There is a colour palette that comes to mind whenever I talk about UFOs, Aliens, or Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP). The 1947 Roswell incident in New Mexico is subject to a great burden. Silver saucers and small grey humanoid creatures dominated the unexplained landscape. Early sci-fi films were added to this with a black and white aesthetic. When colored film reached the mainstream in the 50s and 60s, Little Grey men became little green men. And all bets were off.
Now you can give this world of paranormal plot, sighting and aiding, your own color palette with Andy Price’s Andy Price’s The Alien Encounters Coloring Book, set up courtesy of Adams Media (Simon and Schuster imprint). Price is the illustrator behind the Extreme Horror Sticker Book and the Cryptid Creatures Coloring Book. Both present in-depth knowledge of both classic films and monster design topics.
Alien Encounter Coloring Books color 30 extraterrestrial mysteries, from the Belgian UFO waves in 1989-90 to the Jerusalem UFO sightings in 2011. Each case is portrayed with a sense of grandeur that captures the grand nature of these events. Some recall movie posters from old sci-fi flick movie posters (such as the UFO attack in Washington, DC in 1952), while others meet as classic case files with top-secret photographs of aliens and spaceships, like the illustrations of the 1950 McMinnville UFO case). After that, there are a few that take the form of the newspaper front page. How did the 1947 sighting of Kenneth Arnold UFO appear in the book?
One of the very clever details that accentuate the coloring book is the decision to provide a simple story of each encounter at the back of every page. Unlike the small paragraphs you’ll find in the museum next to your artwork, it provides information about the context and methods. They are bite-sized, but they do a lot to give meaning to the image. It is essentially a crash course of extraterrestrial phenomena.
In addition to this, there are wise choices for book encounters in Price. Many testimonies surrounding these cases tend to share some very similar details between them (i.e., large heads, silver oval eyes, long arms), but are intended to highlight what distinguishes them. The aliens have long hair and suits, while the other aliens are small, but they inflate their eyes. The same goes for spacecraft. This is where prices really broaden his ability to create unique variations of core design.
Since Roswell, films and television series have been fed up with flying saucers as the standard for alien spaceships. For example, children in the 90s grew up with them thanks to many docusaries born around that time, focusing on seeking answers to phenomena of unknown cause. Jordan Pool’s 2022 Noop adds a special twist to the flying objects that open up new paths for experimentation, but resorts visually for sci-fi horror stories. Price takes a like-minded approach and clearly relies on extensive research to give each spaceship a unique identity. The 1977 Petrozavodsk sighting page is a great example of this. It shows a classic saucer-shaped ship with jellyfish-like tentacles coming out from underneath. The initial response to that suggests that the ship could be aliens themselves and a living creature in fusion with high tech. Coloring this is a reward for itself and can inspire enough curiosity to learn more about the sighting.
Alien Encounter Coloring Books is just as educational as coloring books. It’s a job that allows people to go down the rabbit hole in search of truth that previous generations have already begun. Mulder will be a proud owner if he existed in the X-Files world. Simply put, Andy Price’s illustrations will make you want to believe in aliens. And you do it one color at a time.
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