Professor Kidd: Governor, you're a politician. You're used to dealing with the art of the possible. This is the opposite. Some sort of faux therapist, a... new age guru you brought in, like some politicians do — they'd have reassuringly solid answers for you concerning the great beyond. But I deal in mythology. And this is what a mythology does, it bridges the gap between truth and lies. It creates a disturbing liminal zone. A grey area. And in that space, all of a civilisation's weak spots and shortcomings and hypocrisies are made visible. New Mexico is kind of haunted by this myth. As I hope I'm about to show you. We're in saucer country now.
Saucer Country is a UFO mythology comicbook series written by Paul Cornell and drawn by Ryan Kelly, published by Vertigo Comics in 2012. The series is about a US presidential candidate, Governor Arcadia Alvarado, who has come to believe that she may have been abducted by aliens. It has been described as a mix of The West Wing and The X-Files.
In 2013, Vertigo Comics cancelled the book at issue 14 due to low sales. However, IDW Publishing picked up the rights to the series and revived it with both Cornell and Kelly aboard, and with a new title: Saucer State. That series also ended after six issues with the story incomplete, and Cornell and Kelly crowdfunded for an omnibus edition of all twenty issues plus the long-awaited ending, under the title of Saucer Country Completed. Image Comics published the finale as a one shot called Saucer Country: The Finale in 2024.
Saucer Country provides examples of:
- The Alcoholic: Michael is a recovering one, but the stress of the election campaign and his abduction have caused him to somewhat relapse.
- Alien Abduction: Arcadia and Michael are both abducted and returned on the same night. Senator Kersey, Arcadia's opponent for the Democratic primary, was previously abducted and regularly visited after, but the aliens lost interest when he dropped out of the Presidential race. It's eventually revealed that these "abductions" are actually nightmares created using the Microwave Beam, a psychic weapon developed by the conspiracy.
- Aliens Are Bastards: They abduct people regularly and perform horrifying experiments on them, including medical rape, while also being as pointlessly scary and cryptic as possible. But than subverted, as it turns out the aliens doing all the villainous stuff are fake visions created using the Microwave Beam. The real aliens seem to be benevolent, or at the very least, people like us... though at the same time, Michael expresses concern that their relationship with Earth may end up being colonialist in nature.
- All UFO Stories Are True: Yes and no. By the end, it's become very unclear how many of the UFO stories are real and how many are fake. There are definitely actual aliens preparing to make first contact with Earth, but there was also dueling conspiracies to fake alien activity, and only some of the events are definitively attributed to one or the other.
- Amicable Exes: Arcadia and Michael, although the other characters suspect that Michael's physically abusive.
- Anal Probing: Played dramatically; Arcadia and Michael are victims of this and they explicitly call it rape.
- Batman Gambit: Arcadia pulls one off on the Pioneer Couple by having Professor Kidd fake a suicide attempt in order to get the couple to lead Kidd to definitive physical proof of UFO's. When they've led him to the item, Fausto and his men take them down at their home, where they've been projecting into Kidd's mind with a device.
- Bittersweet Ending: The conspiracies are unraveled and the heroes all head off to a brighter future, having received some degree of closure, as Earth makes first contact with the real aliens. But America and Russia are back in a new and especially horrifying Cold War, the scars of their experiences still haunt said heroes, and it's yet to be seen if the aliens are truly good-natured or not...
- Brown Note: The Microwave Beam causes people to suffer horrifyingly vivid hallucinations that can be shaped by the person wielding the weapon. The conspiracies use it as part of their crafting of fake UFO encounters. This is also why the fake aliens change in nature and appearance to suit the person; each incident is literally tailored to the victim and thus they see something that fits their pop cultural perception of aliens and the supernatural. It also tends to have very bad health effects on the target if used for too long; Arcadia suffers a miscarriage because of her experience and Brady is ultimately killed by being subjected to a very long vision.
- Continuity Nod: Lampshaded by Professor Kidd when the Pioneer Couple visit him while he's riding an airplane again in issue 13.
- A Day in the Limelight: Issue 11 focuses on Michael's childhood and strange encounter with fairies.
- Deadpan Snarker: Chloe has shades of this.
- Election Day Episode: What the series has been leading up to with its first season. Arcadia wins.
- Flashback: Issue 11 discusses Michael's childhood and possible interactions with fairies.
- A Form You Are Comfortable With: Zigzagged. The visitations made by aliens take different forms depending on the person, the state of technology of the time period, and any expectation of what an alien might look like, but none of these forms are actually comforting. Michael also visualizes the aliens as rabbits in a therapy session to try and remain comfortable, not that it helps much.
- Government Conspiracy: There are two competing ones behind everything, an American scheme to spread UFO stories and misinformation for the government's benefit, and another by the Russian government to achieve similar results after they learn about the former conspiracy and get a hold of the weapon used to pull it off.
- The Greys: The form most of the aliens take. Because that's the pop cultural view of them and thus what the Microwave Beam tends to make people imagine them as looking like. The real aliens don't look anything like Greys.
- Half-Human Hybrid: The idea of the aliens creating human-alien hybrids repeatedly comes up in close encounters, with Arcadia herself at one point wondering if her miscarriage after he abduction was actually the aliens taking her non-human child for themselves. Ultimately averted due the reveal that these encounters were fake ones. The real aliens have absolutely nothing in common with humans biologically and thus hybrids are impossible.
- Inscrutable Aliens: The aliens are bizarre and scary at even the best of times. Both the fake ones and the real ones, though the latter at least seem to be benevolent.
- Karmic Death: Brady is killed by being subjected to the Microwave Beam he had used on countless people over the years, spending his final moments experiencing the same horrifying hallucinations of being abducted and tortured by aliens he had subjected others to.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: By the end, some of the mysteries have been explained by the government conspiracy (mundane) and others by the real aliens (magic), but others have no explanation; they may have been part of the hoaxes, the real deal, or something else entirely. The narrative leaves a lot up to the reader to decide on.
- Mind Screw: As things go on and the investigation into the conspiracies and UFO's goes deeper, the more the line between reality and nightmare begins breaking down for our heroes. There's a Mind Screwdriver at the end, but it only explains so much and leaves a decent number of questions unanswered.
- Mr. Exposition: Justified with Professor Kidd, who is hired by Arcadia's team to explain UFO's and make sense of the abductions.
- Past Experience Nightmare: Arcadia and Michael after their abduction.
- Rape as Drama: The old jokes about aliens subjecting their victims to Anal Probing are savagely deconstructed here, as the narrative makes abundantly clear that this is rape and both Arcadia and Michael are shown to be deeply affected by being sexually assaulted by their abductors.
- Reptilian Conspiracy: The group or type of aliens that supposedly abducted Senator Kersey and Ms. Bates. Unlike most of the other alien encounters, they're portrayed in a rather goofy light, as they possess a lot of bizarre and cartoonish traits like an inexplicable hatred of anything liberal; this turns out to be one of the first hints to the true nature of the "abductions".
- The Reveal:
- Issue 13 and 14 reveal that the Pioneer Couple that Professor Kidd has been hallucinating are in fact actors who have been projecting themselves into Professor Kidd's mind.
- Arcadia and Michael's abduction was actually a hallucination created using the Microwave Beam weapon... but there are also real aliens.
- Ship Tease: Arcadia and Michael seem to be on their way to rekindling their marriage but it turns out that neither are interested in being anything other than friends. Chloe is also hinted to be attracted to Michael.
- Shout-Out:
- In issue 2, Professor Kidd panicking while on his plane ride about something outside the plane window is very similar to The Twilight Zone story "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet".
- The Pioneer Couple's repeated descriptions of themselves as Kidd's "supernatural helpers" is a shout-out to one of Jedburgh's lines in Edge of Darkness, a series that explores many similar themes to this one.
- Space Cold War: The whole conflict is basically born out of a renewed Cold War born out of the Russian government figuring out that factions within the USA were using a hallucinatory weapon to spread misinformation about UFOs and aliens for their own ends, prompting the Russians to try and get that weapon and use it themselves. The series ends with both sides armed with the Microwave Beam in a new state of Mutually-Assured Destruction.
- Starfish Aliens: The actual aliens resemble some kind of pink, vaguely humanoid fungi.
- There Are No Therapists: Averted. Arcadia and Michael visit one in order to ascertain whether or not they hallucinated the abduction.
- Time Skip: There's a short one in between issues 11 and 12, where the series jumps a couple of months from Arcadia winning the Democratic primary to election night.
- Unfazed Everyman: Harry, while mildly skeptical of the abduction, nonetheless takes it and the subsequent revelations about UFO's in stride.Chloe: Do you believe her?
Harry: I believe... I believe that by the time we figure out what actually happened, she'll be president. - Wrap It Up: The IDW miniseries Saucer State provides an ending to the story four years after Vertigo cancelled the comic.
