ABDUCTING ALIENS

I have just finished watching Steven Spielbergs latest film 'Disclosure Day', which revolves around a government cover-up of alien contact. Whilst it is a total departure from other recent alien films and does actually feature an alien entity, it still managed to leave me a little disappointed, compared to his earlier opus, 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind'. For me, aliens should be, by definition, utterly beyond anything we are used to, rather than appearing to be a a 'version' of humanity. As a child of the sixties, alongside the actual space race and the push for the moon landing, I was acutely aware of the presence of aliens. Not in the real sense of extraterrestrial invasion or interference, but in the media of the day, which, due to the fascination with all things space, included little green men and bug eyed monsters at every available opportunity. For a small boy, this was a dream come true, as alongside all the robot and spaceship toys, there were astronauts and aliens galore, in tv and cartoons, books and comics and in toys and games.

TV shows such as the Outer Limits spawned a set of bubblegum cards, with images of the aliens and creatures in livid colour - when I was given a set of the cards at about age 7, I was utterly terrified of some of the creatures depicted, such as the Chromite and the Glob and yet, revisiting the series today, the special effects look crude and shabby and the aliens appear far from frightening.

By contrast, an early X-rated horror film, the Quatermass Xperiment from 1955, which I was allowed to watch on TV in the early sixties and utterly traumatised me at the time, still has the capacity to unnerve me, some fifty years later, as the alien creature was so far beyond the normal shape and vision of anything which I had experienced before. Richard Wordsworth played a beleagured astronaut who is 'infected' by a space born entity, which gradually transforms him into an amorphous spongiform octopoid. Wordsworth's performance is extremely chilling as he manages to convey a sense of implacable threat, without uttering a single audible word of dialogue throughout the first half of the film. The later scenes, as the alien becomes fully matured were apparently effected by using a live octopus strapped to a board for closeups and a very convincing maquette for the distance shots.

A later sequel, which appeared as a live transmission TV series and as a Hammer film, was Quatermass and the Pit. Nigel Kneale's excellent script and crafty special effects once more left me chilled, as work on an underground tube station leads to the discovery of a crashed martian colony ship.

Both the TV and film versions feature a demonic looking insectoid alien, which terrorises London before being defeated by the good Professor. Although not contemporary with the series, these modern interpretations of the Hammer film martian would have given me nightmares as an 8 year old!

On a less terrifying note, toys and models of space aliens abounded in the sixties, as the 1950's crop of B-Movies had set the scene for giant monsters from outer space and the TV revolution of the sixties had introduced Star Trek, Dr Who and Lost in Space bringing all kinds of weird creatures into the home.

Toys such as the 1968 Miniflex Space Safari, allowed kids to rove distant planets and collect specimens of alien life in special capsules, whilst Remco's Hamilton Invaders series, pitted military might against a rampaging space spider called Horrible Hamilton.

Sweets and candies often included small toys in gumball machines, like this diminutive Man from Mars.

Rubber monsters were extremely popular in the sixties, both as capsule toys and as small inexpensive figures sold from a counter top box. One of my favourite sets were six alien figures that appeared in several different colourways and were made into keyrings, pencil rubbers and small playset figures.

The bell shaped alien was always my favourite and has appeared in many different forms and sizes over the years, which I have since been able to collect from ebay and other sources.

In 1970, Kellogs Sugar Smacks cereals included small plastic space critter in each Star Trek themed box. As Mr Spock looked on, a tiny colourful Crater Critter would tumble out into the bowl.

The modern series of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoons and films featured an alien called Kraang, a figure of Kraang apeared in a Lego set and also in a Ferrero Kinder Surprise chocolate egg, both of which sit really well amongst the critters and are very reminiscent of the early sixties B movie creatures.

A series of rubber monsters called 'Teachers Pets' were common in high street stores, sold individually for a few pence. The exotic looking creatures were based on a set of bubblegum cards and stickers, featuring outlandish looking creatures with everyday names like Alvin and Kenneth.

More modern alien creatures tend to favour a more humanoid shape, such as the bendable rubber figures from Independance Day movie tie ins, or these dinosaur riding spacemen from the Britains toy line.

Possibly some of the best space alien toys appeared in the Mattel Major Matt Mason figure line, a series of toys which ran concurrent withthe Apollo programme, so that kids could re-enact their own moon landing with astronauts, moon crawlers and a space station. Not to be left behind, Mattel introduced Callisto, a transparent headed humanoid and the insectoid Scorpio alien, to complete the line and populate the imaginary planets being discovered by Mattel's Major Matt.

THERE AND BACK AGAIN

 The Atremis II mission successfully returned in the early hours of this morning and thanks to the wonderful world of live streaming, I was able to watch as the capsule approached Earth, was captured by its gravity and drawn home at Mach 33. Watching the globe draw ever closer, it was impossible to gauge the terrific speed that the capsule was moving at and it was only after it re-entered the atmosphere and began its freefall down to the Pacific Ocean, was it possible to see its velocity.

The proliferation of cameras on board the spacecraft, including GoPro's on the solar panels, ensured that live imagery was available at almost all points during the mission. When the Integrity capsule was traversing the far side of the moon, it was possible to see the crew inside the capsule as well as some of the views they were experiencing themselves.

Inside the capsule, the crew used Nikon Z9 cameras, to photograph the lunar landscape, but also recorded commentary of naked eye observations, such as the fall of micrometeorites at the terminator. The crews descriptions of the lunar surface, including the albedo and colouration of the lunar soil, was detailed and evocative, with greens and browns being visible in some of the newer craters.

Almost all the in flight videos and stills show the crew as happy and having a thoroughly great time on the mission, as can be seen in the selfie shot of Christina Koch in the cabin window. As the capsule crossed the lunar farside, mission Commander Reid Wiseman requested that an unnamed crater be recognised as 'Carroll', after his late wife and a second crater, 'Integrity' after the capsule itself.

It will be fascinating to see all the recorded imagery from the mission, now that the crew are safely returned, although NASA has shared a few choice shots during the mission, such as images of the far side and the Orientale Basin, which has never been seen by the human eye before.

It is fascinating to see the comparison of the camera shots with an informal iphone shot through the cabin window of the lunar surface, which shows a much browner colouration to the moon, more in keeping with the verbal descriptions given by the crew.

The crew also managed to provide some absolutely priceless free publicity for camera manufacturer Nikon, Apple iphones and during a live cast with the Canadian President, an inadvertent product placement - front and centre - of Nutella Hazelnut Spread! During the transmission with Earth, a dislodged jar of the spread floated blithely across the screen, much to the amusement of everyone, including the premier, who commented that he hoped the crew would be using maple syrup on their pancakes instead!

Some of the most ethereal and beautiful shots came during the lunar flyby, as the Moon eclipsed the Sun and was surrounded by a ghostly corona for a few minutes, as the capsule traversed the far side.

Once more, a shot of the crew - presumably by iphone again, wearing eclipse glasses, shows them to be having a great time and almost lends an air of frivolity to what was one of the most dangerous and extreme space missions ever completed.

Following return to Earth orbit and capsule separation from the Service Module - once more, visible in real time - the speed of the vehicle could be appreciated more fully, as the globe of Earth began spin faster beneath the craft, before the re-entry of the atmosphere interfered with communications and an anxious few minutes went by as the capsule returned.

Appearing in the upper atmosphere, cameras were able to clearly capture the descent, as the capsule was in freefall, both in infra red and normal colour, before drogue chutes were deployed to slow the descent from over 25,000 miles per hour.

As speed dropped from the hypersonic, pilot chutes took over and assisted the release of the three main parachutes. At 10,000 feet, and approaching subsonic speed, they began to unfurl and checked the nail-biting descent, so the capsule eventually hit the ocean at a steady 20 mph.

After some anxious waiting for the capsule to settle and perform safety checks before being powered down, the recovery crew were able to make contact with the crew and move in to begin retrieval.

All four crew were rescued and returned to a waiting carrier by helicopter, to be checked over.

NASA has set a date of 2028 for the Artemis 3 mission, which is intended to land a crew on the lunar surface, I sincerely hope the unqualified success of an apparently textbook mission, will spur them on to meet this historic deadline. Godspeed NASA!