When alien life forms land on Earth, the first specimen of intelligent life they are likely to encounter is a rural farmer. This farmer is likely to be equipped with a firearm, and is equally likely to threaten the trespasser in a (futile) attempt to scare it off. While usually Played for Drama, it can be Played for Laughs if the farmer is especially unlikeable or foolhardy.
Alternatively, the farmer may not be instantly attacked. Sometimes the aliens are quite peaceful, and only interested in an intelligent dialogue or asylum on Earth.
Usually justified in that farmland usually covers a significant area of most countries. If an alien lands away from cities or suburbs,note there's a good chance that the first person they'll come across is a farmer.
Related to Crop Circles and Came from the Sky. Often used for a Start to Corpse prologue. May overlap with Pastoral Science Fiction.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Anime & Manga
- Dragon Ball Z: The arrival of Raditz on Earth is witnessed by a single farmer, who tries to kill him with a shotgun slug. Raditz catches the bullet and flicks it back.
Comic Books
- Enforced in Icon, where the titular superhero's powers and backstory are meant to evoke Superman. In this case the alien superhero crash lands in the American South of 1839. His first contact is an enslaved cotton plantation worker named Miriam, who adopts him as her son.
- Superman: When Kal-El first arrived on Earth as a baby, he landed on the farm of the Kents, who subsequently adopted him (averted before the 1986 reboot, though, since Pre-Crisis Jonathan Kent was a small town shop owner). In Supergirl: Being Super, Kara Zor-El lands as a toddler on the farm of the Danvers family and is raised by them.
- Wonder Woman Vol 1: By happenstance Etta Candy is the first human to come across the Rykornians and their invasion attempt starts on her family's Bar-L ranch.
Comic Strips
- The Far Side: One strip features aliens whose heads look like human hands. Unfortunately for all concerned, the first human they meet is a farmer who grabs the leader by the head and gives what he thinks is a firm handshake in welcome.
Films — Live-Action
- In Back to the Future, Marty crashes into a pine tree, a scarecrow, and a barn upon arriving in 1955. He crawls out of the DeLorean and tries to apologize to Farmer Peabody. However, he's wearing a radiation suit and the farmer's son has already identified the car as a spaceship, so he just winds up having to drive away for his life when Farmer Peabody goes for his gun.
- Brightburn: A nice couple with a farm in the American Midwest desperately want a baby. One night, an alien spaceship crashes on their farm; they find a seemingly human baby in the wreckage, and raise him as their own, giving him a loving home. Alas, this is not Kal-El of Krypton, and the baby boy grows up to adolescence to become an inhumanly murderous supervillain, killing numerous people, including both his adoptive parents.
- Creepshow's segment "The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill" is essentially an extended version of this trope, with a meteorite landing in the field of a dimwitted farmer (played by Stephen King, having the time of his life). As you can probably tell from the title of the segment, it doesn't go very well for poor Jordy.
- Probably the most memorable character in The Giant Spider Invasion is Dan Kester, a truly loathsome man whose farm becomes the staging ground for the eponymous invasion after a meteorite lands in one of his fields. Kester actually lasts most of the way into the movie before finally getting devoured by the Giant Spider.
- The main antagonist of Men in Black is an alien who crash-lands on a farm, eats the farmer who comes to check out the crash, and wears his skin as a disguise. Played for dark comedy, as the farmer, Edgar, is quickly established as an unlikable Asshole Victim and domestic abuser.
- The first victim of the titular entity of The Blob (1958) is a farmer who witnesses the meteor crash and the foolishly prods at the protoplasmic lifeform within.
- Killer Klowns from Outer Space: The first casualty of the Klowns is a farmer that goes lookin for the landing site of their ship thinking that it's Halley's Comet that crashed and he can dig it up for lots of money.
- In The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, two Human Aliens crash-land their spaceship on Earth, and their pet mutant escapes to go on a violent rampage. Its first victim is a farmer.
Literature
- Akropolis, a Cthulhu Mythos short story by Matt Wallace. The extraterrestrial city that drops from the sky is explored by a couple of farmers and their families before the authorities turn up, and it 'alters' them to be the first stage in an alien takeover.
Somehow it spoke to Danneth’s father. What it later took the scientists months to begin to decipher, the old man knew that first night. But he let them fumble with it, allowed them to study it, to begin to expose it to the world. He let them believe he was a simple farmer just happy to have made first contact with such a discovery. And when the time came that their inept ministrations were of no more use, he, the simple farmer, ejected the government from the Akropolis.
- The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter: Kaguya is a princess of the moon who is found and raised by a lowly bamboo cutter until she decides to return to it after becoming an adult.
- In The Tripods, prequel book, there’s a British version. The first victim of the first tripod on Earth is a farmer who’s taken up into the vehicle after the vehicle lands in the countryside. His house is wrecked and his wife and dog die. The British army destroys the tripod and finds the guy in the wreckage with his head sliced open.
- From the works of H. P. Lovecraft:
- In The Colour Out of Space, a meteorite lands in the fields of a farmer named Nahum Gardner. The meteorite gives off light of a colour never before encountered, whose influence gradually destroys the farm and all upon it.
- In The Whisperer in Darkness, a Vermont farmer named Henry Akeley writes a letter to the protagonist - a prominent skeptic - about his encounters with peculiar fungoid aliens that have been lurking around his farm.
- A variation in the Priscilla Hutchins novel Cauldron where our heroes try making first contact by ringing up a physicist, which means first flying out into the boondocks and physically tapping into a phone line so they can place the call. When they do meet face-to-face, they discover that, due to a mistranslation, they're actually speaking to a physical health guru.
- Inverted in The Ship Who... Won. Carialle and Keff, exploring an exotic planet, first find and study several villages of subsistence farmers before making First Contact, and only afterwards discover that the farmers are under the boot of a more violent and powerful upper class of "mages". Both are actually Human Subspecies.
Live-Action TV
- Invoked Trope in the Farscape episode "I, ET". Moya has to land on an Earth-like planet that hasn't made First Contact yet, and John Crichton goes to find the Mineral MacGuffin at a farmhouse owned by Lyneea, who believes in aliens and is trying to make contact with them. When Crichton turns up in her house however, she panics and goes to call the authorities, but Crichton quickly says that she was deliberately chosen by his fellow aliens to make contact with, and if they wanted to talk to someone in the government they would have.
- In Star Trek: Enterprise pilot episode "Broken Bow", a Klingon crashes in a corn field in Oklahoma. The first human he meets is a pissed-off farmer who shoots him with a plasma shotgun.
- Smallville: The same as in the comics, the Kents find baby Kal-El when his rocket crash-lands in their field.
Music
- "It Fell Out Of The Sky" by Creedence Clearwater Revival. Whatever "it" is, it lands in the field of a farmer named Jody, who must then deal with various power groups - Hollywood, the Vatican, the U.S. government - who all want it. A rare case where things seem to go really well for the farmer.
The White House said, "Put the thing in the Blue Room"
The Vatican said, "No, it belongs in Rome"
Jody said, "It's mine
But you can have it for 17 million"
Stand-Up Comedy
- Jeff Foxworthy gives a few justifications for this (although he replaces "farmer" with "redneck"). First, a farmer that reports an alien is doomed to be dismissed due to a lack of credibility. Second, an isolated farmer doesn't get much vacation, so they are willing to travel with an alien. And, finally, supposing the alien spaceship breaks down, who better to have along than a farmer?
Video Games
- The intro of Part Time UFO begins with an old Farmer crashing his truck into a sign after seeing something flash in the sky, causing the cargo to fall off. Upon seeing Jobski the UFO float nearby, the Farmer asks for their help in putting everything back on the truck.
- In Ultima VII, a Kilrathi ship crashes into the fantasy world of Britannia. A crossover is averted when a local farmer discovers it; startled, the alien leaps at him, and he quite accidentally impales it on his enchanted hoe.
- In Rhythm Heaven's "Second Contact" minigame, a Martian travels to Earth and interviews a farmer named Farmer Bob, who's a little too interested in meeting Martian women. At the end of a Superb playthrough, the Martian takes the farmer to Mars.
Western Animation
- The Schoolhouse Rock! segment "Little Twelvetoes" takes place on a farm at night, where a farmer stumbles upon the titular alien. This one simply wants to learn our number system, and the farmer is interested in multiplying in twelves.
- Love, Death & Robots: in "Suits" a community of farmers fights off an alien invasion with the help of makeshift mechas. Subverted, in that they've set up their farms on a hostile world, and the aliens they're fighting have slipped through holes in their protective force field.
