"For him, it began one night on a lonely country road, looking for a shortcut that he never found. It began with the landing of a craft from another galaxy."

They say that ignorance is bliss. And nobody understood that better than architect David Vincent, who truth be told, would likely have preferred not be aware of the knowledge that aliens were busy disguising themselves as humans to that they could conquer the planet. But David was all too aware of their plans and that provided the premise for The Invaders, a Quinn Martin Production that that first aired in 1967.

The Invaders, which borrowed somewhat from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, starred Roy Thinnes as David Vincent, a man who holds an extraordinary bit of knowledge about a extra-terrestrial invasion. He spends his time traveling from place to place trying to warn the populace of the impending disaster but it often met with skepticism. He eventually finds an ally in millionaire Edgar Scoville and begins to assemble a small group of earthlings to help fight the menacing infiltrators, only known as “the invaders.”

Soon after the show aired, rumors surfaced that young viewers were prone to nightmares after watching the show. It probably didn’t help matters that Roy Thinnes claimed to have witnessed a real UFO while filming one of the episodes. Even this extra publicity wasn’t enough to save The Invaders, however, and the show disappeared from the airwaves halfway through the second season.

Almost 30 years after the original series aired, the series was reprised in a three-part miniseries, also called The Invaders, which aired in 1995. This time around, the conspiracy was discovered by Nolan Wood (played by Scott Bakula, who had his own share of alien encounters as Captain of a starship on Star Trek: Enterprise.) Roy Thinnes even appeared once again as David Vincent, who, now quite advanced in age, simply passes his knowledge on to the new guy and lets him deal with the stress.