KEEP WATCHING THE SKIES!

As if to cap off his long career in the conspiracy world, Fred Lee Crisman believed he was the inspiration behind the late-1960s television series The Invaders. The Quinn Martin production featured Roy Thinnes as architect David Vincent who, after a personal ‘close encounter’, spent two seasons pursuing flying saucers and the alien presence on Earth. Harold Dahl, Crisman’s partner in the Maury Island event, agreed in correspondence with UFO researcher Gary Leslie that the Thinnes character bore a marked resemblance to his former partner.

Producer Quinn Martin had his own conspiracy connections. For his earlier series The FBI, which began in 1965, Martin hired FBI agent Mark Felt (pictured below) as a technical advisor. In the early1970s, Felt would use the codename ‘Deep Throat’ in his interactions with

Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein concerning President Nixon’s involvement in the Watergate scandal, leading ultimately to Nixon’s resignation. Given this connection, it is perhaps not beyond the bounds of possibility that Martin developed The

Invaders after hearing tales of Crisman’s misadventures from his FBI contacts. Ultimately, that series and the entire UFOconspiracy nexus would lead to the 1990s hit The X-Files.