1949 movie - The Flying Saucer

**Skeptical** · Posted: Fri May 23, 2008 9:25 pm Post subject: 1949 movie - The Flying Saucer

Ever since I was in college back in the 70s, I have always had a keen interest in the science fiction movies of the 1950s. I have seen most of them multiple times but there is one that had eluded me for years - the very first of the breed - a movie called The Flying Saucer from 1949 (probably released in 1950). As far as I know, it even pre-dates Rocketship X-M, which was probably the first major studio sci-fi film of the modern era.

Well, I finally happened across a copy on the internet that you could download for free using technology called bit torrent. It was a 667 meg file so it took a couple of multi-hour sessions over my DSL connection to download the whole thing. I sat down this evening a watched it (not very long - maybe 75 minutes or so).

By and large, the movie serves better as a travelogue for Alaska than it does for a science fiction movie. A lot of nice scenery of the Alaskan wilderness (including a glacier that I have to wonder if it's still there). The flying saucer itself makes only very brief appearances and (spoiler alert) turns out to be the work of an American scientist.

The main story is purely Cold War featuring some heavy-handed Russians who are after the saucer as well. Obviously not a single word about aliens from another planet, dimension, time or even zip code.

The idea of aliens must have been percolating in the American consciousness by this time though. It wasn't long before Day The Earth Stood Still and The Thing From Another World hit theaters in 1951. Still, The Flying Saucer is an interesting view into the very early stages of the modern UFO era - just before the ETH took-over.

If you'd like to take a look, Google the movie name along with the word "torrent". That will lead you to several sites from which the movie can be downloaded.

S

PS: An interesting coincidence - the main character's name happens to be Trent!
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"A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have." -- Thomas Jefferson

**Skeptical** · Posted: Mon May 26, 2008 7:54 pm Post subject:

You know, I'm really liking this bit torrent stuff. Downloaded another rare 50's sci-fi movie called The Colossus of New York - a little film featuring a very young Ross Martin of Wild, Wild West fame. It is about a man whose brain is transplanted into a robot. The uptake (and a very interesting point for folks with the standard Christian mindset) is that a good part of our humanity is tied to the fact that we have bodies - that we get tired, that we feel pain. Divorced from that physical body, raw intelligence runs the risk of becoming something monstrous.

You know, they may only have had budgets in the tens of thousands of dollars for some of these B-movies but that doesn't mean they didn't periodically have something rather profound to say. A cautionary tale for our increasingsly mechanized times... submitted for your approval... in the Twilight Zone... Shocked

S
_________________
"A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have." -- Thomas Jefferson