Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956)

“What makes you think you can conquer us without a fight?!” 

We open in media newlyweds as Dr. Russell Marvin and the former Miss Carol Hanley have finally made it official, in a Justice of the Peace sense, and are currently plotting out their pending honeymoon as they motor down a lonesome desert highway -- destination, a fortified military base and research facility, which serves as the current headquarters of Operation Skyhook, where Dr. Marvin (Marlowe) serves as the chief civilian engineer.

In fact, Skyhook was the brainchild of Dr. Marvin, whose goal was to launch a series of orbiting tracking satellites as part of the ever-escalating space-race between the United States and the Soviet Union -- ten attempts thus far, whose results are, well, inconclusive. But! Turns out there’s also a third party that’s about to butt into this Cold War, who intends to have the last word on who controls the Earth’s exosphere as the Marvin’s car is suddenly buzzed by an Unidentified Flying Object -- the very same prototypical domed flying saucer behind a recent rash of UFO sightings all over the world (-- at least according to the film’s opening preamble, ‘natch).

Here, a terrified Carol (Taylor) manages to keep the car on the road as the UFO hovers over them, dangerously close, emitting an ear-piercing, insect-like chitter for several harrowing seconds before the craft finally withdraws and then instantly disappears. Thus, with no physical proof of the encounter, and thinking of his reputation if he reports an encounter with some “little green men” to his superiors, the couple agrees that they need to keep this incident as their little secret -- at least for now.

However, after reaching their destination, as Dr. Marvin goes over some last minute prep-work before launching the next satellite payload rocket, hoping to rectify why they lost contact with those first ten, Carol busily transcribes a tape recording her husband was making on the ride in, who forgot the recorder was still on when the UFO appeared until they both hear that unmistakable thrum and whirring screech. But this evidence is tabled for the moment, as Marvin prioritizes the launch of his latest rocket, which goes off without a hitch.

Then, Skyhook gets a visit from General John Hanley (Ankrum), who is both Carol’s widower father and the rocket program’s military liaison with the Pentagon. And while he is happy that these two have finally tied the knot, the real reason for his presence is a little more dire. Seems he wanted to stop the latest launch but wound up too late. Why? Well, Hanley has finally discovered the reason they lost contact with all those other satellites: the wrecked remains of seven of them that cratered-in all over the globe -- first mistaken as meteor strikes, while the other three are presumed to have splashed down in the ocean.

This is too much of a coincidence for Marvin; and later, after a celebratory family dinner over the nuptials, when word comes that all telemetry with the latest satellite has also been lost, Marvin reveals to General Hanley the close encounter he and Carol had with that UFO; and how he fears whoever was piloting this unearthly contraption might be the cause of their satellite failures. Hanley, of course, is dubious, despite listening to the evidentiary recording. But if it's more proof he needs, Marvin is determined to get it by rigging the next rocket with a camera array so it can broadcast back whatever happens when it, too, is inevitably knocked out of the sky like all the others. (Let’s see. [Checks notes.] Ah, yes. Insert your tax dollars at work joke, here.)

Thus and so, when the day of the latest launch arrives, Dr. Marvin and Carol hunker down in the underground control center to monitor things while Hanley remains topside. But before the countdown can even commence, the flying saucer reappears; and not only does it breach the base’s perimeter, but it also comes in for a landing! 

Quickly surrounded by Skyhook’s crack security force, when the hatch opens and a trio of roughly humanoid figures march out of the craft, no one is taking any chances and, hostile intentions or not, the men open fire on these armored, stiff-jointed interlopers.

Apparently killing one of the extraterrestrials, the other two return fire with some kind of disintegrator beam as they drag the body back inside the ship’s now erected electro-magnetic force-shield, as all the bullets and shells fired at them are now neutered. And once the landing party is safely back through the hatch, the UFO lifts off before firing-up its main weapon -- a more massive version of their handheld disintegrators, which they use to finish atomizing the base’s defenders before laying waste to the entire compound.

And as everything burns topside, and all that suddenly loose carbon disperses into the ether, the Marvins get buried alive under all the rubble. Meanwhile, the aliens land once more and retrieve an unconscious Hanley before leaving the field of this extremely one-sided battle. 

And while it’s still unclear over who was the real aggressor here, this brutal show of force definitely reveals who has the upper-hand if things escalate any further, which, alas, seems pretty inevitable now…

Back on June 24, 1947, when aviator Kenneth Arnold spotted nine glowing disc-like craft streaking past Mt. Rainier at unheard of speeds, his report on these unidentified flying objects triggered a nationwide surge of similar "flying saucer" sightings and stoked the fires of speculation on their origin. Were they Russian? Was this some kind of Nazi Doomsday weapon? Or were they something from outer space?

One month later, in Roswell, New Mexico, initial reports of an actual crashed and recovered UFO stirred-up this growing controversy even more, though this "proof" was quickly refuted as a case of mistaken identity by the Powers that Be. Then, in January, 1948, things turned a little more sinister with a report that a UFO had shot down a pursuing F-51 Mustang near Ft. Knox, Kentucky.

Alleged Flying Saucer sighted over Passaic, New Jersey (1952).

Now, whether the plane piloted by Captain Thomas Mantell was shot down or crashed after running out of fuel is still hotly contested to this day. What wasn't was the overall keenness of the public's reaction to these sightings after this particular incident. Once written off as fantastical tales of crackpots and publicity seekers, people demanded answers as to What these things were, Where they came from, and, most importantly, What were their intentions?

Here, the Air Force tried to provide some answers through several studies and at least three task forces -- Projects Grudge, Sign, and Bluebook. Not satisfied, and in an attempt to get his own undiluted answers, in the March, 1950, issue of True Magazine, Donald Keyhoe, a retired Marine aviator and an ardent UFOlogist, wrote his treatise, Flying Saucers Are Real, where he postulated on the extraterrestrial origin of these phenomenon and the government's ill-advised attempts to deny this and cover these facts up. This article would prove so popular the author would expand it into a book, which sold over a half-million copies.

And then, as these sightings and reports continued to pile up, the shit really hit the fan in 1952, when over the last week of July, several UFOs kept buzzing the nation's capital, outrunning any and all pursuit planes, who, apparently, had the Presidential authority to shoot them down if they refused to land as ordered. But despite several radar contacts, all pursuit turned up nothing. The official government explanation for this mass sighting? Meteors.

Meantime, Keyhoe followed all this up with another best-seller, Flying Saucers from Outer Space (1953), which detailed several of the encounters already mentioned and blew the lid off the alleged Roswell cover-up. And while Keyhoe felt these visitors' intentions weren't hostile -- just rubber-necking, basically, film producer Charles H. Schneer had other ideas and felt it was high time to cash in, cinematically speaking, with his new partner, special-effects animator, Ray Harryhausen.

“One of [Schneer’s] tricks for keeping a finger on the pulse of public interest was to clip items and stories from newspapers and magazines,” said Harryhausen in his autobiography, An Animated Life. “He recognized the exploitation value of a film about a flying saucer invasion and persuaded [the studio] to film such a story with me shooting the effects for far less money than it would appear on screen” -- at least in comparison with what Paramount spent on The War of the Worlds (1953).

A native of Norfolk, Virginia, Charles Hirsch Schneer had been a movie buff since childhood. “My mother would ask where I was going and I would fib: ‘To the library,’” said Schneer in a rare interview with Steve Swires for Starlog Magazine (June, 1990). “Actually, I went from one theater to another on Saturdays. I started out at 10am and didn’t come home until 5pm.”

Initially, Schneer was pursuing a journalism degree but an elective course in screenwriting soon had him shifting collegiate gears. And to those ends, after graduating, he landed a job working as an assistant at the New York City branch of Columbia Pictures’ publicity department. Then, when the United States entered World War II, Schneer enlisted and served in the Army Signal Corps, where he made training and morale films, serving in the same unit as the likes of John Huston, George Cukor, and, you guessed it, Ray Harryhausen.

However, these two didn’t officially meet until the war ended as, by mere happenstance, they both mustered out in the same location and on the same day. This was a mere casual acquaintance, according to Schneer, and, “We never discussed the idea of collaborating in the future.” Thus, out of the Army in 1946, Schneer followed his former captain, Marshall Grant, to Hollywood, who gave him a job as an associate producer at Universal. But he barely got his feet wet before William Goetz took over the studio, rebranding it as Universal International, and Schneer didn’t survive the resulting purge.

Sam Katzman with Little Richard (Don't Knock the Rock, 1956).

But Schneer landed at Columbia before his feet dried, where he was assigned to Sam Katzman’s legendary B-unit, where he would also serve as an associate producer. “Sam knew everything there was to know about making a movie,” said Schneer in the same interview with Swires. “He was a very enterprising fellow, and was enormously intuitive. But, he was a very tough taskmaster and a real skinflint.”

Katzman was indeed legendary for his knack of cashing in on trends and spending very little money on his productions, which explains why they always made a profit. “A picture that makes money is a good picture -- whether it is artistically good or bad,” said Katzman in a 1957 interview for Variety, where he claimed his pictures were the bread and butter of the movie industry. “I’m in the five and dime business, not the Tiffany business," he said. "I don't get ulcers with the type of pictures I make."

“In those days, we made ten pictures a year in the B-unit,” said Schneer. “We operated like an assembly line. I was responsible for the stories, casting, and editing on all of the films in the unit … I found the subject matter, I hired the writers, and I developed the material” but Schneer seldom got any screen credit for his efforts on the likes of Triple Threat (1948) or The Pathfinder (1952).

But by 1955, Schneer had gained enough experience to start making his own credits by producing a film himself. He would still be working under Katzman, who still controlled the purse strings, but it would free him up to do the films he wanted to do and do them his way. Inspiration would come from the first Hydrogen Bomb test on the Bikini Atoll in March of 1954. For if that detonation had stirred-up some kind of sea creature from the bowels of the ocean, which then proceeded to attack San Francisco and destroy the Golden Gate Bridge, well, “That would be a hell of a film,” Schneer concluded.

Meantime, Harryhausen had just made a name for himself with his work on the wildly successful The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), where a thawed out dinosaur attacked New York City, whose impact on the industry was huge -- and in a lot more ways than you’d think. Here, Schneer reached out to Harryhausen through a mutual friend and he agreed to participate. “I don’t believe I would’ve made that type of picture if I hadn’t been able to get Ray to do the FX,” said Schneer.

It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) would prove to be a box-office success for Columbia, which went a long way in convincing Katzman to approve Schneer’s proposed follow up feature, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956). “The newspapers were full of flying saucer stories at the time,” said Schneer. And to reflect these current events and give the film a sense of credibility, as originally conceived, the film would begin with the discovery of a downed flying saucer like the Roswell incident, and then climax with an armada of alien warships attacking Washington D.C.

Securing the rights to Keyhoe's first book as a starting point, Schneer would go through three scriptwriters before the cameras rolled. Curt Siodmak -- The Wolfman (1941), The Magnetic Monster (1953), got the first crack, who established the elements of Skyhook; George Worthing Yates -- THEM! (1954), The Amazing Colossal Man (1957), got the second shot; and then Bernard Gordon -- The Man Who Turned to Stone (1957), The Day of the Triffids (1963), was finally able to stitch it all together to both Schneer and Harryhausen’s satisfaction.

It should also probably be noted that, being black-listed at the time after having his name named by William Alland during the House Un-American Activities Committee’s Communist witch-hunt, Gordon had to contribute under a pseudonym, Raymond T. Marcus, who must’ve taken some grim satisfaction when the film left no recognizable national monument, where those hearings that essentially ruined his career took place, unmolested.

Another fascinating tidbit about the script is how the film’s opening salvo and show of force eerily reflected the events leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, where an ultimatum was first sent by the Japanese but then went untranslated until after the attack itself. This explains why General Hanley, after reviving aboard the flying saucer, has no idea what the over-modulated aliens are talking about when they claim to have made arrangements to meet with Dr. Marvin at the designated coordinates of the Skyhook compound; and thus, aren’t very happy with the reception they received nor the death of their chief emissary.

The aliens mull this over for a moment, remarking on a "lack of compensation" over a "time differential" or some such, before questioning their prisoner further, who will give them nothing more than his name, rank and serial number. Unfortunately for Hanley, the advanced technology of his captors goes well beyond interstellar flight and those disintegrator beams, as an ominous contraption slowly lowers from above, pulsating with light as it draws a bead on his head. And while they refer to it as an “Infinitely Indexed Memory Bank,” to the lay-Earth-man it’s simply a brain-draining machine that hums to life and then sets to work -- without the benefit of any anesthesia for the patient/victim.

Meanwhile, the Marvins are still trapped in the bunker under what little remains of Skyhook. And as the generator runs out of gas, with the usable oxygen not far behind, Dr. Marvin leaves a record of what happened into his tape recorder. And as the batteries on this also fail, he rewinds it to give his last testament one final listen and makes a startling discovery: turns out those batteries were so far gone the tape will now only play at a very slow speed, and he just so happened to stop and play right when the flying saucer buzzed them. And like a record played at a higher speed, which can turn a normal recording into nonsense, here, the nonsense becomes normal; and sure enough, the aliens had requested to meet with him.

Marvin, of course, feels a little guilty over this colossal cock-up. But when he and Carol are eventually rescued and flown to Washington by a Major Huglin (Curtis) for a debriefing at the Pentagon with Vice Admiral Enright (Browne), the aliens once more make contact with him -- at the right speed this time, and arrange for another meeting along the shore of Chesapeake Bay. Against specific orders from the military not to go, Marvin slips his security detail and heads for the rendezvous point -- with Carol, Huglin and a motorcycle cop, who wants to cite them all for speeding, right behind him.

This merry chase ends at the beach, where a flying saucer ominously awaits with its shields down and the hatch open. Upon entering, Marvin’s guilt over the Skyhook disaster quickly evaporates as the aliens reveal the true purpose for this palaver as they take their captive audience on a bit of a joyride throughout our solar system. Seems their own sun flamed-out centuries ago in a far distant galaxy, and what’s left of their entire race has been convoying around in a fleet of saucers ever since, searching the spaceways for a suitable planet to colonize. And now, at long last, they’ve finally found one.

However, the envoy claims their ancient race has no real desire to purge their new home before moving in, and hope for a peaceful transition of power; but if the native inhabitants choose to resist, make no mistake, they will not hesitate to unleash the full might of their superior technology and the vast amount of firepower at their disposal to achieve total subjugation. So, basically, Earth can do this the easy way, or the hard way. 

Told the planet will not be surrendered without a fight, the aliens quickly show how resistance would be a futile gesture by first revealing the shambling, zombified shell of Carol’s father, and then give a practical demonstration of the Infinitely Indexed Memory Bank by lobotomizing the patrolman on the spot. Thus, all the pilfered memories of both men -- including Hanley’s vast knowledge on all things U.S. military, now belong to the aliens. And to punctuate this point of power even further, one of their scout ships is ordered to obliterate a US Navy destroyer, which it does with extreme prejudice.

With that, Marvin, Carol and Huglin are released so they may deliver this ultimatum to the powers that be. This they do. However, assuming the sturm und drang of their destructive weaponry and brain-sucking tech will result in a quick capitulation, these invaders are about to get a harsh lesson on the inherent folly of assumptions as the human race basically gives them the middle finger and then scrambles to come up with an effective countermeasure to stop them -- with the fate of the Earth hanging in the balance. 

Luckily, the military are able to intercept and decode all of the alien’s communications, which reveals they have 56-days before the invaders will launch their attack to coincide with a massive solar storm. Being the only person who’s seen a flying saucer up close, Dr. Marvin takes the lead in developing a new weapon to combat them. He believes their disintegrators are based in ultra-sonics and their propulsion systems are anti-gravity and magnetic in nature. And while he thinks they should try to develop their own version of a sonic cannon, a Professor Kanter (Zaremba) feels they would have better luck in the limited time-frame by piggybacking on some other scientists’ work on the Earth’s magnetic field, modify its limited range and potential, and turn it into a weapon, which, theoretically, would disrupt the saucer’s propulsion system and bring them down.

And so, work begins to do just that. But! The invaders also have spies lurking about, which uncovers their working prototype and dispatches a saucer to take care of this. In the ensuing fight, the miniature spy-craft is destroyed and one of the aliens is killed -- a straggler from the landing party, but not before he kills Professor Kanter. 

Here, the gathered Earthlings get their first look at what’s hidden beneath that armor -- a wizened, scarecrow-like figure that depends on the armor for life support. They’re also able to save the prototype -- at least temporarily, and field test it at the same time as the laboratory is flattened by a saucer, which is then hit by the anti-gravity gun. And while the weapon isn’t powerful enough to bring it down, it was enough to force the aliens to retreat -- but not before they unceremoniously dump the body of General Hanley out the hatch.

When the fateful 56th day finally arrives, radar indicates that a fleet of saucers is zeroing in on Washington, D.C.. And while conventional weapons prove useless, Dr. Marvin soon rolls in with a convoy of flatbed trucks, each mounted with an anti-gravity gun and the largest portable generators available. Thus, the battle is joined, which pitches back and forth as the alien beachhead on the White House lawn is neutralized. 

And soon enough, the tables are turned and the flying saucers start tumbling out of the sky and begin plowing into the Potomac and several famous landmarks -- the Washington Monument, Union Station, and the Capitol dome, resulting in an incalculable amount of property damage.

Summarily defeated, what’s left of the alien strikeforce retreats. Further tracking shows their armada has withdrawn from Earth’s orbit altogether to try their luck someplace else. This, of course, allows the Marvins to finally go on their honeymoon. And while they frolic on the beach, Carol admits they won this time, but what if they come back? Or something worse comes next? We’ll be ready for them, assures her husband. But that’s a worry for another day as the couple embraces and we fade out into the sunset, safe in the knowledge that terrestrial know-how and can-do-ism will always send them alien sumbitches packing. 

Now, in that assembly line production model at Columbia Schneer referred to earlier, I honestly don’t know how much control he had over who directed his pictures. Were they chosen by the producer? Or were they assigned by the studio? For It Came from Beneath the Sea, Robert Gordon sat in the director’s chair. And for Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, Fred Sears got the nod.

Like Gordon, Sears was a former actor who switched to directing. And while he had nearly two dozen B-movies notched on his director’s chair before taking this assignment, these were mostly westerns -- Ambush at Tomahawk Gap (1953), The Nebraskan (1953), or crime capers -- Cell 2455, Death Row (1955), Teenage Crime-Wave (1955), or rock ‘n’ roll showcases -- Rock Around the Clock (1956), Don’t Knock the Rock (1956). And so, Earth vs the Flying Saucers would be Sears’ first FX-driven feature and his unsure hand gets kinda rough in a couple of spots, especially in the overabundant and all-too noticeable rear-projection scenes. 

But worst of all were all the inserts and reaction shots during the climactic battle -- though to be fair, those might be all second unit results, meaning the blame lay elsewhere. And when you look at how much care and effort Harryhausen put into creating those highly detailed miniatures for the Battle of Washington D.C. -- seven in total, which were basically built pre-broken so he could animate every piece of falling debris upon impact, and how carefully he melded all of those inserts and stock footage together with those models rather seamlessly, makes these lazy second-unit efforts even more frustrating.

Sears would fare better with the film’s co-feature, as he would pull double-duty by also directing The Werewolf (1956), where the old lycanthropic legends of old are adapted for the Atomic Age with some pretty nifty results. Averaging about six films a year, the prolific Sears reached his peak in 1956, directing ten features and over a dozen television episodes. 

Alas, he might’ve been pushing himself a little too hard as not long after the release of another sci-fi double feature for Katzman, the notoriously gonzo The Giant Claw (1957) and The Night the World Exploded (1957), Sears would suffer a fatal heart attack in November of 1957. He was only 44. But he wasn’t quite done yet as his last five films would be released posthumously, and his career officially ended from beyond the grave with the release of The Ghost of China Sea (1958).

For the cast, we have the poor-man’s Richard Carlson, Hugh Marlowe, as the can-do square jaw, who acquits himself fairly well. And he’s ably supported by Joan Taylor, Morris Ankrum (-- I can’t be the only one who laughed out loud in the theater when General Ankrum showed up in the movie within the movie in Joe Dante’s Matinee (1993), right?), Thomas Henry Browne, and fast-shooting Donald Curtis. Also onboard was prolific voice actor Paul Frees, who provided the over-modulated voice of the alien invaders.

One also cannot discount Mischa Bakaleinikoff's rousing score either, that really sets the tone and hammers the action home. But, let's not kid ourselves as to what brought us all here in the first place: the wizardry of Harryhausen, who once more delivers the goods with a lot of wanton destruction and cosmic whiz-bangery. Though, to be fair, Schneer deserves some of the credit, too, for doing his best to lift everything else up to meet Harryhausen’s efforts, which, I think, is one of the many reasons why their films are both timeless and remembered so fondly.

“Ray was always totally immersed in his subject matter, and it shows in the films. I, on the other hand, could stand back a little further,” said Schneer, commenting to Swires on his working relationship with Harryhausen. “My concern was with entertainment. Ray’s interest went way beyond that. It was almost a religion to him. But our combination mixed because we never had any philosophical differences. Our collaboration was totally on a creative level. I always deferred to Ray’s sense of ‘magic,’ and he deferred to my sense of ‘motivation.’ While I give him full marks for his imagination, Ray is essentially a designer. He was trained in the arts, and is a marvelous painter and sculptor, [but] it was my job to put story structure into the pictures. Ray and I would work out the story, and then we would both get it up on the screen. But it doesn’t make any difference to me which of us the audience thinks is the real creator, as long as they enjoy our films.”

Now, while I think Jason and the Argonauts (1963) is Harryhausen and Schneer’s best film, The Valley of Gwangi (1969) will always be my favorite. And oddly enough, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers ranks third on both mental lists. But not Harryhausen’s, who ranks the film as his least favorite experience and end result.

At first glance, it’s easy to see why; what with the main attraction, those flying saucers, being fairly impersonal and sterile -- and I’m sure very tedious and monotonous to animate. Thus, one wonders if the animator’s attitude might’ve been different if he’d been allowed to animate the aliens, too, as originally intended before budget concerns nixed it. (This limited budget would nix a lot of things, including Skyhook being an orbital space platform that gets destroyed.) 

According to some early production sketches, the aliens were intended to be lizard-like, with serpentine bodies instead of legs. Harryhausen would still design the practical aliens, but it fell to Columbia’s FX and make-up department to realize them -- specifically Clay Campbell, who took Harryhausen’s modified sketches and cooked up the aliens’ rubberized armor. And while these come off a little stiff on camera, they’re ultimately serviceable as a Plan-B.

Of course, one of Harryhausen’s greatest gifts has always been a knack for breathing life into his stop-motion creations -- and not only that, but bestowing a strong sense of personality into each and every one. Thus, while the saucers those arthritic-jointed aliens piloted could’ve easily been a series of simple models with sparklers shoved-up their tailpipes like in Robot Monster (1953), or stagnant flying hubcaps like the one in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), they were not. Thus and so, one can and should appreciate the extra-effort in bringing the ones for Earth vs.the Flying Saucers to life.

“The design of the saucers was based mostly on what people expected,” said Harryhausen. “[It] also had to incorporate something to show the audience that it was moving and avoid it becoming a boring lump of metal -- something that would animate it," which is why "I designed the models so that the outer rim of the craft and the center were independent of the inner revolving section. These rims were decorated with parallel lines that gave the saucers, when animated, a strange stroboscopic effect.”

For the shoot, three different sizes of the saucers were created, the largest measuring about 12-inches, with three more at six inches, and three more at three inches for the long shots. All were tooled out of aluminum by Harryhausen’s father, Frederick -- who built a lot of the jointed armatures for the majority of his son’s creations, which were then anodized so they wouldn’t reflect any light.

In action, I love this rotation, and the thought that went into the kinetics of it; with the sense that this was how the machines generated their magnetic, gravity-defying fields. I love how he was always sticking something in the foreground to give the set-up some depth. And the glorious, ear-splitting and spine-cracking whine they made, pilfered from some ringing pipes buried deep in a waste-water treatment plant -- which also served as mission control for Project Skyhook, tweaked and amplified to such menacing proportions -- I mean, damn. Wow. Don't tell me those things don't have any personality. 

In fact, aside from the Medusa in Clash of the Titans (1981), the Children of the Hydra in Jason and the Argonauts, and maybe the Cyclops in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), I'm hard pressed to name a more menacing or iconic presence in Harryhausen's entire oeuvre. Thus, while Earth vs the Flying Saucers might not be his greatest creation, or his most beloved, I would argue with anybody that its his most under-appreciated.  

Originally posted on February 24, 2013 at Micro-Brewed Reviews.

Earth vs the Flying Saucers (1956) Clover Productions :: Columbia Pictures / EP: Sam Katzman / P: Charles H. Schneer / D: Fred F. Sears / W: Curt Siodmak, George Worthing Yates, Bernard Gordon, Donald E. Keyhoe (novel) / C: Fred Jackman Jr. / E: Danny B. Landres / M: Mischa Bakaleinikoff / S: Hugh Marlowe, Joan Taylor, Donald Curtis, Morris Ankrum, John Zaremba, Thomas Browne Henry