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.

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