What was the best UFO related series on television?

[Decker]

I just stumbled over this thread and want to throw one out there. Back in the 60's, oh about 1966 or 7 was

The Invaders ...A Quinn-Martin production. Haven't seen an episode in many moons but at the time ... damned good.

David Vincent ... coming home one night gets lost and pulls off the road to take a nap. Suddenly there is a classic saucer landing in front of him.

At the time ... Whew! That was some very Hot TV.

Decker

 

[ALPHA ROMEO UNIFORM]

British TV show UFO. American Taken.

 

[nameless]

I just stumbled over this thread and want to throw one out there. Back in the 60's, oh about 1966 or 7 was

The Invaders ...A Quinn-Martin production. Haven't seen an episode in many moons but at the time ... damned good.

David Vincent ... coming home one night gets lost and pulls off the road to take a nap. Suddenly there is a classic saucer landing in front of him.

At the time ... Whew! That was some very Hot TV.

Decker

I loved that show and even more intriguing was the claim that it was a pretty much a documentary of Fred Crisman's life!

 

[RobDel]

UFO Hunters and UFO Files were good. Chasing UFO's, not so good. Has anyone watched "Dark Skies"? I picked up the DVD set after the producer was on the show. It's very entertaining as a "what if" story. They used real historical characters and events. The show had a decent budget too, it looked great. I highly recommend it. I also have the first season of "In Search Of..." Nimoy's narration is great.

 

[Burnt State]

In search of was brilliant. Leonard Nimoy was brilliant. I think that is what got me reading books at the local library searching for answers. I remember borrowing some books as teenager that would have the librarian slide her glasses down the bridge of her nose to look at me in the most curious and unimpressed manner! I will say one crazy thing slowly but surely all the books I borrowed involving ley lines, occult, ufo research slowly but surely was removed from the library year after year.

Thanks for the memory. The library was my saving grace from about grade 5 onwards. When I had exhausted the sci-fi section of grade school I discovered the city library's paranormal section - it was limited and mostly filled with the occult, devil worship and the occasional tale of possession.

Between Leonard Nimoy and Arthur C. Clarke I had all sorts of interesting topics to research, but rarely could I find what I was looking for - there was only three or four UFO related books there ever. I waited patiently for the grocery store to produce new UFO related paperbacks that I would convince my mom to buy along with Elvis records, back when grocery stores used to sell albums.

My TV Guide beacons were In Search Of, Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious Universe and WKBD TV 50 Creature Feature (which introduced me to all the great, and great because they're bad, UFO related movies). These three dominated, though I was faithful to all the other 70' and 80's series listed in the poll.

 

[Burnt State]

Way back during an original airing of In Search Of with Leonard Nimoy, there was an episode where the show cut to an unscheduled insertion of a UFO film clip taken at a archaeological dig in the USA. It only lasted about a minute or so before the screen went to static and the show stayed that way until the end of the hour ( about 10 minutes ). The film showed a small ( about 15 foot wide ) faceted disk come floating in over the horizon and down into the dig site while the film crew was filming the workers. The camera people started following the UFO as it moved in and around people and objects. It was clear and looked totally genuine. I was awestruck. This was back in the 1970s so it would have been a lot harder to fake without a serious budget. I got a copy of the show but that segment is not in the released video. I've tried to get a comment from Nimoy but I've had no luck. The guy probably still has millions of unanswered Star Trek fan letters and only a few people ever get close enough to him to ask any deeper questions. The broadcast was obviously cut off on purpose to censor the footage. I've never been able to get to the bottom of that episode, but Nimoy must know about it. It makes me wonder if he's been sworn to silence or something because I've never seen him mention it since either. Let's hope he includes it in his memoirs.

I was very fascinated by your retelling of this anomalous tv moment. Does anyone else remember this? Have you pursued this with a broader audience? I find it an extremely strange story as it would require the network or broadcast station to have a lone wolf step up with rare footage, infiltrate the booth, interupt the broadcast and suggest to the masses that authentic footage exists. The static makes me think that either the entire broadcast was a staged event or there was someone else in the station that interrupted the broadcast hijacker. Either way it's a very strange occurrence - it's not very often that these things happen outside of fiction/movies. Do you remember if you were watching an American broadcast feed from a major network at the time or was this a local feed running re-runs? In Ontario, growing up, I remember watching re-runs from TVO.

What are your suspicions regarding what actually transpired?

 

[Randall]

I was very fascinated by your retelling of this anomalous tv moment. Does anyone else remember this? Have you pursued this with a broader audience? I find it an extremely strange story as it would require the network or broadcast station to have a lone wolf step up with rare footage, infiltrate the booth, interupt the broadcast and suggest to the masses that authentic footage exists. The static makes me think that either the entire broadcast was a staged event or there was someone else in the station that interrupted the broadcast hijacker. Either way it's a very strange occurrence - it's not very often that these things happen outside of fiction/movies. Do you remember if you were watching an American broadcast feed from a major network at the time or was this a local feed running re-runs? In Ontario, growing up, I remember watching re-runs from TVO.

What are your suspicions regarding what actually transpired?

I've tried to find others who also saw it. But so far I haven't had any luck. Nimoy and Landsburg would had to have known about it because Nimoy himself did the intro to the clip. So to clarify, when I say "unscheduled", I'm saying that is how Nimoy introduced it, so it was probably something he didn't see coming in the script, agreed to do it, and it was spliced into the network release in an non-storyboarded manner so that nobody saw it coming.

The only other way would have been to physically cut it in at the broadcast point, and that would have been much more difficult. But I swear it looked totally legit. Even though the clip was in black and white, it was in perfect focus as this faceted saucer came right down into this large dig site. You could clearly determine its size and distance from the camera.

When people working in the dig noticed it, they stopped to observe it. It looked like a drone to me. No dome on top. No crew cabin. It was a rotating disk like the classic "two pie plates stuck together", and perfectly symmetrical, but faceted instead of smooth. Nimoy is getting so old now that unless he actually got to see the clip, I don't know if he'd remember introducing it. But if he did see it he'd never forget it. I've tried emailing him via is agency and art site, but have received no response, and you can imagine how impossible it would be to get near him at a convention.

Someday I'd like to work with a special FX person to do a recreation. If anybody is interested please get in touch with me.