How pop culture has shaped our understanding of aliens

For decades, film and TV fascination with aliens has reflected ourselves – our fears, anxieties, hopes – long before a Senate report took them seriously

• It came out of the sky: US releases highly anticipated UFO report

Anticipation of the unclassified report by the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force has, unsurprisingly, sent America’s long-running UFO fascination into overdrive.

The confirmation of an unexplained somethings by even Barack Obama has felt unsettling, like a misread headline. The US government … is taking unidentified flying objects … seriously? To have them explicitly, publicly concerned with UFOs seems dubious – like the stuff of movies, which has long been the appropriate and accessible lane for interest in eerie objects in the sky.