Orson Welles bears no relation to H.G. Wells, but the actor, writer, and director begins his creepy narration of this 1975 NASA film by reading from H.G.’s classic alien invasion tale War of the Worlds. With contributions from scientists George Wald, Carl Sagan, and others, Welles then examines the possibility and implications of extraterrestrial life, with a heavy emphasis on our closest Earth-like neighbor, Mars. There’s talk of NASA’s Project Cyclops, which studied the feasibility of scanning the heavens for intelligent life with radio telescopes, as the on-again-off-again SETI project would soon begin to do.
The search continues — SETI is finding new sources of funding again, and astronomers are piling up the possible candidates for habitable planets within our galaxy — but the larger points that Welles and NASA want to make are that science isn’t fiction, that the government doesn’t know anything about aliens, and the only spaceships we’ve seen are the ones that we’ve built. But listening to Orson channel H.G. is going to make you wonder.
