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There’s a certain color palette that springs to mind whenever talk of UFOs, aliens, or unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) comes up. It owes a lot to the 1947 Roswell Incident in New Mexico. Silver-colored saucers and little grey humanoid creatures dominated the landscape of the unexplained. Early sci-fi movies added to this with their black & white aesthetic, which leaned on grey tones to portray their aliens. As color films reached the mainstream in the Fifties and Sixties, little grey men became little green men. And then all bets were off.
Now, you can give this paranormal world of conspiracies, sightings, and abductions your own color palette with Andy Price’s The Alien Encounters Coloring Book, set for a July 1st release date courtesy of Adams Media (an imprint of Simon and Schuster). Price is the illustrator behind the Extreme Horror Sticker Book and The Cryptid Creatures Coloring Book, both of which showcase a deep knowledge of both topics with drawings that homage classic movies and monster designs.
The Alien Encounters Coloring Book features thirty extraterrestrial mysteries to color in, ranging from Roswell to the Belgium UFO Wave of 1989-90 and up to 2011’s Jerusalem UFO sightings. Each case is portrayed with a sense of grandiosity that captures the spectacular nature of these events. Some are reminiscent of movie posters for old sci-fi flicks (like The UFO Attack on Washington, DC in 1952) while others come across as classified case files with top secret pictures of aliens and spaceships spread out over someone’s desk (as in illustration for The McMinnville UFO case in 1950). Then you have a few that take the form of newspaper front pages, which how is the 1947 Kenneth Arnold UFO Sighting appears in the book.
One very clever detail that makes the coloring book stand out is its decision to offer brief narratives of each encounter on the back of every page. It’s not unlike the small paragraphs you’d find in museums next to art pieces, providing information on context and method. They’re bite-sized, but they do a lot to give meaning to the images. It’s essentially a crash course in extraterrestrial phenomena.
Adding to this is Price’s smart selection of encounters for the book. While the many testimonies surrounding these cases tend to share in some very similar details between them (i.e. big heads, silvery oval eyes, and long arms), there’s an aim to emphasize the things that differentiate them. Some aliens have long hair and suits, while others are smaller but with bulging eyes. The same extends to spaceships, which is where Price really stretches his ability to create unique variations of a core design.
Ever since Roswell, movies and TV series have largely stuck to the flying saucer as the standard for alien spaceships. Nineties kids, for instance, grew up with them thanks to The X-Files and the many docuseries that cropped up around that time with a focus on seeking answers to unexplained phenomena. Even Jordan Poole’s 2022 Nope resorts to the visual for its sci-fi horror tale, albeit with a special twist on the flying object that opens up new avenues for experimentation. Price takes a like-minded approach, clearly relying on extensive research to give each spaceship its own identity. The 1977 Petrozavodsk Sightings page is a great example of this. It shows a classic saucer-shaped craft with jellyfish-like tentacles coming out from underneath it. Initial reactions to it suggest the ship might be the alien itself, a living creature fused with high tech. Coloring this one is a reward unto itself, and it can spark enough curiosity to learn more about the sighting.
The Alien Encounters Coloring Book is as much an education as it is a coloring book. It’s the kind of work that can make people go down the rabbit hole in search of the truth previous generations already started on. If it had existed in the world of The X-Files, Mulder would be the proud owner of one. Simply put, Andy Price’s illustration will make you want to believe in aliens. And you’ll do so one color at a time.
English (US)