thumb|[[Roy Thinnes and Lee Farr in a network publicity photo for the 1967 episode "Doomsday Minus One".]]
The Invaders is an American science fiction television series created by Larry Cohen that aired on ABC for two seasons, from 1967 to 1968. Roy Thinnes stars as David Vincent, who after stumbling across evidence of an alien invasion—the aliens disguising themselves as humans and gradually infiltrating human institutions—tries to thwart the invasion despite the disbelief of officials and the general public, and the undermining of his efforts by the aliens. The series was a Quinn Martin production.
Plot
The architect David Vincent accidentally learns of a secret alien invasion and thereafter travels from place to place attempting to foil the aliens' plots and warn a skeptical populace of the danger. Other plot elements include Vincent's grim and lonely determination to find "tangible proof of the invaders' existence" despite having become a "quasi-famous object of public ridicule"; Unless they receive periodic treatments in what Vincent calls "regeneration chambers", which consume a great deal of electrical power, they revert to their alien form. One scene in the series showed an alien beginning to revert, filmed in soft focus and with pulsating red light.
Most of the aliens, in particular the lowest-ranking members or workers in green jumpsuits, are emotionless and have deformed little fingers that cannot move and are bent at an unnatural angle, although "deluxe models" could manipulate this finger. Black aliens' palms were not pale, like humans of African descent, but were the same shade as the rest of their skins. Some mutants experience emotions similar to those of humans and even oppose the alien takeover.
When aliens die, their bodies glow red and burn up along with their clothes and anything else they were touching, preventing the documenting of their existence. On several occasions, a dying alien would deliberately touch a piece of their technology to prevent it from falling into the hands of humans. In episode three ("The Mutation"), a female alien who falls for Vincent and is killed while running to warn him he is in danger tells him, "That's what happens to us when we die here on Earth."
Technology of the invaders
The type of spaceship by which the Invaders reach the Earth is a flying saucer of a design resembling early 1950s photographs of alleged UFOs produced by self-proclaimed UFO "contactee" George Adamski. They differ slightly from Adamski's images in not having three spheres on the underside, but instead five shallower protrusions. Numerous pieces of alien technology featured "penta" or five-sided designs. It was a principle of the production crew to show The Invaders' technology with set, prop designs, and control panels that were utterly alien from the conventional human ones (such as H. R. Giger would later present in Alien).
To kill humans they apply a small, handheld, disc-shaped weapon with five glowing white lights to the back of the victim's head or neck to induce a seemingly natural death, which is usually diagnosed as a cerebral hemorrhage. They also employ weapons that disintegrate witnesses, vehicles, and when necessary members of their own race with some sort of ray. Also in their arsenal is a small device consisting of two spinning, transparent crystals joined at their corners which acts like a truth serum, forces human beings to do the aliens' bidding, or (in most cases) imposes the complete loss of memory of previous events.
Themes
According to producer Alan A. Armer, "The major thing that the show had going for it is the fact that we are all a little bit paranoid, and that it's easy to identify with ... one person fighting the society, fighting the government, fighting an invisible force ..." Series creator Larry Cohen noted the similarities between The Invaders and another Quinn Martin-produced show, The Fugitive, while also describing Alfred Hitchcock as a major influence.
<blockquote>Of course The Invaders was definitely in the same genre as The Fugitive: a man moving across America, in search of something, and in jeopardy. Really, to me, my idea was taken more from Alfred Hitchcock than it was taken from The Fugitive. I always liked the Hitchcock movie where the hero is in a situation where he's the only one that knows the spies are operating, and no one will believe him. And when he takes the police back to the locale where he saw their operation, everything has been removed, there's no more evidence, everybody lies and says that he was never there before.</blockquote>
Such Hitchcock movies include The 39 Steps (1935) with Robert Donat, Saboteur (1942) with Robert Cummings, and North by Northwest (1959) with Cary Grant. |group=Note and dedicated "ufologists" made sometimes-outlandish claims of alien presence on Earth and of earthly conspiracies to suppress evidence of it.