ET Walks Into a Bar

What happens when **ET walks into a bar—and everybody laughs?** Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman set out to explore the history of aliens as comedy, only to make an unexpected discovery: some of the funniest extraterrestrials in television and movies have been carrying surprisingly serious UFO ideas with them for more than sixty years. It begins with the 1963 sitcom *My Favorite Martian*, whose pilot contains an Air Force aerospace test, an anomalous radar encounter, official suppression, a crashed spacecraft, a living non-human occupant, telepathy and an alien hiding in plain sight. Even stranger, Bryce discovers that the fictional X-15 encounter followed only months after a real X-15 pilot reported seeing something unexplained at nearly 60 miles altitude. From there, Bryce and Brent follow the alien comedy trail through *Mork & Mindy*, *ALF*, the *Coneheads*, *3rd Rock from the Sun*, *Men in Black*, *Paul*, *People of Earth*, *Resident Alien* and SNL’s hilarious alien-abduction sketches. Along the way, a pattern emerges. Early alien comedy made extraterrestrials safe by turning them into eccentric houseguests and cultural anthropologists. Later stories became increasingly comfortable with the real language of the Phenomenon: abductions, missing time, Grays, government investigators, crash retrievals, memory suppression, secret programs and entire taxonomies of non-human beings. So was Hollywood merely reflecting a growing UFO mythology—or helping create the vocabulary through which we now understand it? From *My Favorite Martian* giving America permission to laugh at aliens during the era of Betty and Barney Hill, to *Men in Black* turning secret-keepers into heroes, to *Paul* literally joking that an alien has been feeding UFO lore to Hollywood for decades, this episode asks whether comedy may be the perfect delivery system for extraordinary ideas: **the truth, wrapped in a joke.** To learn more: www.SoundLightFrequency.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.