It was half a century ago that science fiction played on our biggest fears. Now, three new shows prove its popularity wasn’t an alien notion.

Gargantuan monsters from the deep, unleashed by science gone awry. Space aliens in our midst, insinuating their godless thoughts into our brains, commandeering our bodies. Paranoia lies like a poison fog upon the land.

Flip on your flat-screen during prime time this fall and you just may start to wonder if you’ve entered a time tunnel and gone back to the antsy 1950s, when invading body snatchers threatened to turn good Americans into commie-pinko pod people and Godzilla was unleashing hell-atosis on Tokyo. From “Supernatural” to “Smallville,” “Medium” to “Ghost Whisperer,” there have never been more series in the science-fiction/fantasy/horror vein in the same season, but three new shows in particular give credence to a ’50s-flashback scenario.

In ABC’s bluntly titled “Invasion,” an extraterrestrial life form has sneaked onto our planet under cover of a hurricane. Only a handful of humans in Homestead, Fla., saw the things cascade into the ocean like a meteor shower. Now, some of those folks are changing. No one in authority can be trusted, not even cops and doctors.

“Threshold,” on CBS, at times plays like “The X-Files” crossed with “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.” Yes, that means so many flashlights that “Threshold” is practically a program-length commercial for Eveready. But it also means we get crack “contingency analyst” (Carla Gugino, “Karen Sisco”) heading a team of techie experts trying to subvert invaders from another planet without panicking a public that’s already anxious about terrorists from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

Closer encounters

The creators of NBC’s “Surface,” meanwhile, are attempting a Spielbergian triple lutz with a series that combines a “Jaws”-like sea hunt with a boy-and-his-creature yarn, a la “ET: The Extraterrestrial,” and case studies in obsessive curiosity right out of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” The show’s main monster is a sea creature so humongous, it makes our old buddy Godzilla look like an overweight gecko.

Brannon Braga, an executive producer of “Threshold” and a veteran of several “Star Trek” series, most recently “Enterprise,” said it’s probably just coincidence that so many science-fiction series with undercurrents of ’50s-style dread made network schedules the same fall. “At the same time,” he added, “it’s important to note that science fiction and horror usually reflect something going on in the national psyche.”

Our collective conscious doesn’t only give rise to fearful visions. As novelist Lewis Shiner, winner of a World Fantasy Award for “Glimpses,” pointed out, the expansive, optimistic “Star Trek” franchise was born in the mid-1960s, when President Lyndon Johnson was pushing civil rights legislation through Congress and waging war on poverty. Sci-fi in that era could even take the shape of a show as innocently silly as “My Favorite Martian.”

Watch out! It’s paranoia

Circumstances of the late 1940s and the 1950s begat the genres we’re arguably seeing updated this fall. Movies such as “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” “The Day the Earth Stood Still” and “Them!” manifested Cold War worries and concerns about consequences of our newfound atomic might.

Shiner believes that since Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists have become the new Reds. “And I think we’re seeing a lot of the same behavior,” he said. “We’re seeing the government using it as an excuse to subvert the Constitution. People getting paranoid and repressive. Scapegoating people.” In the ’50s, Braga said, “It was communism and the nuclear threat and radiation and all those sorts of things. Now there’s a certain fear about terrorism and people infiltrating our culture and doing terrible things. It’s kind of similar to the Red Scare business. There’s a fear of people being amongst us who will do us harm or could possibly influence other people amongst us.”

In “Threshold,” the invaders haven’t actually shown themselves. All viewers have seen of them is sort of a giant, floating, shape-shifting origami that emits a sound that can alter our very DNA. Like a computer virus, the signal can reproduce itself in our communications technology. Beware of your cell phone. It may be possessed.

While Braga believes his and the other series probably are “an expression of those [terrorism] fears,” he was hesitant to say they consciously inspired the shows. “It usually takes a while to work through the psyche and find a way to manifest itself,” he said. “The classic example of all is Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then the Godzilla movies. It couldn’t be a more powerful icon of what that nation went through. It’s a monster movie, but it’s a metaphor for the bomb and everything that it meant.”

Jonas Pate, who with his twin brother, Josh, created and executive produces “Surface,” said he’s not so sure the current shows and the ’50s sci-fi stem from the same impulse. He suggested a more pragmatic explanation for the seeming replay. “The networks have become more open to serialized storytelling,” he said. “They’d gone to episodic with procedural cop shows, but series like ’24’ and ‘Lost’ really kind of opened up that possibility – that combined with TiVo and all the DVR technology that allows people to catch up on serialized stories.”

Lucas-Spielberg babies

True enough, but this also may be the Pates’ age showing. Jonas Pate is 35 and refers to himself and his brother as “total Lucas-Spielberg babies.” To anyone old enough to remember ’50s sci-fi flicks first hand, it’s impossible to see the “Surface” sea serpents and not think of a veritable zoo full of oversized animals enlarged and/or unleashed by mankind’s brash experimentation. Pate himself said that as “Surface” unfolds, “There’s a whole sort of nature vs. industry subtext that will get more apparent.”

The thing to remember is, “Surface” is a lot more complicated than “It Came From Beneath the Sea” or “The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms.” Similarly, “Invasion” is more complex and subtle than “Body Snatchers” or “The Invaders,” the late-’60s network series in the same mode remembered for its space-alien infiltrators’ telltale imperfection: a crooked pinky finger.

“A lot of people have assumed from the very beginning we were doing a remake of ‘Body Snatchers,'” said “Invasion” creator and executive producer Shaun Cassidy. “There are certainly elements there. The ‘Who do you trust?’ element basically is the same. Is there a conspiracy afoot? All of that is there. But whatever process is occurring here is, I think, very different. The audience, right or wrong, has already made a lot of assumptions. You know, the sheriff’s the bad guy, Mariel’s been taken by someone or something, bring on the pod people. I hear that. Our job is to say, ‘Well, audience, you’re right and you’re wrong,’ and to take their expectations and spin them in a new way.”

Parallels between two eras

Cassidy nonetheless understands why someone might see parallels between these times and the ’50s. “There was a great deal of uncertainty,” he said. “For another generation now, I suspect there’s equal uncertainty. Writers and artists always try to process what’s going on through their work.”

Cassidy said he sees hope as the driving force in his series – hope that people work out family differences, hope that they can put their lives and community back after a hurricane, hope that they can stand up to an extraterrestrial threat.

Braga issued a cloudier forecast, suggesting we may not have seen the last manifestations of artists’ processing 9/11, terrorism and other threats to our domestic tranquillity. “Look, many people would tell you that we may not be living in the dark ages, but we’re very much in the dim ages,” he said. “It’s not exactly a hopeful time when we’ve got enough of the world’s problems solved that we can look to the stars and start dreaming again. We’re just trying to get out of a lot of nightmares. It’s a paranoid world we live in right now, and science fiction to some extent does represent that world.”

Shows that were out of this world

Television’s fascination with space aliens goes back to the 1950s, when Gore Vidal’s satirical play “Visit to a Small Planet” was performed live. Over the decades, some have come to observe us, others to oust us – or worse. Raise your tentacle if you remember these shows.

The Twilight Zone (CBS, 1959-64) – Several episodes dealt with alien contact, none more wickedly than “To Serve Man,” in which ostensibly benign visitors really wanted us on a menu.

My Favorite Martian (CBS, 1963-64) – Uncle “Martin” (Ray Walston) was really a Martian, with pop-up antennae that looked like TV rabbit ears.

The Invaders (ABC, 1967-68) – Aliens that look exactly like us, save for bent pinkies, are here. And there. And everywhere.

Mork & Mindy (ABC, 1978-82) – Alien as innocent, with Robin Williams doing otherworldly shtick as Mork from Ork.

The Powers of Matthew Star (NBC, 1982-83) – A royal alien hides on Earth. Sort of like Fresh Prince of Betelgeuse.

Starman (ABC, 1986-87) – Robert Hays reinterprets Jeff Bridges’ movie role as a lone, stranded alien.

Alien Nation (Fox, 1989) – Aliens as immigrants, living openly, though uneasily, among us. Inspired by hit movie.

V (NBC, 1984-85) – Aliens as Nazis, first in a hit miniseries, then briefly as a weekly.

The X Files (Fox, 1993-2002) – FBI agents Mulder and Scully chase invaders, some of them little gray men, others unnervingly human in form.

3rd Rock From the Sun (NBC, 1996-2001) – Four aliens pose as a nutty college professor and his family.

Source: News Day, Written By: Noel Holston (Freelance Writer)