The Alien Invaders are an unnamed duo of humanoid aliens who sought to have humans destroy themselves, serving as the overarching antagonists of "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street", the 22nd episode of The Twilight Zone's first season, which aired in 1960. Externally, they are identical to humans, although they wore distinct uniforms. While unnamed, one of the aliens was visibly senior, and presumably higher-ranking, while the other was visibly younger. Their method of creating chaos was quite simple: disrupt the day-to-day consistency of human activity, sparking paranoia and panic, serving as a criticism of McCarthyism, the Red Scare, and other mass paranoia present during the Cold War.
They were portrayed by the late Sheldon Allman and Bill Walsh, whose costumes were reused uniforms from the 1956 film Forbidden Planet, with Bill Walsh credited as William Walsh. The alien invaders were absent from the 2003 remake of the episode (titled "The Monsters are on Maple Street"), replaced by two soldiers of the US Army, who were instead testing how small towns would react to fears of terrorism.
History[]
In the 1960s, an imperialist species of alien humanoids sought to take over Earth, doing so not by invasion, but rather, by making humans destroy themselves, sending at least two male members of their species to Earth. This duo tested their methods on several towns across the globe, cutting the power and communications of those towns, down to cars and portable radios, while also creating occasional power surges to certain vehicles or buildings, watching the results from afar. In every town the aliens experimented on, the residents became so overwhelmed by the paranoia of the strange situations that they began looking for someone to blame, usually whoever received the power surges, and soon turned on each other. Eventually, the aliens experimented on Maple Street, a small town somewhere in the United States, their ship being seen passing overhead by the residents of Maple Street, but dismissed as a meteor. The aliens arrived at exactly 6:43 PM.
Landing atop a nearby hill overlooking the town, the aliens then cut the town's power, beginning the experiment, watching as the people grew increasingly paranoid, soon realizing that the "meteor" was actually an alien ship, but then began to accuse each other of being in league with the aliens or being aliens themselves. As the situation became a riot, unwittingly sparked by Charlie Farnsworth, the two aliens stood outside their ship, still watching the events unfold. One alien, an older male, had been working a device that manipulated the town's power, telling the younger male alien with him that all that was needed to throw humans into chaos was to disrupt order, and that Maple Street was not a unique case. Seeing that Maple Street was in ruins and that the pattern repeated itself everywhere they went, the aliens departed, set on using their strategy to conquer Earth one neighborhood at a time.
