Top Seven Alien Abductions in Cinema and on TV
Steve Barton
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Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Here’s an example of another type of abduction…the abduction of the personality. In Invasion of the Body Snatchers the aliens didn’t take anyone anywhere; they just stripped humanity of their… well… humanity. Whether you’re talking about the original from 1956 or the well-received remake from 1978 (both based on the novel The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney), both films dealt with the same general concept: the loss of our emotion. And in reality, if stripped of emotion, what are we? This may be a scarier concept than actual physical abduction because you can survive a good anal probing, but what becomes of you when you lose yourself?
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Just to prove that all alien abductions aren’t bad, Steven Spielberg brought us the iconic film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. And just in case you still didn’t believe that aliens weren’t necessarily our enemies, he followed it up, of course, with E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, but no one got snatched up into space in that one. Although Close Encounters did end up on a positive note, it was quite harrowing along the way. Richard Dreyfuss’ performance is one of the most memorable of his career (who could forget his mashed potato Devil’s Tower sculpture?). And have we ever really gotten that five-tone song out of our heads? Do-do-doo-do-doooo.
Fire in the Sky
Based on the real-life story of Travis Walton’s personal tale, Fire in the Sky does for alien abductions what The Amityville Horror did for haunted houses. That is, taking an incredible tale of a supernatural experience, one that is believable but not able to be proven, and making an incredibly powerful book and, ultimately, movie about it. Many fans of the genre feel that Fire in the Sky is indeed the scariest alien abduction film they’ve ever seen, and that’s an opinion that’s hard to argue. If you really dig this movie and would like to check out more on the real-life abduction claim, track down a copy of Travis Walton’s book, The Walton Experience.
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