The Space Shuttle Enterprise is on a mission to deliver a satellite to orbit around the Earth, and all is going well for the three astronauts and the control down at NASA. However, as the doors have opened and the equipment is ready to launch, with one of the team performing a spacewalk to ensure it succeeds, his two fellow crewmembers, Steve (Gary Collins) and Lew (James Hampton), notice an irregularity on their radar screen: an object they initially take to be a meteor is bizarrely changing direction and hovering above the Shuttle. NASA can see it too, but press ahead regardless, a big mistake for when the satellite goes up, it crashes into what looks like an alien craft, and the spacewalker's head falls off.
They were regarded as getting too big for their boots, however, with this release, thanks to its debut in a crowded field and with obviously not the budget to realise their ambitions: this came across as a TV pilot version of Close Encounters, and was stuffed with faces most known for their small screen excursions rather than a proper, tried and tested movie star to lead the drama. We are told in a title card that what we were seeing was true, no matter that the Space Shuttle programme had not commenced its maiden flight yet which should have set off alarm bells in the contemporary audience's heads, and in fact more or less everything that followed the mildly hilarious space accident at the beginning was invented.
And familiar, if you had seen another science fiction thriller torn from the conspiracy theory paperbacks, Capricorn One of a couple of years before. That had taken the moon landings paranoia (i.e. the theorists said they never happened) and turned them into a fair thriller about faked Mars landings, whereas this had great faith in the ability for NASA to conduct space missions, it was simply that they were suspicious they knew more about aliens than they were letting on. That suspicion has fuelled a million websites and bled over into parapolitics where governments were behind various high profile assassinations and were aware of the World Trade Center destruction before it happened - or even instigated it themselves in some takes. Back in 1980, there was enough novelty in the idea for director James L. Conway, a main player in Sunn Classics, to spin his yarn.
