Long before television made its appearance in our household, I knew about the Flying Saucers. My parents had a stack of old issues of Fate magazine, one of whose staples (along with Fortean phenomena) was Saucers (the term “UFOs” came later, I believe). In fact, I was five years old in the year of Kenneth Arnold and the Roswell crash, the year when the army’s Project Sign (which concluded that the saucers were visitors from another planet) turned, at a critical word from a general, into Project Grudge (which concluded that the saucers were all hoaxes) and then into Project Blue Book (which was primarily an attempt to bury the damned things). I grew up with science fiction pulp magazines, whose every third issue back in the fifties seemed to have a saucer on the cover (half the remaining issues, of course, replaced the saucers with babes in brass bras). Later in life, I got to do my own saucer research, as part of my job as an air force weatherman (I successfully, even to my own mind, demonstrated that the school bus driver had been looking at an early morning manifestation of the planet Venus), and brushed up against one or two less explicable phenomena, including the one that the ops officer very carefully shitcanned (that was the one with three separate sightings — one by a kid on the ground in North Charleston, one by a civilian pilot coming in to the civvy side of the field for a landing, and one by Navy Jacksonville radar, which clocked the object, which took off from a vacant lot in North Charleston, at three to four thousand miles per hour just before it disappeared from the screen). That one, I decided, wasn’t Venus. Luckily, nobody ever asked me to suggest what it, in fact, was.

Steven Spielberg also has had an interest in UFOs, particularly the ones that from time to time carry off people, which he manifested almost a quarter of a century ago in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Now he has expanded the idea into what has to be the longest mini-series in TV history, and at least as interesting as Roots. The story of “Taken”, which so far has run through five of its ten two-hour episodes on the Sci-Fi Channel, starts by assuming that UFOs (including the one that crashed at Roswell) and all the associated phenomena (including abductions) are real; we see both the saucers and their alien crews (the big-eyed “greys”) early on in the first episode. But the story is really about three families and, down through the years, their relationship to the saucers.

Russel Keys (Steve Burton), a World War II pilot whose entire crew was captured and “processed” by aliens (is the name perhaps a play on that of Russell Casse, the abducted pilot in Independence Day?), carries around some sort of alien monitoring and tracking device in his head; this role of “guinea pig” is to be passed down through his family, even after his death at the hands of representatives of his own nation, perhaps to the present day (the narrator is his great-granddaughter Allie, aka Dakota Fanning, who has so far been heard but not seen).

Two aliens survived the Roswell crash; one died in a government laboratory, while the other escaped, somehow took on human semblance, and found refuge with Sally Clarke (Catherine Dent), a traveling salesman’s neglected spouse near Lubbock, Texas. The resulting dalliance resulted in a son, Jacob, who had certain capabilities not usually found in children.

Owen Crawford (Joel Gretsch) is an army air force (later air force) captain who lucks into the Roswell crash and eventually takes over the entire surreptitious UFO research program. He is a thorough-going SOB who first attempts to steal Jacob away from Sally — but Jacob manages to escape from him — and then seizes Keys and his son Jesse for experimentation that results in Keys’ death. After his death, his elder son Eric (Andy Powers) — the younger died in Alaska during the fourth episode, during yet another encounter associated with the aliens — takes over both the project and his SOBness.

So far, the series has brought us up to the Reagan election in 1980; we are somewhere between the second and third generations of the three families. It will be interesting to see where the series takes us in the next five episodes / 22 years; will we reach some sort of final understanding of why the saucers are here? Or will we, as in real life, be left only with more questions?