A little OT: But those of the Alien Generation will appreciate...

I remember reading about it in the news - at that time I was a "space geek", I had a lot of beautifully illustrated books on mostly the unmanned Moon missions, the Gemini, Mercury, Apollo, Apollo–Soyuz programs and the Sky-Lab program, and also a couple of books on the Soviet cosmonauts and their spacecrafts. My late father & my mother both used to live in the East Germany, they saw the moon landing live on the TV. Later they collected a lot of stuffs like these space books on both sides of the "Iron Curtain", gave them to me and I grew up with the best of both world, LOL. As for Alien, I do not think that it had that much publicity before its eventual release. I think that I may have seen the trailer at one of the showing in the cinema, I don't remember which as I used to go to the cinema almost every fortnight. Alien was however one of the slew of 70s' blockbuster movie that left a deep impression on me, the others being Jaws, Close Encounter of the Third Kind, Superman, and Star Wars. In those days, they were lax in letting kids seeing R rated movie especially horror.

I certainly do remember, that was going on in pretty much in my backyard here about 40 miles north of L.A. Edwards is a test base, not an operational one, and you can get right up to the perimeter with no problem. When it came down, you couldn't hear anything of course, but we got to see it come in and land. I swear I have been trying to remember seeing ads for Alien and I cant...not even in the theaters. Alien really took me by surprise..I only learned about it about a month out. I really thought it was simply the latest cool space monster flick, a dime a dozen.

that's impressive! I was 1 year old

maybe not even that!

I'm pretty sure I'm the oldest on this site, at least the oldest to admit it. Age didn't make me grow up unfortunately. But I'll get by.

^^ respect! @forever war

@ubik333 As Brett would say.."Right !" I had lots of pictures I cut out from Life magazine and Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine as well, and book after book on the entire NASA Space program dating back to the Mercury and Apollo programs. The U.S. Space program was front and center in the worlds attention for a long time....I saw the Apollo 11 landing at 3am in Yosemite National Park in California at a Park Ranger station, the whole campground was crowded around one little TV...to this day I remember the caption at the bottom of the screen.."Live from the moon"..WOW...THE MOON! Unforgettable. All this is completely responsible for the profession I chose. I grew up wanting to be an astronaut, instead, I became a pilot. It's as close as I could get. My Mom wanted me to be a doctor. I fly Air Ambulance Medical Transport missions. My Mom settled for that...if I need a bypass operation, I got all the help I need 3 feet behind me.