Until humanity makes contact with some genuine extra-terrestrials, the aliens we invent will say more about us than about them. By extension, the same goes for where we first encounter these imaginary off-worlders. These maps show the locations of alien first contacts on Earth in almost a century of popular films, from Algol (1920), a Faust-from-outer-space parable made in Weimar Germany; to Annihilation (2018), a reflection on America’s loss of faith in the future of humankind. The rules: Each dot shows the first appearance of (outer-space) aliens at specific locations…
