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Extra Credit 015 - Fire in the Sky & Why the Sci-Fi (Patreon)

Published:
2023-09-26 12:00:00
Edited:
2023-09-28 13:14:16
Imported:
2026-06
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We're discussing the alien abduction classic Fire in the Sky as well as recent alien testimony in the US and Mexico. Also covered:

Voyage of the Rock Aliens 

Escape from the Planet of the Ant Men 

And then a bunch of obscure stuff like Star Wars and The Expanse.

Comments

MonsterTalk

There's no better place to talk about the interplay of fact and fiction than in the world of UFOs. The first UFO stories were really promoted by Ray Palmer - who we all know from AMAZING STORIES, but who also created FATE and FLYING SAUCER magazines and paid flying saucer originator Kenneth Arnold to go investigate an early saucer story. Fact, fiction, folklore and hoax all blend together until now it's almost impossible for a newcomer to the topic to figure out where the "legitimate" claims are and which are fantasy or literal fiction turned in on itself in an ouroboros of narrative mixology. The question of whether any claimant is really believing or not? We've settled in on the idea of "presumption of sincerity" as the approach we take, until we find evidence that something else is at play. I think that gives dignity to the experiencer and takes some of the steam out of the "foolin' the rubes" kind of hoaxer.

Daniel Restione

Hell- even Inspector Le Grasse knew how to deal with this stuff! He took his little stone dude to the experts! Share what you got or shut up!

Aidan McSweeney

Please do “Think Like a Dinosaur” by James Patrick Kelly. I think it’s an excellent example of the science fiction genre.

Sam Sagins

I’ve been thinking about the discussion of 2001 that y’all have been having. I feel embarrassed at my need to come to the defense of a highly successful iconic movie, but I do genuinely think that 2001 is meant to be a very specific experience that most people don’t have access to. Especially in the late 60s before the proliferation of home video, I would assume (maybe incorrectly) that Kubrick didn’t intend for this film to be seen on a small screen at a reasonable volume. That may be a “well duh” sort of statement. But it highlights how a movie theater experience is fundamentally a different experience from a home viewing, and that my overall reaction and opinion of a film is so dependent on that. A couple years ago there was an IMAX re-release of the movie for it’s 50th anniversary. The only one I could catch was a late night screening that started around 10pm. I was the only person in the theater, I sat in a spot where the ridiculous IMAX screen just barely fit into my field of view, and the sound system (probably as a result of the theater being empty) was absolutely deafening beyond any movie theater experience I’ve had before. The result was overwhelming as one would expect, but the scenes I found slow and boring before became engrossing as a result of the heightened sensory detail that became possible through its overwhelming presentation. In this setting, it may be the greatest movie I’ve ever seen, at least in the sense that no other movie has ever given me anything like that. At home, I’m like “dear lord why am I watching them meticulously eat their goofy astronaut food”. Does a film’s “greatness” include the criteria of being able to translate it’s experience consistently across viewing platforms?

Stacy Schumacher

Oh, Fire in the Sky. The film that lulls you into a false sense of security with that made for TV vibe to more effectively annihilate your sense of calm in the last 15 minutes. As a teen in the 90s I loved the X-Files and thought i was prepared. I was not. Core traumatic memory unlocked.

Sweatin' to the Great Oldies

Good UFO and alien abduction stories are rather like a good magic trick. They befuddle, astonish, and awe. We find ourselves frustrated because we can't figure them out and this allows the true believers to step in with a simple explanation: spacecraft from another world, we're star seed, magic. Most of the really popular UFO and alien abduction stories have been explained quite well. (A nice, recent starting point is the film "The UFO Movie THEY Don’t Want You To See" by Brian Dunning) And just like a magic trick, once you know how it is done, well, it loses most of its charm. The most depressing thing, I find, is how many politicians studiously avoid the clear explanations in favor of questionable (at best) testimony.

Aaron La Vene

The expanse is 100% my favorite sci fi show. Even watched it a second time with my wife and I think she would agree. I love how they try to make the physics of things making sense. Like the ship shrapnel in space when they are destroyed, that so many sci fi shows ignore. And it genuinely feels like it could be where we are in the future and how humans in their conditions and situations would react to the stimuli presented feels genuine.

UltharMeow

Our criteria and definition of “life” is based on our understanding of Earth biomes and the organisms that arise within them. Which is why science focuses on objects with liquid water and heat sources as the best place to support life. Which isn’t a failing of our science but an acknowledgment of the good ole scientific method working within the limitations of our understanding. What bakes my noodle is: what about planets with wildly different biomes? Gas giants, methane atmospheres? Is it plausible that molecules could arrange themselves into Life following entirely different rules that we never considered because they are so far removed from our limited experience? And if they did, would we even recognize those structures as “life”?

Andrew Brown

So a few thoughts: 1. Why do the aliens do what they do, it's employment of course, see the "intergalatic anal probing" documentary by the renowned filmmakers "Kids In the Hall". They clearly document the pressing need the endless probing. 2. Modern SF/F is dead - soooooo dead, really dead. Just look at the best sellers on Amazon, even if you remember to filter out the smut - yep - there is a special flag amazon let's you filter out that - 99% is LitRPG Harem fiction, the remaining 1% is weird dude writing about female assassins who don't really kill people but are notorious assassins etc, etc, and 3 I would argue that the worst things to happen to SF (and F) is Star Wars and Star Trek, The first Star Wars was a great heist movie set in a gestalt of 60's war movies and 70's heist stories, and the first Star Trek was an amazing mirror on the Cold War but they've crowded out all the rest of SF and set really poor expectations on what good SF is. But now there is no room for that other SF/F.... It's all been taken up by those franchises.

Jim Cannon

Disappointed that Chad fell back on that classical logical fallacy "50 million Navy men can't be wrong." You hate to see it.

It's a Ghost.

As a kid, my favorite episodes of Unsolved Mysteries were the alien abduction ones. I remember one in particular where there was a military guy who was on watch at night when a light appeared overhead, then when he looked back down at his watch, he realized several hours had passed!!!

Carter Stepper

I used to teach a sci fi course to high schoolers during the summers, and one of the things we did was try to define it in such a way that Dune, blade runner, and the expanse (among others) could all fit into it. It’s possible that the moniker “speculative fiction” is a more precise one than “science fiction,” but if pressed to define it, I’d first center it on the question “what does it mean to be human?” That is too broad, obviously, so I’d adjust it thus: science fiction is a genre that explores the question of what it means to be human via possible futures and differences in science, technology, and human abilities. Not exactly quippy but it’s better than using the old adage for pornography: I know it when I see it! I am also not scared at all by alien stories, but I do find them fascinating and fun in a different way. One of the reasons I do take many peoples accounts of their experiences seriously (in the sense that something happened, not that it’s necessarily an abduction by extraterrestrials), is that it so often ruins these peoples lives, like the real life subject of the film you watched, or Barney and Betty hill. Something terrible happened to them, but it’s unclear what. I also agree with Chris, given the vastness of space and the distances involved, it could very likely be some other phenomena than aliens. And clearly unidentified craft are flying around Willy nilly according to our government, so someone is screwing around out there. One last thought and a recommendation: have you watched The Vast of Night? It’s from 2019 but set in the ‘50’s, and for my money is one of the most engaging and interesting extraterrestrial movies out there. Really fun and might be a good bonus content.

Ben Gilbert

I always assumed that UFOs were just the government testing top secret aircraft and other military equipment. They would rather us and the Russians believe they were aliens.

Evan

Y’all should do Jacob’s ladder as an extra credit at some point. That’s the closest thing I can think of to the alien sequence in this being expanded out to a full movie (at least, that’s relatively main stream)

It's a Ghost.

Maybe related to this episode, I read a description of the forthcoming 4th season of True Detective today and was very intrigued. "When the long winter night falls in Ennis, Alaska, the eight men who operate the Tsalal Arctic Research Station vanish without a trace."

Long time hater

Not sure that being 15 at the time means the actor most famous for not aging couldn't have possibly been in Fire in the Sky...

Rickard Åström

Very interesting discussion about what SciFi is. It certainly has meant different things for different people over the years. I got introduced to SciFi in the early eighties when my older sister exposed me to such as Asimov and Arthur C Clarke. She would look for stories that had "sense of wonder" where the story was perhaps not so much about what humans do, but about completely foreign ideas, like the alien cylinder in Rendezvouz with Rama or the monolith in 2001. Well....until Clarke started writing sequels where it ALL was about people with in-fighting. :-P

Ben A

I have thoroughly enjoyed this month of potpourri strange and amusing fiction. And listening to you guys debate what constitutes sci-fi in various media was interesting, and parallels conversations I've had with others over the years. I think that sci-fi, much as fantasy, thriller, or mystery as genres serves as a broad way to organize literature and film to help the audience locate it or know (perhaps too broadly) what to expect. But there are combinations of all these genres, and that is what makes the fiction novel and at time unique. A story where individuals time travel and are confronted with a whodunnit in another time could encapsulate all those genres, but I doubt a publisher or librarian would want to place that story in the historical fiction or mystery sections. Perhaps this is cynical, but I would argue placing such a story in the sci-fi section would reach a broader audience than those in the mystery or historical fiction sections, in part because sci-fi generally encapsulates other genres. Mysteries also bleed into a variety of genres (thrillers, procedural crime, horror, and yes, sci-fi), for example, but would we look for Leviathan Wakes, the first book of the Expanse series, in the mystery section even though one of the main characters is a detective searching for a missing woman? Because the framing is a fictional future where space travel is the mechanism, the books are placed in sci-fi. But Chris is right, if we moved those stories onto galleons and kept the tale Earthbound, it would be in historical fiction or in the mystery section. This is a long-winded way to say I think there is no pure form of sci-fi, just as there is no pure form of most fiction. And this is why I greatly enjoy the latitude of genres you guys discuss under the banner of "strange stories," because what unites these is your interest and the fact that all the tales have an element that is out of the ordinary. Genres are what we make of them.

Jeremy Impson

"Genres are only useful as a suggestion for where to start browsing in the book store." I don't know where I first heard that, but I sincerely believe it is true. It can be fun to try to define things like Science Fiction, but if your conclusion is anything other than "it depends" I encourage you to consider the question some more. In order to be useful as a signpost, genres have to be rather broad. The alternative is to be as specific as some music fans have become, resulting in microgenre definitions that only describe one band, a period of time in one band's history, or a single album. I don't know what purpose that serves, other than to be an updated way to say, "my favorite band is pretty obscure; you probably haven't heard of them."

Pete Williams

I'm largely a skeptic (with a lower case). It does annoy me when I get called closed minded for saying I don't know what some phenomenon is rather than saying its definitely ghosts or aliens or bigfoot or what have you.

David Halstead

Lying Vincent Price testifies on his alien encounters.

Karl Haikara

Very late comment but revisiting this after rewatching the movie its T2s sister not daughter lol