This course ALIEN CONTACT: SCIENCE & SCIENCE FICTION is about mankind’s desire for extraterrestrial contact. We will see classic science fiction films— Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, The Day The Earth Stood Still, War of the Worlds, 2010 A Space Odyssey, Andromeda Strain, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Alien, Men in Black, Contact, District 9, Solaris, and Out of the Blue and read the novels the spawned them as well as examine television shows (Twilight Zone and X-Files) that have become part of our “alien pop culture” for fifty years. Archival news footage of space exploration will be integrated into the course as well as interviews with Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking and Michio Kaku. We will examine the historical links between film and television to historical world events as they relate to increased reports of contact. We will read and study about the Roswell Incident in 1947, the Phoenix lights in 1997, and other UFO phenomena revealed by the recent declassification of international government files on UFO sightings.

Leslie Kean, an investigative journalist known internationally, will be a guest speaker to discuss UFO contacts reported by generals, fighter pilots, air traffic controllers, directors of military installations, and heads of state. She will discuss these interviews, show photos and transcripts of a UFO that event that occurred in 2006 over the United terminal at O’Hare Airport, of a wave of UFO sightings that occurred in upper state New York in the 1980s, of a dogfight with a UFO over Tehran, of a sighting where over ten thousand people, along with the governor of Arizona, saw a UFO the size of several football fields float silently 1,000 feet above the city, and more.

Colonel Charles Halt will also be a guest speaker in the class. He was deputy base commander of a large military twin-base complex in East Anglia, England when on December 26 and 27, 1980, a UFO landed in the forest just outside the base.

Along with his heads of security and several other personnel, Colonel Halt approached the UFO, and stood only feet away from it recording the event. He will play the recording in class, and show a plaster imprint of the UFO’s tripod foot. He will discuss this famous Rendlesham Forest event and answer questions about it and UFO government cover-ups.

There has never been a course like this: science fiction, the science of space travel with footage of humankind’s venture into space, and incidents of verifiable UFO/alien contact, all rolled up into one class.