Seventy-five years on from the first mysterious sightings in the US, the flying saucer makes its return in Jordan Peele’s new film Nope. Nicholas Barber looks back at one of the most haunting objects in popular culture.
It’s only there for a moment in the trailer for Jordan Peele’s new horror film, Nope, but it’s definitely there: a flying saucer. Judging by the twists and turns in Peele’s previous films, Get Out and Us, it’s impossible to say whether its real or fake, whether it’s from the Earth or from outer space, but that glimpse of sparkling silver is tantalising. Maybe, just maybe, Nope will be a proper flying-saucer movie – a celebration of one of the most recognisable and spine-tingling shapes in the history of popular culture.
“By the end of the 1950s,” says Andrew Shail, senior lecturer in film at Newcastle University, “that particular shape had become a shorthand for ‘spacecraft piloted by beings from another world’, available to everyone working in the visual arts.” Sure enough, flying saucers have signified mysterious visitors from Mars and beyond in countless films, TV series, novels, comics, and even hit records, from Mulder’s I Want To Believe poster in The X-Files TV series to the popular children’s picture book, Aliens Love Underpants. The flying saucer is a design classic – the archetypal Unidentified Flying Object. And yet it didn’t take off, so to speak, until the 1950s, when the world went flying-saucer crazy.
Science-fiction artists had drawn circular spacecraft long before that: an early Flash Gordon strip from 1934 features a spinning “squadron of deadly space-gyros”. But if you flick through copies of Startling Stories, Super Science Stories and other pulp magazines of the period, you’ll see that in the first half of the 20th Century, aliens preferred their transport to resemble submarines and airships.
ISS Captures 3,000-Mile-Wide UFO – What Happened Next Shocked the World
In a stunning turn of events, the International Space Station (ISS) captured footage of a colossal 3,000-mile-wide unidentified flying object (UFO) hovering near Earth. Astronauts aboard the ISS first noticed an unusual anomaly on their monitors—a massive, disk-like structure slowly emerging from the darkness of space. As the cameras zoomed in, the object’s sheer size and eerie glow became undeniable.
NASA’s live feed mysteriously cut out moments after the sighting, fueling speculation and conspiracy theories worldwide. Social media exploded with theories ranging from advanced extraterrestrial civilizations to secret military experiments. Within hours, governments worldwide held emergency meetings, and leading scientists scrambled to analyze the few images that leaked before the broadcast was cut.
Then, something truly shocking happened—the UFO suddenly vanished without a trace. No debris, no energy signatures—just an empty void where it once was. NASA released a brief statement citing “technical anomalies,” but many remained unconvinced. Could this have been first contact? A cloaked mothership observing humanity?
To this day, the truth remains unknown, but one thing is certain—humanity had just witnessed something beyond comprehension.