Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott, James Cameron - all directors whose visions of life from other worlds captivated us and inspired us to think bigger. Alien fiction goes all the way back to the turn of the 20th Century, where H.G. Wells horrified us with visions of tripods and heat-rays. Nowadays aliens are mostly consigned to theoretical science - they certainly exist, but likely as bacteria. But for a brief moment in a New Mexico desert at the start of the Cold War, they’d never been more real...

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