008 that wrapped up yesterday, chemist Steve Benner proposed that formamide might make a great solvent for life with some bizarre biochemistry that mimics our DNA, but in a way we can only imagine. Benner's a great speaker and scientist, but has a tendency to lapse into flights of chemical minutia, so I'll take a page from a New Scientist feature in June that aptly sums up the point:

A suitable solvent is only part of the story of life, of course. Apart from a few viruses, all life on Earth uses deoxyribonucleic acids (DNA) to encode the information needed to build and run an organism. But is there an alternative? Could genetic information be stored another way?

DNA consists of a double helix, like a twisted ladder. Every rung of the ladder comprises a pair of molecules called bases. These bases are the part of DNA that actually encode the genes. There are four types, known by the initials G, A, C and T, and they form the alphabet of every genetic code. The struts of the ladder consist of deoxyribose sugars linked by charged phosphate groups.

Biologists have methodically altered different parts of the DNA molecule to explore which aspects of its structure are necessary for it to function properly. They have identified several parts that can be changed without disrupting the molecule. For example, you can replace deoxyribose with another sugar, such as threose. Different and more molecules can be used to represent the bases too.
DNA disaster

But that's where the known options end, says Steven Benner, a synthetic biologist at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Gainesville, Florida. Benner has found that replacing the phosphate groups with uncharged substitutes brings disaster. The DNA strand becomes unstable, collapses into a ball and sinks to the bottom of his experimental solution like dregs in a beer keg.

Before these experiments, people wondered why the phosphates were there - whether they were simply a redundant evolutionary artefact, rather like a male nipple. It's now clear that they serve a vital function. The charges keep DNA stiff by organising a cradle of water molecules along its chain; without them, DNA easily wads into a ball - another demonstration of how water is integral to life as we know it. An alien's DNA equivalent in ammonia or methane, say, would therefore need some very different structures to avoid rolling up. Those charged phosphates might have to be replaced by something greasier, like hydrocarbon or benzene molecules, says Jack Szostak, a molecular biologist at Harvard University.

Source: original reporting, New Scientist (sub required)

Image: ufocasebook.com

He uses acrylic, oil paint, watercolor, and ink to create stunning portrait paintings of these supermodel-grade beings from another planet. What's truly fascinating is the way he uses alien standards of beauty, rather than adhering to a human idea of what's sexy.

While perhaps not beautiful to traditional Homo Sapiens, these aliens are engaged in deeply spiritual acts that even humans can understand — like meditating and getting high in the nude. Images by Naoto Hattori

Naoto Hattori's main page via Pink Tentacle

Lineweaver's idea kind of rocks SETI scientists' mission statement to the core. Ever since Carl Sagan's famously framed the ET question "are we alone?" as "Are there functionally equivalent humans elsewhere in the universe?" SETI folks have been trying to answer it. It's a gargantuan task, and one that that Lineweaver argues we're making worse by assuming that there is something about humans that is unique or special, or that life on Earth "wants" to be human.

If there is any tendency for life to evolve to get as functionally human-like as possible, then Lineweaver asks why haven't isolated part of Earth evolved human-like intelligence? Madagascar has been separated from Africa for millions of years, and should therefore be full of high-level primates instead of lemurs — apes' distant cousins. New Zealand (which because of its isolation Jared Diamond said was "the best opportunity we'll ever have to study life on another planet") should be filled with super-intelligent giant birds.

Lineweaver thinks that big brains aren't the be-all and end all of evolution. In fact, he argues that the answer to Sagan's question is "no" — functionally equivalent humans don't exist elsewhere in the universe. Instead, life elsewhere might be so weird as to be unrecognizable. "Intelligence" could easily take the form of some kind of system at profound disequilibrium with its environment — something like a hurricane or a star could be intelligent.

It's sounds like he's begging to get the SETI Institute's funding pulled, and to declare the entire SETI operation utterly useless, and in a sense he is. But he also thinks it's worth continuing the search because there's a lot of unexplored universe still out there to look at. And he admits he could be wrong — there could be a Planet of the Apes out there, too.

Lineweaver presented his theories at the Astrobiology Science Conference 2008.

And you can friend The Dark Lurking on Myspace, just in case you're feeling lonely. [QuietEarth]

Lineweaver's four main preconditions for a piece of galactic real estate being hospitable to intelligent life are:

- Distance from galactic center. Our sun is about 8.5 kiloparsecs from the center of the Milky Way which is about right. The further you go out from the center of a galaxy, the fewer stars there are. The further you go in, the more likely a nearby star will go supernova, and wipe out life in your start system. LIneweaver figures between 7 and 9 kpc is about right.

- Age. Life takes time to evolve into something resembling intelligent. This takes a few billion years.

- Metallicity. This is Lineweaver's way of measuring how much of the supernova leftovers are accumulated in a given region of space. If there's less than 1% of the metals found in our solar system, there's probably not enough to build a rocky planet (in astronomers' parlance, 'metals' includes everything that's not hydrogen and helium, so stuff, like water, too).

- The likelihood of forming a gas giant. Like supernovas, Jupiters, Saturns and other giant planets make bad neighbors for harboring life. During the early stages of star system formation, they have a tendency to come crashing through planetary habitable zones, annihilating rocky planets that may one day harbor life.

In short, it's a galactic jungle out there, and in 2004 Lineweaver's beginning to get his head around narrowing down the best places we may find our interstellar neighbors, whether in this galaxy or the next. All that said, though, he's careful to point out that we don't even really know what a good definition of life is, so instead of "habitable zone" maybe the name should be changed to the more sensible (and way less-exciting) "pre-habitable zone."

Image: NASA

Chart: Science

Says Vakoch:

Might not such an attempt to put the best face on our current situation unintentionally reveal a potentially far more dangerous fault of humankind: a tendency to hide from our own problems and to avoid these threats to our very existence?

Here's the crux of Vakoch's argument, as far as I understand it: any interstellar society we encounter is likely to be much, much more advanced than us. After all, the chances of two cultures developing the ability to communicate across interstellar distances in the same part of the galaxy within the same historical moment are infinitessimal. So the aliens will either have been spacefaring for longer than us, or else their space-going era will already have ended — in which case we won't meet them.

So let's assume that a more advanced race, technologically, will also be more advanced in its cultural development. In that case, we'll be like messy, screamy, food-flinging, barfy children to these space demigods. And the most valuable contribution we could make to the interchange would be to remind our new friends of what it's like to be more primitive and id-driven. In any case, if we try to sweep our wars, our environmental destruction and our general crazoid behavior under the celestial rug, they'll probably be able to figure it out and we'll just look like idiots. Our best bet is just to emphasize everything bad about ourselves when we first meet other intelligences, so they'll know what they're in for.

Actually, Vakoch's argument veers sharply towards the end, and he starts talking about how acknowledging our "Shadow" (in the Jungian sense) is just good for us generally, and how we should just own up to our worse natures because it would be therapeutic and healthy. So maybe he's actually got some other agenda, and he's one of those Jungian infiltrators you hear about. [Space.com]

Johnson told Deadbolt News:

We're in the process to do a remake of the original mini-series first as a theatrical feature, which I'm so jazzed about because it will give me an opportunity to really realize it and execute it in a way that was impossible to do back then. Then that will lead to the obvious sequel, because it is a franchise, and then we'll get into The Second Generation and I'm hoping we'll be able to do two movies, because there's certainly enough material in the novel to warrant two separate sequels. That's my goal at this point and that's what we're in the process of doing. I just literally came from a meeting, 15-20 minutes ago with a fellow in Beverly Hills who really says that we're gonna do it.

V Remake Aiming for Theaters [The Deadbolt via Quiet Earth]

There is a reason why you never see extraterrestrials fumbling to prevent bulky umbrellas from flying away in a rainstorm.

UFO Cap main page

Avery writes:

The videos I created, which eventually culminated into the music video for 'Drone' the musician are all inspired by the original photos. I myself am totally unsure as to the origin of the images beyond what I already known.. i.e. anonymous witnesses . . .

Since then, I have been accused of being the originator of the whole drone saga, and the photos were in fact just a viral campaign to promote the eventual video. This is definitely NOT the truth. In a way, I wish it had been, because that would make me some kind of viral genius, and I'd be in completely the wrong job lol.

I was involved in the discussions on OMF, Alien casebook, and other places for months, and the whole thing just reached a real frustrating deadlock between the believers and the non believers.. or real/hoax argument. I'd made my point until I was blue in the face, and was met by people telling me that the CG I had created was no where near as good as what was being shown in the photos. So I knuckled down and set out to create a video and images that would shut them up. So really, it is the very people who refused to believe CG was capable of creating the images that pushed me on . . .

It is bizarre really. I'm not sure what people think I am, but honestly, I am just a normal guy who does 3D graphics for a living. I pay my bills, have a girlfriend, a dog, and am currently looking at doing a bit of decorating around the house.

This leaves us with the still-burning question: Whose viral marketing campaign is this? And what are they trying to sell us?

• Show creator Chris Carter hadn't had much success in television writing, having written mostly comedies and worked for The Disney Channel, before he was offered a chance to create shows for Fox.
• Carter was inspired to delve into the mysterious world of The X-Files by both the Watergate scandal, the old television show Kolchack: The Night Stalker, and a report that was circulating around 1992 that said 3.7 Americans "may have been abducted by aliens."
• Originally, Fox executives wanted someone blonder with big boobs instead of Gillian Anderson. Thankfully they didn't win that fight.
• The company Carter formed to run the production was called Ten Thirteen Productions, after his October 13th birthday. Sound Designer Thierry Couturier's son says the "I made this" over the company logo.
• Fox left Carter and his production team alone for the most part during the first season because they were putting a lot of time and effort into The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. Now, as a Bruce Campbell fan, I have to say I loved that show, and I'm glad it was able to take some heat off of The X-Files.
• The writing staff didn't want to follow Carter's all-alien abduction storylines, especially since the UFO show Sightings was airing on Fox. As a result, the show "Squeeze" with the creepy guy who ate livers, hibernated for 30 years and had Plastic Man like stretching abilities became a template for the "freak of the week" style the show eventually adopted.
• Besides the pilot episode, Carter also wrote "Space" during the first season, which was about a ghost in the Space Shuttle program. It was extremely expensive to make, and Carter calls it "one of the worst hours ever produced for the show."
• The show often fought for its life during the first season, having low ratings and a Friday night timeslot. Despite finishing 102nd out of the 118 programs in the Nielsens that year, it was picked up for a second season. This is why the season one finale "The Erlenmeyer Flask" has the X-Files being shut down, and Mulder and Scully being reassigned.
• The X-Files' opening sequence was nominated for an Emmy, and the theme song was remixed and became a hit in dance clubs in the UK, Australia, and France.
• The legendary writing team of Morgan and Wong, who were also co-executive producers, wrote many of the best episodes in the first season, although they left in season two to produce their own show Space: Above and Beyond. Sadly it tanked after one season, although Morgan and Wong didn't return to The X-Files until season four.
• The show didn't actually show an alien until the "Little Green Men" episode in season two.
• Gillian Anderson was pregnant throughout season two, and the producers decided to hide the fact by having her behind a desk or a medical exam table most of the time. It helped that she'd been transferred to Quantico to teach.
• By the end of season two, the show had climbed to 64th out of 141, although it was gaining cult status and spreading fast by word of mouth. The show had also spread beyond the U.S. borders, and was one of the most popular TV shows in the world, outside of the country.
• The show was also named the best show on TV by Entertainment Weekly that year, and also won a Golden Globe for best drama.
• However, the show was still so budget strapped that they couldn't afford location filming, and in the episode "Ascension," a rock quarry had to be painted to look like the desert of the American Southwest.
• Season three brought on a cavalcade of comedy, and a slew of guest stars including Alex Trebek, Jesse Ventura, Giovanni Ribisi, J.T. Charles Nelson Reilly, Walsh, R. Lee Ermey and Jack Black.
• Guest star Peter Boyle won an Emmy for his portrayal of a man who could predict death in the episode Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose, and the show also won for best writing.
• The show went on to win five Emmys that year, and Gillian Anderson won a Screen Actors Guild Award. By now The X-Files was here to stay.
• Season four premiered to their highest ratings ever, and Carter's new show Millenium (set in the X-Files universe) was put on Friday nights, so they moved The X-Files to Sunday night.
• By the fall of 1996, it was the most popular show on Fox, and Fox got the rights to broadcast the Superbowl. So, they decided to feature an episode right after the game, and "Leonard Betts" (about the guy who could regrow his body) received the highest ratings ever for an X-Files episode. More awards and kudos followed.
• Season Five opened to even bigger ratings, and the show was supposed to end there and become a series of feature films. However, Fox desperately wanted to keep the show, and worked out a new contract with Carter.
• Carter had been planning a feature film versin of the show ever since season two, and security was so tight that they were sending the script around on red paper, which would make it unable to be photocopied.
• They filmed the X-Files movie, X-Files: Fight the Future, inbetween seasons four and five, although it ended up pushing the start date for season five back, and as a result that season was two episode shorter, with only 20 instead of 22. It was code named "Blackwood" after Algernon Blackwood, a British writer of ghost stories.
• By season five, the two main stars were also becoming popular, and as a result many episodes featured either Scully or Mulder, and not usually both of them together. This was to allow them time to concentrate on other projects.
• Season five also featured episodes written by guest writers, including Stephen King and William Gibson.
• By the end of season five, both Anderson and Duchovny wanted the show to move from Vancouver to Los Angeles (where it was originally supposed to be shot), and so the sets were struck and production moved at the end of the season.
• X-Files: Fight the Future opened in 1998, although it wasn't a smash success. The movie grossed around $189 million worldwide, which recouped their reported $126 million dollar budget (with advertising figured in), but not by much.
• The movie takes place right inbetween seasons five and six, and season six picks up right where the movie left off.
• At the end of season five, the X-Files were once again closed, but then reopened in season six. However, new agents Spender and Fowley were assigned to them, and Mulder and Scully were given a new boss.
• Season six was seen as the "beginning of the end" for several reasons. There were several episodes which hardcore fans considered too comedic, like the gated community episode "Arcadia" or the two-part body hopping episode starring Michael McKean as Morris Fletcher. Also the move from Vancouver to L.A. seemed to alienate fans as well.
• However, the show was Fox's most popular again that year, and pulled in more awards. But, the wheels had been set in motion.
• David Duchovny left the show after season in part due to contract problems and feeling the need to "move on." Scully's role was dialed back as a result, and new agents John Doggett (Robert Patrick) and Monica Reyes (Annabeth Gish) were introduced.
• Doggett and Reyes had some good episodes, but the show had lost a lot of it's hardcore fans and was turning into a sinking stone.
• For the season nine episode "The Truth," most of the cast returned and ended the season, and the show, on a cliffhanger. Sadly, they finished third in their timeslot, pulling in less viewers than their original pilot episode.
• In 2001 Fox introduced The Lone Gunmen spinoff show (which I must admit I am a huge fan of), although it only ran one season. The first episode had the unfortunate plot of hijackers trying to fly planes into the World Trade Centers, although it was filmed before 9/11. They were eventually (supposedly, I hope) killed off in season nine of The X-Files.
• The X-Files has a long-lasting legacy, having inspired shows like Smallville, Torchwood, and even Alias. You can buy the entire mammoth nine season set with the Fight the Future movie (but sadly, no Lone Gunmen disc) for just about $150 bucks right now. As a fan, I'll tell you up front that the packaging sucks on this set, but the contents are more than worth it.

Here's a closeup up the ship.

And here are a couple schematics from "anonymous."



Please do let this be from the upcoming X-Files movie. Or even better, some other movie that I haven't heard about yet.

UFO Reports Draw National Attention to Capitola [San Jose Mercury News]

Up until now, the only planets outside of our solar system that we've successfully detected are way bigger than earth. This is because most satellites detect planets by observing the pull their gravity exerts on the stars they orbit, so it's easier to find large planets orbiting close to their stars. TESS does things a little bit differently: it'll search for planets by measuring the amount of starlight it obscures, allowing astronomers to see a lot more planets of different calibers all at once. Examining the spectrum of a planet's star as it passes through its planet's atmosphere also lets researchers gauge the planet's size, temperature, and atmospheric chemistry much more accurately.

If all goes as planned, TESS could launch in 2012, and we could be making friends with aliens by 2013. Image by Tess Team

MIT aims to search for Earth-like planets with Google's help [MIT News]

According to Art MoCo:

According to legend as transmitted by Koleric, the rarely seen Moji "originates from the vast goji berry fields in the Himalayas. This ground burrowing creature eventually stowed away on goji filled crates destined for America. They now dwell unnoticed deep inside the produce displays, living off new varieties of produce and fruit which have contributed to the Moji's recent color change from muted cream to more vibrant hues such as orange and red."

Moji family [Art Moco]

Conlangers include everyone from Marc Okrand, the linguist who wrote Klingon, to the nerds who invented the most perfectly logical language in the world, known as Lojban. Anthony Burgess invented a little conlang for his characters in Clockwork Orange, and Suzette Haden Elgin's Native Tongue trilogy is all about a group of rebel women linguists who create their own language to subvert their ultra-sexist society. Sometimes Hollywood employs conlangers to make alien talk seem more realistic, and sometimes conlangers wind up going into computer programming, where they can invent computer languages to their heart's content. Larry Wall, inventor of scripting language Perl, is a conlanger, for example. And nobody who has ever used Perl will be surprised to hear that. Chart via Bartleby.

Robby the Robot, star of 1955 special effects blockbuster Forbidden Planet and later a main "charater" on the TV show Lost in Space, was the creation of legendary production designer Robert Kinoshita. Apparently one of his biggest inspirations for the globular humanoid bot was washing machine tubs. Kinoshita had worked on those before his career in the movies. The comparison sounds strange to us today, until you look back and see what washing machines looked like in the 1940s, when Kinoshita worked on them. This picture shows the odd similarities, with the bulbous roundness and strange silver knobs sticking out.

The HAL 9000 computer which famously refused to open the pod bay door in the 1969 movie 2001 was inspired by surveillance cameras which filmmaker Stanley Kubrick saw around London as CCTVs were being put in place. Author Arthur C. Clarke, who worked with Kubrick adapting his novel for the screen, confirms that HAL was inspired by "television cameras in cities" in an interview.

Here is a rather odd reverse-inspiration. The exoskeleton that Ripley used to fight big mama alien in Aliens is frequently mentioned by the designers for exoskeletons that might be used by soldiers or disabled people. Here you can see Ripley's cool device, and the exoskeleton for soldiers it inspired.

Since the special effects designers for Machine City in Matrix: Revolutions were located in San Francisco, it's probably no surprise that they based it in part on the San Francisco skyline. Effects designer Craig Hayes said in an interview that one of the first things he and his crew did was go out on the San Francisco Bay, about 8 miles from San Francisco, to see how the city would look from a distance. That gave them a sense of how to build Machine City from Neo's point of view as he zoomed into it.

Here you can see the hot fudge sundae that became the T-1000. Director and effects maven James Cameron said that when he was first conceiving of the liquid metal Terminator, he thought a lot in terms of texture. How should it ooze? How should the reflections look? In an interview, he admitted:

I wanted the effect of the T-1000 to look like a spoon going into hot fudge; it dimples down, then flows up over and closes. That's the look I wanted. You have to work with the viscosity in order to get that look just right.

When Steven Spielberg set out to make futuristic computers for Minority Report, he didn't mess around. He went straight to a research group at MIT, called the Tangible Media Group, which thinks up next-generation interfaces. The group told him that gesture-commands would be the wave of the future, and even showed him a bunch of prototypes — some of which are now in use, several years later. You can see an early gesture-controlled prototype here, on the left. And there's Tom Cruise doing his Minority Report gesture thing on the right.

And finally, there are the eXistenZ "metaflesh game pods," created by David Cronenberg for his dizzying movie about virtual reality games that plug right into your spinal column via a creepily biological bio-port installed (oh so Cronenberg style) right above your butt. Cronenberg has said a lot about how current technology is heading towards a merging with biology. So it's no surprise that his game pods look exactly like biological rehashings of late-1990s Playstation controllers that he would have seen every day while making this movie.

Picture of Port of Oakland by John L. Polos. Picture of fudge by Ms. Info. Picture of San Francisco skyline by Mike. Image spiffing by Stephanie Fox. Additional reporting by Nivair H. Gabriel.

• Major Alan "Dutch" Schaefer from Predator: As the only surviving member of a squad who encountered a Predator, Dutch isn't afraid to take risks and do what he needs to do to survive. He might not be the best at keeping everyone around him alive, but he'll make sure the objective is taken out no matter what the cost. Plus he's handy to have around for catchphrases and one-liners.
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• Second Lieutenant Juan "Johnny" Rico from Starship Troopers: Sure, he may have joined up for a girl, and he almost washed himself out after he got a squadmate killed, but when the going got tough he decided to man up for the job. Heck, he was even reported dead and survived a giant claw through his thigh.
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• Sergeant Todd from Soldier: As a genetically engineered soldier who has been trained since birth, Todd won't break down and start wishing he was back home during a skirmish in the rings of Saturn. He's a cold, calculating, killing machine, and he's there to get the job done. Just don't expect him to show any emotion.
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• Sergeant Andrew Scott from Universal Soldier: You'd need two sergeants to keep a group like this in line, so why not balance out Sgt. Todd's emotionless stare with the over the top insanity from Sgt. Scott? He'd be crazy enough to put the fear of god in you, and you probably wouldn't question his orders.
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• Master Chief from Halo: As another genetically engineered super soldier, Master Chief is already tough under his hardened battle armor, and he'd be the perfect man to throw at groups of invading aliens for some brute force action. Plus he seems to have an endless supply of lives on-hand, which could come in handy.
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• Mandalorian Supercommando Jango Fett from Star Wars: Jango Fett was so tough and feared that they eventually engineered an entire clone army of soldiers from his DNA. He could go toe to toe with Jedi Knights and survive (for the most part), although his clones didn't seem to be able to shoot that straight. He's handy to have around to serve as every member of the squad in case you lose someone.
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• Pvt. First Class Jenette Vasquez from Aliens: Vasquez was tougher than every man on her squad in Aliens, proving that she could trade bullets with the best of them. She lugged around a giant M56 Smart Gun, and she wasn't afraid to get down, dirty, and up close with a pistol. Plus, women in uniform who kick as much ass as she does are just hot.
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• Colonial Fleet Ensign Samuel Anders from Battlestar Galactica: As a former star Pyramid player for the Caprica Buccaneers, Anders has the moves and the stamina to pull off flanking maneuvers and keep going when the going gets tough. He's also just found out he's a Cylon, and I'm sure that means he has other capabilities as well. Of course, he might murder you in your sleep too.
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• Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart from Doctor Who: As the leader of U.N.I.T. (United Nations Intelligence Taskforce), he's used to handling strange situations and issuing commands under pressure. From his dealings with the Doctor, he's also used to seeing a lot of really strange shit, so he'd be cool and calm while time-traveling wraiths try to invade. Also, he probably makes a darn good cup of tea.

• Thanks to Finite_Elephant for suggesting this triviagasm. Got other ideas? Let us have 'em!

Only four Rex Havoc stories ever appeared in the pages of Warren Presents and three of those were collected in issue #14 from November 1981. Their team emblem consisted of a boot-print superimposed on a pair of buttocks, and Rex had his own fight song he would sing as the team marched into battle:

"We are the ass-kickers of the fantastic,
Let monsters all beware.
Three guys and a lass...
We kick ass...
In French we kick...derriére!"

Rainn Wilson - the evil alien Gallaxhar
Hugh Laurie - Dr. Cockroach, Ph.D.
Seth Rogen - the jellylike B.O.B.
Will Arnett - the half-ape, half-fish Missing Link
Kiefer Sutherland - General W.R. Monger
Stephen Colbert - The President
Reese Witherspoon - Ginormica

[Slashfilm]

You'll control a squad of four Colonial Marines in the game, issuing commands and dealing with their different personalities as you investigate the disappearance of Ellen Ripley and the team of Colonial Marines she left with aboard the U.S.S. Sulaco. Key areas in the game include the derelict spacewreck from the first Alien movie, and the LV-426 colony from Aliens. You'll use weapons like the pulse rifle, the M240 flamethrower, and the M56 Smart Gun that Vasquez kicked much ass with.

The thing sure looks a bit like Doom meets Quake, but we loved the world of the Colonial Marines so much that we'd watch a television show or movie about them even if it didn't have a single Alien in it. Oh wait, we did... and it was called Starship Troopers. Actually, there were a lot of aliens in that, except they looked like bugs instead of creepy H.R. Giger nightmares. Still, we loved it and have high hopes for Part 3, especially if it includes shower scenes.

Colonial Marines was originally being developed for the PS2, but was cancelled by Fox back in 2001. Then SEGA announced in 2006 that they were working on a game set in the Aliens world, and it'll be out for the PC, the PS3, and the Xbox 360 in late 2008. Which of course means we're going to have to wait on it, a lot more than 17 days. As Hicks would say. "17 days?!?! We're not gonna last 17 hours!"

• The 1975 movie was based on the 1968 book of the same name by Alexander Key. Sadly, most of his novels, including Sprocket: A Little Robot and Bolts: A Robot Dog, are out of print. You can read and download some of these here.
• Don't let the name fool you, Escape To Witch Mountain isn't about witches at all, but about super-powered alien kids who don't know they're aliens.
• Remember the creepy and slightly spooky overture music? If not, you can hear it right here.
• In fact, want to watch the opening credit sequence? Well, here you go.
• Tony and Tia, the original Wonder Twins, both possess telekinesis, although Tony can only use it when he plays his harmonica. Tia can also telepathically speak to mammals, and to Tony. Looks like she got the lion's share of the cool stuff.
• Unlike Zan and Jayna, Tony and Tia have difficulty controlling their powers, which leads to several mishaps. Like Tia having to free every captive animal who can talk to her.
• Tony was played by Ike Eisenmann, who Trek fans will immediately recognize as Midshipman Peter Preston, who Scotty brings to the bridge of the Enterprise in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Perhaps if he'd taken the mortally wounded kid to sick bay, he might have survived.
• Kim Richards, who plays Tia, is the aunt of both Nicky and Paris Hilton, which isn't really that interesting, but more mind-boggling.
• Both Ike and Kim would be reunited as brother and sister in the extremely forgettable Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell TV movie in 1978.
• The Twins' Uncle Bene is played by Denver Pyle, better known as Uncle Jesse from The Dukes of Hazzard, which Kim Richards later appeared on as Cooter's daughter. Now that's just weird.
• They encounter Jason O'Day (Eddie Albert) who lives in a Winnebago and travels around the country. He ends up helping them out, and probably made kids everywhere think Winnebago's were cool. (I know it did for me, in fact my parents bought me a little scale model Winnie after I saw this movie).
• The bad guy in the movie, Aristotle Bolt, seems like a genial rich man who just want to save kids from the orphanage. Of course, he really wants the twins for their abilities. However, he does have a pretty cool name and lived in a replica of a Byzantine castle that was built by Templeton Crocker between 1926 and 1934 from lava rock from Mt. Vesuvius and materials gathered all over Europe.
• The twins eventually discover (via their little leather "star case") that they are actually aliens from a binary star system who fled to Earth because their own world was dying. They're reunited with others from their planet, and they fly off in their spaceship for the sanctuary of Witch Mountain, never to return.
• That is until Disney made a sequel, Return From Witch Mountain, in 1978. In this movie, Tony and Tia have been training hard to use their powers and to learn about their own kind. In fact, they've been working so hard that the elders let them have a vacation in Los Angeles. What, two superkids on a vacation in L.A.? Nothing could possibly go wrong, right?
• If you want to see a movie trailer that says 1970s as loud of possible, then you're in for a treat. This trailer for Return features Christopher Lee, Bette Davis, andthe words "far out," "molecular mobilization," and "intergalactic energization." Is it me, or does that announcer sound like the guy from the old Batman TV show?
• In the sequel, Christopher Lee plays evil mad scientist Dr. Victor Gannon, and he uses a mind-control device he's invented on Tony, eventually pitting twin against twin in a battle of telekinesis. Bette Davis plays Letha Wedge (what a name), who has been financing the bad doctor's experiments.
• Sadly, there's no Eddie Albert in the sequel. It was also Jack Soo's final film, having been best known for playing Det. Sgt. Nick Yemana on Barney Miller. It was probably the coffee.
• In 1982 Disney made a television pilot called Beyond Witch Mountain, which featured a return of Eddie Albert as Jason and his Winnebago, but they recast everyone else, from the kids all the way to down to Aristotle Bolt. This was meant to become an ongoing series with the kids and Jason finding other alien kids and helping them get back home, but it never got that far and never went to series.
• Disney remade the original film back in 1995, with some major changes to the script. The twins are now named Danny and Anna, and they are separated as infants (who have full-fledged telekinesis), but are later reunited accidentally when they're older. Land developer Edward Bolt (the always evil Robert Vaughn) finds out about their powers, and plans to use them to blow up the entrance to Witch Mountain... without explosives. Way to use that power, Edward.
• It wasn't as charming as the original movie, and wasn't nearly as well received. You can find out why by watching the first 10 minutes right here.

1. Double mouth, or double-wide mouth. (See: Alien)

As the Alien series taught us, there's nothing scarier than a really long, giant toothy mouth — especially if there's a second long, toothy mouth inside it. But the long, toothy mouth rule shows up in a lot of alien movies. In Slither, for example, a guy is taken over by an alien and one of the first things it does is elongate his mouth so that it practically stretches to his ears on one side. (Lopsided elongated mouths are a bonus — lopsided is always scary.)

Corollary: Drool

A scary alien must drool. Again, we know this from the Alien series where the drool flows like water. But since Ridley Scott first gave us full frontal drool in the first Alien flick, drool has been the sign of scary for all aliens. It says "out of control." Now, of course, we cannot imagine any monster without drool. See, for instance, Beowulf, where the monster's drool is one of the first 3D effects. And there's 3D drool coming up in Journey to the Center of the Earth, too. Dinosaur drool!

2. Collective Consciousness (See: Borg from Star Trek)

One of the scariest and most alien things we can imagine is a species that has collective consciousness, or group think. All their minds are connected together like a bunch of little networked Linux boxes, rapidly churning through all that knowledge to figure out exactly how to kill you. Plus, collectively conscious creatures can more easily coordinate an attack, because they are all in mental communication with each other all the time. And they might absorb you — think how scary it was the first time you saw the Borg chanting: "You will be assimilated."

3. Looks Exactly Like a Human (See: Invasion of the Body Snatchers)

Somehow it's scarier when an alien looks exactly like a human, or is camouflaged as one. Even though Men in Black wasn't exactly scary, there was something uncanny when the alien took off its human skin and revealed its true face. And of course one of the reasons Hollywood has remade Invasion of the Body Snatchers four times in the past 50 years (Invasion was the most recent one) is that it's so freakin creepy that the aliens look perfectly human — except for the fact that they have no emotion. We will not, however, speak of the human-camo farting aliens from Doctor Who.

4. Treats Humans the Way Humans Treat Animals (See: Predator)

The infamous Twilight Zone tale "To Serve Man" packs all its punch into one single idea: the aliens have a cookbook ALL ABOUT EATING HUMANS! They look at us the way we look at chickens! The same idea lurks at the heart of popular franchise Predator, where the whole conceit is that the alien has just come to Earth on a safari to hunt human game. Where's the respect? 5. Polymorphous (See: The Thing)

If there's anything scarier than an alien that looks just like a human, it's an alien that can look like whatever it wants. Although the shiny, pretty aliens in Abyss wind up being our friends, they are super scary at first because they can morph into any shape they want. And of course what makes the thing in John Carpenter's version of The Thing so scary is that it can turn any body part into chunks of alien — human heads sprout legs, blood jumps up and runs around the room, people grow dog heads. Whoa. Same goes for the aliens in my personal favorite alien movie, Society, where a bunch of rich Beverly Hills types turn out to be polymorphous creatures who love to have giant orgies where they merge into a big room full of goo and eat humans.

6. Wants to Mate With Humans to Produce Scary Hybrid Offspring (See: Species)

The fear of an alien being who wants to mate with you probably goes back thousands of years, but in terms of current pop culture we can probably trace it back to H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu stories of the 1920s. Remember, one of the scariest things about Cthulhu's spawn is that they are mating with humans, producing strange, fishy-looking humans who eventually go back to the sea. Combining this rule with rule 3 (looks human) is the Species franchise, where a super-hot alien lady goes around humping unsuspecting men for their seed and then killing them in flagrante delicto.

7. Buglike (See: Independence Day, Starship Troopers)

Buglike aliens are a staple of the genre. Even the aliens of Alien are buglike, with their hard carapaces. Bugs are so scary-looking already, and we suspect they may also participate in rule 2, having collective consciousness. In fact, "buglike" has become shorthand (sometimes lazy shorthand) for "scary alien," which is why you see so many depictions of aliens with feelers or antennae on their heads. Bug aliens show up in some of the most generic scifi flicks like Independence Day and Starship Troopers. But there are buggy aliens in more highbrow places too, like the Ender's Game series, where Earth is battling (and ultimately genociding) a buglike race.

Really, I cannot convey to you the full atrocity that is this movie. Allow me simply to say that I had to choose between showing you this scene, and showing you one where Travis conjures up some alien soy milk in a box, along with a spiny fruit. Plus, the scenes of the aliens whipping Travis' gay roommate while drooling milk are priceless. As is pretty much any scene where Travis wears his helmet.

Demons in My Head

Flickr macrophotographer P/\UL took this on a Texas beach, where tiny sand crabs tunneling under the sand kick up these dwellings as they disappear. Here is another shot he took, of the cracking surface of mud in Galveston. To me it looks like a wound in the hide of some impossibly huge sea monster from an alien world.

Images by P/\UL.