Cult of Undeath—pre-5x5 column noodling on The Strangers

One of the Strangers

I don't yet know exactly how I'm going to end up adapting the UFO mythology into a fantasy setting. I know that the aliens will be entities from another dimension, most likely, something like the Plane of Shadow or the Shadowfell or whatever they're calling it these days. The Upside-down is basically the same idea too (a more esoteric thing that Stranger Things stole from D&D.) But we'll see. I've got plenty of ideas, but I'm not 100% sold on any of them yet. I'll "noodle", as the title says, with some possible interpretations, but this is just brainstorming at this stage, not anything that's concretely decided.

But let me make a quick and dirty list of what some of the most iconic elements of the UFO mythology are in the real modern world. Later, I can refer to this list as I look for elements to adopt into a Lovecraftian-like fantasy format. 

• The most iconic, of course, is mysterious lights in the sky, moving more quickly than can be explained. I suspect that I'm not going to have "craft" that fly, because that's too on-the-nose UFOs, but maybe the Strangers, my version of the aliens, can transform themselves into insubstantial ghost-forms or something like that to travel in an odd, alien way.
• Loss of power? I mean, heck—the very first episode of The X-Files, Mulder and Scully are in a car that dies mysteriously when they reach an ominous stretch of road. This is a little harder to replicate in fantasy, of course, but maybe some kind of combination of darkness and paralysis will work; the idea is that the characters have a measure of helplessness. That works well anyway, for some of the other things that I have in mind for the Strangers; if they come from a Shadowfell-like place, why wouldn't they have darkness abilities, and paralysis is already a UFO mythology detail as part of abduction narratives.
• One of the most iconic elements of the UFO mythos is official government explanations that are so janky that they tend to engender more contempt and derision than being taken seriously, as if they're not even trying to really explain anything. Swamp gas? Weather balloons? Ball lightning? Some accounts are worse than others, of course, but the rather ham-handed cover-up is certainly a huge part of the UFO mythos themes.
• People (probably NPCs) experiencing lost time or lost memories, which may or may not have been because of abductions, experimentation, "anal probing", etc., although that last has become possibly a joke in and of itself. In any case, victims being able to access memories of what happened to them is difficult, because the Strangers have in some way stolen those memories. Therefore, they're a little off, bewildered, and skittish after it's all over, or they are subject to malaise and borderline unresponsiveness.
• Alien implants. In real life UFO mythology, these are alien high-tech devices, but in fantasy, they'd probably be some kind of weird Lovecraftian alien parasitic devices or even organisms. Maybe even something like the "black oil" of the movie Prometheus or some of the middle seasons of The X-Files could be the delivery vehicle, or what's within it, at least. Unexplained and eerily timely nosebleeds, weird scarring, etc. would be the clues. Whether there's some kind of "Manchurian candidate" something or other behind it is TBD, but... why not, amirite?
• I have no idea how to work these in, but there has to be crop circles and cattle mutilations going on out in the rural areas.
• Meanwhile, the Men In Black as almost but not quite human, threatening figures who ... well, literally threaten people who get too close to figuring stuff out. The California Dark Watchers mythos, while unrelated to UFOs, could play a role here too, if nothing else, just for creepy encounters that the PCs can't quite come to grips with.
• The UFO mythos has a long history of alleged crash sites, debris fields, recovered alien artifacts and even alien autopsies. Lovecraft did something not too terribly different from this many decades earlier in "The Horror at the Camp" episode in At the Mountains of Madness, so there's certainly a way to adopt some of this stuff to a fantasy setting. Not that that's fantasy per se, but it's at least early enough modern that the ideas can pass muster, and the aliens don't need to have crashed their flying saucer to end up on an autopsy table, and they can have inadvertently left weird stuff laying around in the wilderness without having to fly and crash it to get it there.
• Area 51. The idea of corrupt government groups, already mentioned above, having some kind of secret site where they're experimenting with alien stuff that they've either recovered, captured, stolen, or been given in corrupt bargains with the Strangers is another one of the most iconic line items of UFO mythology. Doesn't have to be the government, of course—but some powerful, shady organization with backing that makes them effectively immune from consequences other than mob violence. In the kind of decentralized, localized government that I'm more likely to have, a strong federalized Deep State doesn't quite make sense like it did in the X-Files.

I did create a Hero Forge model of a Yaddithian. While it doesn't look very much like the AI image of an alien in a fantasy setting, as above, it might be another alternative. I'd kind of thought of them as a more overtly Lovecraftian homage in the same way mind flayers are (even more than the wink-wink, nudge-nudge that D&D did, since Yaddithians are at least mentioned once in a Lovecraft story) and could potentially fill a similar role. It occurs to me that The Strangers already are that similar role—alien, inscrutable, horrible, and possessed of weird psychic powers that operate unlike magic as it's described already in the setting. So I guess the actual physical appearance of the Strangers remains unknown. I do kind of like making them overtly more "gray alien" like rather than a substitute mind-flayer but I may yet change my mind. After all, playing up the Lovecraftian angle probably makes it much easier to adopt UFO ideas and concepts into a fantasy milieu without it feeling really out of place and strange. I'm also not 100% certain that I want this whole thing to be solved and figured out as part of play; leaving it slightly unresolved and mysterious is, of course, another key element of UFOs.

Yaddithian