In 1951, Ella Fitzgerald recorded a jazzy number written by Arthur Pitt and Elaine Wise called Two Little Men in a Flying Saucer, a satirical catalogue of humanity's off-putting habits, as seen by the little green men of the title: "During their mission / Heard a politician / Making speeches as they travelled by / But they departed / Faster than they started / Because the hot air blew them sky high." (The song has since been simplified into a nursery-school counting song.) But no medium was more besotted by flying saucers than cinema.
