The Flying Saucer

The Invaders (a Quinn Martin Production!) premiered in the states in 1967 and ran for 2 seasons, 43 great episodes. Architect David Vincent (Roy Thinnes) stumbles across a planet-wide (but mainly American based) conspiracy of aliens "from a dying world" intent on infiltrating and eventually conquering ours. Their true form is never revealed for they have adopted our own, but they must spend ten minutes in a regeneration tube every day or lose human form (rather messily) and die. They can be identified by their lack of emotion (except for specially trained infiltrators), failure to bleed and deformed fourth finger (the little one). On death they conveniently incinerate leaving only ashes. They are never seen eating or drinking and may not even be breathing (oxygen is poisonous to them, s2e13 "The Captive") so the regeneration tubes are probably all they need. Only one design of spaceship is ever seen, an elegant saucer. Art direction / production design on the series was credited to James Dowell Vance and George B. Chan so presumably the saucer design is theirs, with set decoration by Sandy Grace and Carl Biddiscombe. The exterior is clearly inspired by the photographs of George Adamski who claimed to have ridden in real (friendly) alien flying saucers in 1953. Cynics pointed out that the rather clunky looking craft he photographed for his book "Flying Saucers Have Landed" closely resembled the end caps of a Hoover cylinder vacuum cleaner thrown into the air but the design instantly became a classic. The Invaders flying saucer is a streamlined Adamski, with its cylinderical upper half, flared lower rim and power blisters underneath. Propulsion seems to come from a central pulsating red disc underneath (which also fires red death rays in some episodes) and around that are 5 glowing green (NOT blue - 60s colour stock problems) hemispherical blisters. There is also a band of rotating blue lights at the top of the upper cylinder which look to be in the right place for windows but are definitely not visible as such from inside. They must be another part of the drive system, or possibly sensors. Vincent describes one as "maybe 50 feet across" and to fit everything in mine is 60 feet in diameter. The interior layout is only seen in a few episodes and changed depending on script requirements and budget, so my design is a bit of a mashup. The saucer lands on 5 leg panels that fold down to make a neat den, built for the show as a full sized practical set that could be assembled on location, usually a desert, with the top part of the saucer added later in post production as an optical effect. Ladders fold out of one leg leading up into the saucer through two simple circular hatches, although only one hatch is ever visible once inside. It has two decks, the lower one for cargo (unremarkable crates for smuggling past unsuspecting Earthlings) and engineering. The upper deck has a bridge with a single small rectangular window, apparently invisible from the outside. In the opening credits the saucer is steered by two invaders standing before a simple panel in front of this window, but in one episode it appears to be steered instead by an alien standing further back in one of three bridge stations balancing glowing eggs in his palms (honestly, check out s1e9 "The Innocent" if you don't believe me). Sometimes there is also a neat pilot chair but only Vincent is ever seen in it. Come to think of it, no invader is ever seen sitting down at all except when deliberately passing for human. No writing or decoration of any kind is apparent anywhere in this spartan saucer or on any invader hardware and the overall design and instrumentation is pure elegant 60s minimalist. The invaders have a 5 fixation so my design has 5 main interior radial bulkheads, to match the exterior 5 landing legs and engine bulbs. The central pentagonal service deck area must be where engineering is and around this is a service corridor (s2e9 "Dark Outpost"). The space above it on the command deck is some kind of invaders' special ops room directly behind the bridge. It is never shown but Michael Rennie is seen going in there while his crew hypnotise Vincent in "The Innocent", so I'm guessing computer and unknown alien things. There are no ablutions or canteen, just regeneration tubes, because that is all they need to survive. In "The Innocent" Rennie escorts Vincent through a room between the inter-deck access and the bridge where we glimpse an antenna, so I made that the radio room. That left a spare room on the top deck so I installed a brain washing machine from s1e2 "The Experiment". They just don't make flying saucers like this any more. Soundtrack is sampled from the original series, music by Dominic Frontiere.

• published: 29 Mar 2013
• views: 31731