close encounters

Beyond what science or sightings say, literature and cinema have brought us face to face with aliens for more than a century. The encounter has had terrifying, epic, endearing and also comical nuances. From those shaking plates on the screen, in Ed Wood’s low-budget movies, to that radio broadcast by the great Orson Welles, based on “The War of the Worlds”, which sparked mass hysteria in New York in 1938, when people believed that the planet was actually being attacked by alien ships.

After World War II, UFOs gained screen and press with sightings of all kinds. In Peru, the sixties and seventies were prodigal in these encounters. In this newspaper, news about “silver men” or about “objects that floated in the sky of Arequipa” were disseminated. On July 4, 1965, this supplement published “The Trap,” an account by Kem Bennett of a dish that crashed in California and turned into a restaurant selling “grilled chicken.” Around those years, “I visited Ganymede” circulated successfully, a book written by Yosip Ibrahim, who presented his work as a shocking testimony of someone who had been transported to one of Jupiter’s moons.

The writer and specialist Elton Honores highlights a novel like “The Magic of the Worlds” (1952), by Eugenio Alarco, set on a utopian and idyllic planet whose inhabitants had achieved immortality, while others, exiled in other worlds, lived and suffered life as we know it today. “This is an interesting novel, because it is made in a philosophical key”, specifies Honors. The researcher also highlights the texts by José B. Adolph that appeared under the title “Letters from a Martian”, in which an extraterrestrial informs his superiors about the errors and failures of the earthlings.

In contemporary times, the novel “UFOs in the Andes” by Ernesto Carlín stands out, in which a Peruvian pilot shoots down an extraterrestrial object convinced that it is an enemy Chilean ship. The novel is a satire about a country that receives superior technology from heaven, but cannot use it due to incapacity and corruption.

ET and other beings

“In the cinema the figure of the alien has always had a metaphorical character”, says José Carlos Cabrejo, who has just published “Cuerpo y surrealismo. From poetry to cinema”. And perhaps the most paradigmatic case is Invasion of the body snatchers (1956), by Don Siegel, a film about otherworldly beings who take on human guises to infiltrate society undetected. “It has provoked readings that indicate that it is the metaphor of the communist or the red threat after the Second World War”, Cabrejo specifies. The opposite, in his opinion, would be they liveby John Carpenter, about a character who finds dark glasses, with which he discovers aliens, but also hidden messages of obedience to the capitalist order.

Then there is the vision of the alien as a being capable of provoking empathy, with films like Scott Derrickson’s “The Day the Earth Stood Still”, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and Steven Spielberg’s “ET”. “The issue of the alien is present whether in reconciliation, in understanding or in the fight with the other”, says Cabrejo.

In local cinematography, two films stand out: The parody “A Martian Called Desire”, by Antonio Fortunic, and “El forastero”, by Federico García, with a muscular alien that can also be a threat. “ANDn Peru, the most striking images I have are rather comical, playing with our low resources”, adds Cabrejo. There are Roger Corman’s tapes made in these lands, capable of competing with news like the one this week in Iquitos about the presence of two-meter “strange beings”.