Picture a snowstorm. A crashed UFO. Two state troopers following tracks across a highway into a roadside diner. Nine strangers inside, but only eight of them are human.
That is the setup for “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?”, a 1961 episode from the second season of The Twilight Zone. Entertainment Weekly recently ranked it among the top 10 best original episodes the show ever produced.
If you watched The Twilight Zone back in the day, you may remember this one. Critics often compare it to John Carpenter’s The Thing. The tension in that diner builds slowly and then the ending hits you twice.
The first twist: one character stands up and reveals a third arm, announcing they are a Martian. Shocking enough. But then a second character reveals a third eye and they are from Venus.
Getting that three-armed effect on screen took some real ingenuity. Author Marc Scott Zicree described it in his book The Twilight Zone Companion. A crew member crouched behind actor John Hoyt, threading one arm around and under Hoyt’s. That arm was dressed in matching fabric, and an overcoat was draped over Hoyt’s shoulders to hide the trick. With enough rehearsal to make the movement fluid, the illusion held perfectly.
Actor Barney Phillips, who played the three-eyed alien, explained what went into his transformation. “They had run a wire over my head concealed in my hair,” he said, “and one of the property men was concealed behind me, manipulating the trigger on the wire to effectuate the rolling of the eyeball in the socket.”
Phillips added that the makeup team made a cast of his eye socket. He estimated the crew spent well over a day fitting and preparing the device before they ever started shooting.
The episode also holds a grim distinction in Twilight Zone history. It has one of the highest body counts in the entire series, a bridge collapses at the end, killing all of the human characters. The only episode with more deaths is “Time Enough at Last,” in which the entire world is destroyed.
Rod Serling’s opening narration for this one said it all: “They’ve got to find a Martian in a diner, and in just a moment you’ll search with them, because you’ve just landed in The Twilight Zone.” Some invitations, it turns out, you never quite stop accepting.