Everyone loves a good UFO movie. Thrilling, chilling, and thought-provoking, the best UFO movies stand the test of time and inspire us with a sense of child-like wonder combined with a creeping unease. Looking for a truly great UFO movie to terrify the senses and tantalize the mind? These are the four movies to put on your must-watch list right now.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
Steven Speilberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind is arguably one of the best UFO movies of all time. Electric company lineman Roy Neary (played by Richard Dreyfuss) is one of several people in Indiana who experience strange flashing lights in the sky – Roy believes he encountered a UFO and gradually becomes obsessed with discovering the truth. When Roy and another witness start having dreams or visions of a mound with vertical striations, their belief is that something momentous involving the UFO and its mysterious inhabitants mounts.
At times frightening, thrilling, touching, and dreamlike, Close Encounters of the Third Kind remains loved and widely watched nearly half a century on from its original release. It captures our fascination with UFOs and taps into humanity’s search for purpose and hopes for future evolution.
It wasn’t just audiences that rated this movie highly; it won many major awards and was nominated for a slew more. Close Encounters of the Third Kind took home the Oscar for Best Cinematography and the award for Best Production Design at the British Academy Film Awards, among many other accolades.
War of the Worlds (1953)
A flaming meteor lands in the hills of a small town in California – except it’s not a meteor. It’s a UFO containing inhabitants that definitely don’t come in peace. Adapted from the original novel by H.G. Wells, the movie was selected for preservation in the United States Library of Congress’s National Film Registry in 2011. As well as being a great UFO flick, it was deemed by the panel to be “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” It’s also been (and continues to be) a major influence on other science fiction films, such as 1996’s Independence Day.
War of the Worlds details the events that unfold during a surprise Martian invasion of Earth. Global defeat appears to be just days away, and all hope seems lost when even an atomic bomb fails to halt the progress of an alien war machine. However, salvation comes from the unlikeliest of places…
The movie combines real science stock footage with special effects and a voice-over from Paul Frees to create a documentary atmosphere of authenticity. War of the Worlds was a resounding success at the box office and has gone on to become a classic UFO movie. It’s since spawned several remakes, but the original 1953 version is, for many, the best.
Signs (2002)
M.Night Shyamalan seemingly had an impossible task before him – living up to his 1999 cinema smash Sixth Sense. Signs saw Shyamalan attempt to put his unique spin on the alien invasion genre, and, just as Sixth Sense reimagined your standard ghost story, the movie succeeded spectacularly.
The story follows a family in rural Pennsylvania who discover crop circles regularly appearing on their land. As this slow-burn sci-fi horror unfolds, we find that the mysterious crop circles were just the beginning, and it becomes apparent that a full-scale alien invasion is imminent. Clearly influenced by The War of the Worlds, the tide is turned by the most unlikely of Earthy elements.
Want a fascinating UFO movie factoid? The story told in the movie of the kids’ birth is actually the real-life story of the births of Shyalaman’s own two children.
Arrival (2016)
Based on the short story Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang, Arrival sees twelve UFOs suddenly appear, hovering just above various locations around the globe. Linguist Louise Banks is one of a team called in to study the mysterious craft and attempt to make contact with the two alien creatures residing within them.
Beautiful, eerie, erudite, and profoundly thought-provoking, Banks discovers that the aliens’ perception and experience of time is totally different from that of humans – and that this is both reflected in and facilitated by their language. Slowly learning the aliens’ tongue results in Banks herself having visions, in which the time it transpires is fluid.
Arrival was a huge hit with audiences and critics alike, and several renowned linguists went on record to praise the movie’s accuracy and its use of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
