Galactic Glastnost : Trends: Extraterrestrial beings have recaptured the public imagination--and not just in the United States.

E.T., phone your agent.

You’re big, baby. You’re everywhere. Books, movies, TV. Tass!

Russia! You know you’ve made the big time when you can get the Iron Curtain to go up on your act. Hey, it’s getting so people are expecting to run into you or one of your pals every time they step out of the house.

You’re saturating the market, baby! Keep this up and you’ll be bigger than the Smurfs! Only thing keeping us from putting you on Burger King glasses is we can’t agree on what you look like . . . .

Indeed. Take your pick: short with big heads, tall and skinny with little heads, gray skin, tan skin, big eyes, little eyes, creepy, cuddly, nasty, nice.

It’s getting tough to peg an extraterrestrial these days.

Everybody seems to be trying, though.

From the Hollywood sound stage to the Soviet Union, extraterrestrial beings are showing up on the A-list.

They star in films, populate television series, zip around in the night sky, and allegedly abduct people and return them shaken and dazzled.

And in the Soviet city of Voronezh, they even reportedly take strolls in the park and make the evening news.

Whether it’s all a cyclical fad, a coincidence or the real thing, Outer Space is in.

“I’ve noticed that the volume of calls I’ve received has increased substantially in the past six months,” said Whitley Strieber, a New York author who claimed in his 1987 book “Communion” to have been abducted by “visitors.”

“People are having more sightings, apparently,” he said. “There’s always the possibility that these stories can be true. Certainly they represent perceptions of an unusual nature, and we don’t yet know the origins of those perceptions.”

Even the Soviet news agency Tass was willing to report a recent landing. The origin of one prominent sighting, it said, was a park about 300 miles southeast of Moscow. There, in the city of Voronezh, a handful of towering, tiny-headed creatures emerged from their craft and went for a walk, terrifying several residents.

The landing, disclosed early this month, was confirmed by “scientists,” said Tass, which reported that a large shining ball or disc was seen hovering over the park by residents. It landed. They saw up to three creatures similar to humans emerge, accompanied by a small robot, said the report.

The aliens, said to be from nine to 12 feet tall, soon re-entered the craft, leaving onlookers “overwhelmed with a fear that lasted for several days.”

Vladimir Lebedev, the Tass reporter who covered the story, said later that he had not actually seen the UFO and had based his story on interviews with “about 10 youngsters aged 12 to 13.”

A Guessing Game

The Tass report, as well as similar stories in the newspaper Soviet Culture, apparently have triggered widespread interest across the Soviet Union. In the glasnost era, such nationwide reports are something new.

But back in America--in the land of Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Superman, Flash Gordon, Mr. Spock, Darth Vader, E.T., Buck Rogers and the Blob--alien mania, never far out of fashion, may be hitting one of its periodic apogees.

And once again the guessing game is: What do they look like?

Kenneth Johnson thinks they have no hair, larger-than-human heads, no external ears, two hearts and reproductive functions that oblige two males to impregnate one female.

Johnson, creator and executive producer of 20th Century Fox Television’s show “Alien Nation,” also sees them as benign visitors who work at peacefully coexisting with Earthlings.

“You see them walking around on the street and it’s pretty clear they don’t come from here,” Johnson said. “But in terms of their hearts and souls, they’re a lot like us. To a limited extent, it’s a science-fiction show. What I really wanted to do is to show what it’s like to be the latest people off the boat--or the spacecraft as the case may be.

“I think people are always fascinated by the possibilities that face us when we look into the night sky,” he added. “Whenever you have someone come here who is different from you, you have a lot of opportunity for questioning.”

Conflict is also part of the scene, at least across town at Paramount, where the television series “War of the Worlds” is being produced.

‘The Bad Guys’

Unlike “Alien Nation,” “War of the Worlds” is just that, a battle between Earthlings and space creatures. And the characters, while advanced technologically and biologically, can adopt human appearances, though sinister.

Greg Strangis, the creator of the series and last season’s executive producer, said he hopes real aliens aren’t like his creations.

“For the purposes of drama in TV series, there are certain constraints,” he said. “You have to have good guys and bad guys, and in this case the aliens are the bad guys. My personal feelings are that any intelligent life possessing the means and interest to pay us a visit would have much more in mind than to do Earth inhabitants any harm.”

In fact, he said, much of the current interest in matters other-worldly may have its basis here on terra firma.

“In a funny sort of way, it may be a reaction to some of the earthbound problems that we have,” Strangis said. “Call it alien salvation. They may be seen as coming with solutions to our social, economic and spiritual problems. Where’s the help coming from, since we don’t seem to be able to do it ourselves? It’s the Superman phenomenon.

“I just wish they’d land in L.A. sometime so I could see them.”

He just hasn’t been in the right place at the right time, said Tim Beckley, editor of UFO Universe magazine, a periodical that reports on sightings, abductions and other UFO phenomena.

“There have been many sightings in Los Angeles and New York,” Beckley said. “Actually, there’s a constant kind of underground network that goes on between people in various parts of the world who exchange information and correspondence and stories about abductions and so forth. It’s been going on since the early 1950s and it doesn’t necessarily coincide with media attention on the subject. There isn’t any particular part of the world that hasn’t had UFO sightings.”

A sighting in the Soviet Union, he claimed, is not unusual. “The Russians have published articles and magazine stories about other sightings before this.”

But the appearance of the Voronezh aliens is: “Their looks are unusual in that most of the beings are usually seen as relatively human-like. They might be able to pass for us, or they may be smaller, from 3 1/2 to 4 feet tall with gray skin or very large foreheads. But these tall beings are rarer. They’ve been seen three or four times in South America. They’re certainly not the most frequent visitors we’ve had.”

But there appears to be uniformity in the purpose of the aliens’ visits, Beckley said, adding, “If they have one particular message, it seems to be that we are in danger of destroying ourselves. Many of those who have seen the aliens have seen them as kind of space brothers, godlike, majestic beings come to save humankind from annihilation. Then, there are other people who say they don’t see them as having any particular leaning.”

Beckley told of a Soviet pilot who reportedly was forced to parachute from her plane and revealed later--after finding herself safe on Earth after blacking out for a time--that she had been taken aboard a UFO and warned about the dangers of nuclear proliferation.

“I don’t think all these people are hallucinating,” said Beckley. “They’re not making up the majority of these stories. In 75%-80% of the cases, they’re actually reporting what happened to them in a pretty sincere manner.”

Beckley, who said he has sighted UFOs in the sky on three occasions, thinks we are closer to alien visitors than we may imagine.

“One theory going around that I subscribe to,” he said, “is that they look so remarkably human because they’re related to us. They may have come here and seeded Earth millions of years ago and now they’re coming back for a look-see. They may be curious to see how their children have grown up.”

It is a view decidedly not shared by members of the traditional scientific community, nor by the American military.

A spokesman for Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena said all offices at the lab routinely refuse comment on UFO stories.

And at the Pentagon, Capt. Sigmund Adams, an Air Force public affairs officer, said the agency’s official study of UFO phenomena--”Project Blue Book”--ended in 1969. It investigated 12,500 sightings in the United States, and, said Adams, “about 95% were explainable as meteors, satellites, aircraft, lightning.” The other 5% showed “no indication of technology beyond our scientific knowledge or indication of extraterrestrials,” he said.

Since the end of Project Blue Book, the Air Force has not kept records of reported sightings and such calls have been infrequent, said Adams.

Still, tales continue to appear that fire the popular imagination. One of the most widely known--and commercially successful--of these was chronicled by author Strieber in “Communion” (he has since published a second book about his encounter and its aftermath, titled “Transformation”).

In “Communion,” Strieber claims to have been abducted on the day after Christmas, 1985, from his secluded cabin in Upstate New York. He called his captors “visitors,” and did not specify where they came from. Throughout much of the abduction, he wrote, he was in a kind of dreamlike state.

He recalled being aware of short beings, perhaps 3 1/2 feet tall, as well as others, dressed in gray-tan body suits with faces that featured two eye holes and a round mouth hole.

He writes that he was taken to a “messy round room” filled with tiny beings that moved quickly around him. One of them, he wrote, smelled like cardboard, with a “distinctly organic sourness” and “a subtle overtone that seemed a little like cinnamon.”

Besides stocky beings, dressed in blue cover-all type suits, Strieber remembered others, one type being “about five feet tall, very slender and delicate, with extremely prominent and mesmerizing black slanted eyes . . . and almost vestigial mouth and nose.” Others had round eyes.

“Communion” became a best-seller and Strieber has become a contact for many people who say they have encountered aliens. But he insists the beings who abducted him may not necessarily have come from space.

“I wrote about an unknown experience that was not understood,” he said in a telephone interview. “All I can say is that there seems to be a strange set of perceptions people can have, the source of which is unknown. One hypothesis is that these things should not be dismissed out of hand.”

And he doesn’t. But, he acknowledged, sightings and alien encounters do increase after a newspaper report like the recent one from Tass.

A ‘Major Unknown’

“When sightings are prominently reported in a paper, that generates reports of other sightings,” he said. “People who have seen something and have not wished to report it are encouraged. There’s a fear of ridicule; 99% of the sighting cases never appear in the press. For instance, there have been major sightings over New York City recently that were not reported in the press. The reports have come from so many different people, there must be something extraordinary . . .”

While Strieber admitted that “the average person can easily be misled by the sky--the night sky is full of illusions,” he said that his experience has convinced him that “there is a very major unknown waiting to be understood. We have to do one of three things: revise our understanding of the way our perceptive systems relate to the world around us, revise the understanding of our own minds, or recognize that there are nonhuman intelligences moving about.

“It’s happening on such a large scale now that it’s almost inevitable that we are going to find the answer sooner or later.”