UFO (1970) Part 2: The Alien Spacesuits

These are the chaps that lurk within the UfOs.  For aliens, they're sort of human looking except for the dead-fish eyes and the fact that they breathe green liquid instead of air.

An image that lurks from childhood is of a captured human being converted to alien, his helmet filling up with the green stuff.  I sort of remember him drowning inside his helmet as he fights against breathing the alien goo in.  The image sticks in the mind’s eye along with all of those Public Information Films that haunted our childhood back then.

Anyway, these are the bad guys that give SHADO all the trouble.   As a general rule you never see more than one of them at a time and I’ve heard that there were only two suits made.  So you can understand that there was a bit of a problem when in one story there was a scene where two of them needed to be seen carrying a third between them.  Clever camera editing managed to crop either the front or back alien out of the shot so as presumably not to reveal the other actor dressed in his jeans and a T-shirt.

There are a couple of alterations made to the suits over the shows run, the biggest being the replacement of the silver chain mail for a less ornate material finish.

To the best of my research, this space suit only makes one future appearance after the show finished and that was in a Children’s Film Foundation feature.  Blog post pending.

Steve