Hopkins’s descriptions leave something to be desired. The godly aliens of CE3K trash the home of the little boy Barry and they terrorize his mother as they abduct him. They disrupt the life and mind of Neary. Kindly and spiritual Klaatu happens to have a robot with him who is all business. His offer to leave the police force is eminently pragmatic. The comparison is frivolous in either case since any UFO aliens matching these descriptions go into the contactee file. Hopkins professes it is instructive that his abductees are not devoured like in War of the Worlds, but how would a myth devour a person?
That Hopkins is ignorant of science fiction would be apparent to any fan by the fact that he used the repellent phrase “sci-fi’ –a sure sign of an outsider to the genre.[10] War of the Worlds is one of the recognized masterpieces, yet it is grossly evident Hopkins never read it or he would be co-opting Wells as an unconscious abductee. Far from “mindlessly” devouring us, Wells endowed his aliens with “intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic. The did not devour people but took the fresh and living blood of other creatures and injected it into their own bodies. His aliens had “no extensive muscular mechanism”. The invaders also brought along for provisions bipeds with flimsy siliceous skeletons and feeble musculature.[11]
There are multiple similarities to other abduction narratives – an immense pair of dark eyes possessing an extraordinary intensity, a mouth without lips, greyish color of skin, the skin glistening like wet leather, telepathy. They are also “absolutely without sex”. Add to this that the alien craft was circular, made a peculiar humming sound, and when they flew the sky would be alive with their lights. In fact, Wells’s aliens more resemble Hopkins’s abducting aliens than most abduction reports,
Hopkins further errs in thinking the Wells aliens are mere “satanic monsters”.[12] Their motivation is survival. Their world is dying and Earth is their only escape. Ironically, just a couple of pages before Hopkins mangles War of the Worlds he quotes the impressions of an abductee that the aliens are from a society millions of years old that is dying. They desperately need to survive. This places UFO aliens squarely in the main tradition of aliens in SF films.
Dying worlds are commonplace in alien invasion movies. It leads the aliens in “This Island Earth” to borrow Earth scientists for their expertise in atomic energy. It motivates the aliens in “The 27th Day” to give Earth people the means of destroying human life. It motivates the “Killers from Space” to operate on a man, extract information from his mind, and compel him to become a spy saboteur.
It leads the “Devil Girl from Mars” to abduct healthy males. It similarly motivates the aliens in “I Married a Monster from Outer Space”, “The Mysterians”, and “Mars Needs Women” to procure females for breeding stock. An astronomer in “Invaders from Mars” theorises the secret operations aliens engage in are motivated by the fact that Mars is a dying world. The aliens in the popular TV series “The Invaders” were also escaping a dying world.[13]
The fact is most film aliens have some implicit motivation to
their activities. One of the few exceptions I could find was the
“so thin – so fragile” aliens of “Target Earth!” and even they
don’t seem particularly satanic or monstrous.[14] It seems more
sensible to flip Hopkins’s allegation around. He says nothing
about the aliens of UFO abductions resembling “sci-fi”. I ask, is
there anything about UFO aliens that does not resemble science
fiction?
An abductee in the 1954 movie “Killers from Space” has a strange
scar and a missing memory of the alien encounter that caused it.
The mysterious impregnation of women, including virgins, and the
subsequent birth of intelligent hybrid children is the theme of
the 1960 film “Village of the Damned”. Brain implants are
featured in the 1953 movie “Invaders from Mars”[15]
Take a look at the creatures of the 1957 movie “Invasion of The
Saucer Men”. The bald, bulgy-brained, googly-eyed, no-nosed
invaders match the stereotype of UFO aliens delineated by Bullard
to an uncanny extent. It prompts worries that abductees are not
only plagiarists, but have bad taste as well.[16]
“Earth versus the Flying Saucers” (1956) also precedes UFO lore in featuring an abduction in which thoughts are taken. Saucerians abduct a general, make his head transparent, and suck out the knowledge to store it in an Infinitely Indexed Memory Bank. Though the frequency of the motif in abduction narratives can be laid to psychological factors in the personalities of abductees, one cannot rule out the movie enculturating the association.
Years from now we may have an epidemic of implanted parasites, potential chest-bursters, due to the influence of the movie “Alien” starting such an association. Presently such a report would be too suspect, but eventually some puzzling medical oddity might be associated with such a delusion and the UFO lore would evolve in new directions. It could just as easily never happen because of the vagaries of social factors.
In a more esoteric vein even abduction narrative structure has science fiction predecessors. Thomas Bullard has discovered a consistent structural order to events within abduction reports. There are eight types of events and they are preferentially ordered in this manner:
(i) capture,
(ii) examination,
(iii) conference,
(iv) tour,
(v) otherworldly journey,
(vi) theophany,
(vii) return,
(viii) aftermath.
No abduction has every event, but events avoid appearing out of this sequence. Abductees aren’t generally given a tour of the ship before examination or conference and so forth. Bullard considers the arrangement occasionally arbitrary from a rational standpoint. The fidelity of reports to this arrangement seems, to Bullard, to indicate these are real experiences. He would expect the elements of the story to get jumbled if they were subjective.[17]