10 Greatest Sci-Fi Movies About UFO

UFOs in movies have been around since the sci-fi space epics began in old-school Hollywood, with a 1951 robot warning Earth about danger, and on to a 2022 predator that attacked beings on Earth. In the old days of cinema, seeing UFOs in movies was a groundbreaking and unsettling event, especially since a radio show reportedly sent the world into a panic with Orson Welles' War of the Worlds.

Since that time, the UFOs have been both hostile and friendly, and at the same time, humanity's response to them has been both welcoming and hostile. It is when those two dynamics are reversed that the alien movies have a chance to shine, such as when friendly aliens arrive only to have humankind attack with violence, or when UFOs show up, and humans greet them, only to end up disintegrated.

The best UFO alien movies are never really about unidentified flying objects. Instead, they are about what the arrival of these alien visitors means to the humans who witness them. They represent everything from nuclear anxiety and human smallness to exploitation or what people do when the unknown becomes much too knowable. The best of the UFO movies take these lessons and get their themes exactly right.

10 Fire In The Sky (1993)

Fire in the Sky is based on a real-life event where a man named Travis Walton claimed in 1975 that aliens abducted him in Arizona. Walton and his wife even appeared in the movie, lending to its sense of discomfort and authenticity. Walton wrote the book the film is based on, but the actual abduction itself was fictionalized and bears no similarity to the story that Walton originally told.

The film opened in 1993 and brought in $19.9 million at the box office, which was decent for a movie with a slow-burning storyline and no action scenes. The UFOs in this movie are never heroic or communicative, and they represent the unknowable fear of abduction, as well as the confusion and terror of what the aliens have planned. Fire in the Sky contains one of the best alien abduction scenes in movie history.

9 Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers (1956)

One of the earlier UFO movies arrived in 1956 with the sci-fi movie Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. This movie remains best-known for the work of Ray Harryhausen, who created the stop-motion animation that created the UFO scenes. The designs match the description of flying saucers from Major Donald Keyhoe's 1953 book, Flying Saucers from Outer Space, which the movie is based on.

This was the first movie that showed the UFOs attacking and destroying national landmarks, something that Independence Day copied decades later. Tim Burton's Mars Attacks! also paid homage to the UFO design years later, proving the lasting legacy of this sci-fi classic. This movie had the UFOs as weapons of war during the era of Cold War paranoia.

8 Flight Of The Navigator (1986)

The UFOs became part of a coming-of-age story in the family-friendly Flight of the Navigator in 1986. This was one of Hollywood's first attempts to use extensive CGI in a movie, with the alien spacecraft used to create the realistic ship for the young man to pilot. This also featured one of the earliest film appearances by Sarah Jessica Parker, who befriends the young time-traveling pilot.

The UFO is also voiced by Paul Reubens (Pee-wee Herman), and is more empathetic and curious in its delivery than it is threatening. It also makes him both a vehicle and a character, and he is a nice supporting character to young David Freeman (Joey Cramer). This mixes the ideas of alien abduction and time-travel coming-of-age stories in one of the better UFO movies of the 1980s.

7 Mars Attacks! (1996)

Tim Burton made his own alien invasion movie in 1996. In Mars Attacks!, Burton has the alien invasion show up in Las Vegas, with the cartoon-looking Martians attempting a hostile takeover. The cast here is star-studded, with names like Jack Nicholson (in two roles), Glenn Close, Danny DeVito, Pierce Brosnan, Annette Bening, and many more as they fight to survive the alien attacks.

Mars Attacks! is a different UFO sci-fi movie, as it is a comedy, with slapstick moments, some shockingly hilarious scenes with major movie stars in unpredictable situations, allowing Burton to spoof the genre, while also paying respect to what came before. The UFOs here are used as satire, but the menace and destruction match up with anything in serious movies like Independence Day.

6 Nope (2022)

Jordan Peele followed up his first two horror movies with a terrifying sci-fi movie called Nope. This was a huge production, with Peele shooting it on IMAX and delivering the story of a UFO terrorizing a small Western town. However, what made this UFO so different from others in movie history was that it was a living organism that arrived on Earth as a predatory creature feeding on living life forms.

Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer star as siblings running a horse ranch, and when they have money problems, they decide that if they get footage of the UFO that has shown up, they can save their business. The UFO angle here is a commentary on the idea of spectacle, and every character's response is to capture the UFO on film rather than run from it, which is the wrong decision.

5 District 9 (2009)

District 9 takes the idea of a UFO movie in a wildly different direction. Instead of the aliens arriving in peace or to wage war, these alien UFOs arrived with aliens looking for sanctuary and help. Directed by Neill Blomkamp and based on his 2005 short film, this features a UFO that arrived over Johannesburg in 1982 with aliens who were all sick and malnourished. They wanted help and received it.

However, the aliens were locked away in an internment camp called District 9, where they were often treated with contempt and hatred by humanity. The parallels with this movie are clear, as Blomkamp presents a vision of life during the apartheid era in South Africa. Critics praised the film, with District 9 earning four Oscar nominations, including Best Picture.

4 The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951)

The original The Day the Earth Stood Still was released in 1951, with a UFO arriving on Earth containing a robot known as Gort (Lock Martin) and an alien named Klaatu. This was one of the most impressive robots shown in movies at the time, as Gort stood over seven feet tall. The alien that showed up next, Klaatu, delivered an alien warning, saying, "Klaatu barada nikto."

This was a line that has been referenced, homaged, and spoofed several times over the years in other movies, including Army of Darkness (1992). The UFO here was not a weapon, but was instead a warning. Klaatu's words were a warning about the dangers of nuclear war. When humans shot and killed Klaatu, Earth was left with a warning: Find peace or face obliteration. This theme is one of the strongest in UFO movies.

3 Independence Day (1996)

Roland Emmerich became the master of the disaster movie throughout his career, but his masterpiece remains the alien invasion movie, Independence Day. The movie was one of the highest-grossing movies of all time when it was released, second only to Jurassic Park (1993), and it showed an alien invasion movie where the UFOs began to destroy national landmarks.

The scale of the UFOs in this movie was large enough to show that any military response was helpless to stop them. The destruction of the White House was one of the most famous UFO attacks in movie history. The plot itself is based on Roswell mythology, suggesting aliens had crashed on Earth before, and that made the attack here mean much more than something like War of the Worlds.

2 Arrival (2016)

Based on Ted Chiang's 1998 novelette Story of Your Life, Denis Villeneuve directed this movie about a UFO that arrives on Earth and humans race to find out if it is there as a danger or in peace. To do this, a linguist is brought in to learn the alien language and figure out what these UFOs are trying to say. This is clearly influenced by The Day the Earth Stood Still, but with a different focus.

While The Day the Earth Stood Still was about humans who feared the unknown, Arrival was a story about the linguist, Louise Banks (Amy Adams), and how this mission ties into her own life and doubts about her future. The UFO in this movie serves as a philosophical question about what it means to be human and what a person would do if they could see their own futures.

1 Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (1977)

Released in 1977, Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a UFO movie that is more about what humans expect from these unidentified flying objects rather than what the UFOs have planned for humanity. Steven Spielberg's sci-fi movie follows a man who wants, more than anything, to learn if there is something more outside of Earth, and he is willing to give up everything, including his family, to find the truth.

The UFO landing site at Devil's Tower was an incredible set. The giant spacecraft hovering and landing with the giant musical communication movement is one of the most memorable moments in sci-fi movie history. This UFO sci-fi movie is about the curiosity of the unknown, and the human story makes it one of the best sci-fi movies of all time, UFO-related or not.