UFO concept / Aliens

"Mark Davies" wrote:
I very much agree with you on most of this - I've never personally
associated UFO with 'traditional' (if you will) UFO folklore, I
really just took it on its own merits as an idea without identifying
it with accepted ideas or folklore about Unidentified Flying
Objects. And I think the stories are often rather shaky, with some
honourable exceptions. But the underlying concept and the way it
was translated into a TV series - the futuristic image, the secrecy
of SHADO, the fantastic hardware and effects, even the characters to
an extent - still make for compelling viewing. I particularly agree
with your later point about the Aliens, as I've often said the fact
that they have no dialogue and their motive is never explicitly
spelled out by them makes them all the more sinister and mysterious.
That was compromised slightly in the episode in which they send
Straker a letter of ultimatum, though. I forget which episode.

The Mysterons are considerably less mysterious than the Aliens,
because they spell out their intention and motive at the beginning
of every episode!

James

--- In SHADO@y..., James Gibbon <james.gibbon@v...> wrote:
> I very much agree with you on most of this - I've never personally
> associated UFO with 'traditional' (if you will) UFO folklore, ...

Traditional flying saucers and traditional Greys as their crew turn
up in so much fiction and Gerry Anderson needed something different
to make the series effective.

> ... [the aliens] have no dialogue and their motive is never
> explicitly spelled out by them makes them all the more sinister and
> mysterious. ...

In one UFO episode a human relays a message from the aliens: "We have
no quarrel with the people of Earth".

Some people want a mystery preserving; some people get tired of a
mystery and want it to be solved or explained. In some of the
Countdown and TV Action UFO stories, aliens talk, and sometimes
humans understand them and sometimes not; and in two stories events
on the alien homeworld are shown - in one of them Foster is abducted
to the alien homeworld and escapes and teams up with two other
abductees and they steal a UFO each and fly home. In two text stories
in the periodical Flightpath, a UFO and a SHADO team make temporary
alliance against a different alien threat.

> The Mysterons are considerably less mysterious than the Aliens,
> because they spell out their intention and motive at the beginning
> of every episode!

But we never see a Mysteron or get to find what they look like or how
their power gets from Mars to Earth (except for the two circles that
their eyes project). If they use spacecraft, those spacecraft are
cloaked and undetected.

I wonder what would have happened if the Earth explorers had not
fired on the Mysteron city and the Mysterons had welcomed the
Earthmen in peace?

What groups currently discuss Gerry Anderson stories other than UFO?
I thought that that is what the group F_A_B is for, but mostly it
gets less than 10 messages per month.

--- In SHADO@y..., James Gibbon <james.gibbon@v...> wrote:
> I very much agree with you on most of this - I've never personally
> associated UFO with 'traditional' (if you will) UFO folklore, ...

--- In SHADO@y..., "anthonyappleyard" <MCLSSAA2@f...> wrote:
> Traditional flying saucers and traditional Greys as their crew turn
> up in so much fiction and Gerry Anderson needed something different
> to make the series effective.

Another reason is likely that before CGI = computer generated imaging
came, there was the endless problem of how to represent aliens of
various sorts by human actors realistic and without looking absurd or
B-movie-ish or puppet-ish, such as the effect that some people call
the "man-in-a-suit-osaurus".

The first time I saw Greys on the screen was in Close Encounters of
the Third Kind, and there they only appeared at the end, and they
only stood about. To represent Greys the film crew had to put
costumes on young children, and had the usual sort of problems with
acting with children: the children kept taking their costume heads
off, and when the big synthesizer played they persistently disco-
danced to it.

I suspect that that sort of production problem was why in the series
Dark Skies the script writer after a few episodes killed off the Grey
that was on the team for a while.

More recently in Stargate a Grey species called the Asgard are
represented successfully: I don't know whether they are acted or CGI.

The UFO series alien helmet's characteristic of being wider above and
below, is a bit like the conventional shape of a Grey's head, And it
is grey in color.

I suspect that the gravity plates on the standard UFO series UFO, may
have been inspired by previous drawings of flying saucers with an
equator girdle of windows.

Are there available any Gerry Anderson studio drawings of what stages
were gone through before they arrived at the production versions of
their aliens and UFO's?