Animorphs
The Scholastic sci-fi series that hooked '90s kids on something surprisingly dark: five teens who can 'morph' into any animal to fight a secret alien invasion. The covers where a kid transformed mid-photo were the whole hook.
#Aliens
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Biker Mice from Mars
Three motorcycle-riding mice from Mars, Throttle, Modo and Vinnie, crash-land in Chicago and fight the Plutarkians, fish-like aliens out to strip Earth of its resources. It was Marvel's 1993 attempt at the next Ninja Turtles, and its voice cast reads like a Beverly Hills, 90210 cast list.
I Left My Sneakers in Dimension X
Bruce Coville's 1994 sequel to Aliens Ate My Homework, the one where Rod Allbright and his bratty cousin Elspeth get snatched into another dimension by a monster called Smorkus Flinders. Exactly the kind of paperback that came home in a book-fair bag or got renewed twice at the library, from the author who had already turned a whole grade's worth of kids into alien believers.
Independence Day
The White House explodes. Will Smith punches an alien and delivers the one-liner. Jeff Goldblum uploads a virus from a PowerBook. The movie that made July 4th weekend a permanent blockbuster holiday — and the biggest film of 1996 by a mile.
Mars Attacks!
Tim Burton's $80 million love letter to a gory 1962 trading-card set: cackling bug-eyed Martians vaporizing Jack Nicholson, Pierce Brosnan, and half of Hollywood — until Slim Whitman's yodeling makes their heads explode. Five months after Independence Day played it straight, this played it very, very weird.
Men in Black
Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones in black suits and shades, policing the aliens already living in Manhattan. The neuralyzer flash, the talking pug, and a theme song you could not escape made this one of the defining blockbusters of summer 1997.
Roswell
Alien teens hiding in plain sight in a New Mexico high school — sci-fi wrapped in teen romance, set around a kitschy diner where everything came doused in Tabasco. It only ran three seasons, but its fans mounted one of TV's most famous save-our-show campaigns, mailing bottles of hot sauce to the network.
Signs
Crop circles in a Pennsylvania cornfield, a baby monitor hissing in the dark, and grainy birthday-party footage from Brazil that made a whole theater hold its breath in August 2002. M. Night Shyamalan's follow-up to Unbreakable starred Mel Gibson as a widowed ex-priest and Joaquin Phoenix as his baseball-bat-swinging brother, and it was the summer's biggest haunted house.
Stargate
Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin's 1994 hit: a metal ring dug up at Giza in 1928 turns out to be a wormhole, and Kurt Russell's grieving colonel and James Spader's dismissed Egyptologist walk through it to a desert planet where a body-snatching alien is worshipped as Ra. Critics shrugged, it opened to an October record, and it spawned three live-action television series.
The X-Files
Fox's paranoia engine: FBI agents Mulder and Scully investigating UFOs, monsters, and government cover-ups one case file at a time. Created by Chris Carter, The X-Files turned "I Want to Believe" into a mantra and proved that prime-time TV could do serialized mythology decades before the streaming age demanded it.