The Coneheads: Remulak, Mass Quantities and Dan Aykroyd's Real UFO Beliefs

The first Conehead sketch aired on Saturday Night Live on January 15, 1977, in the show's second season, and the family was complete from the start: Beldar (Dan Aykroyd), Prymaat (Jane Curtin) and their teenage daughter Connie (Laraine Newman), living in a suburban house, speaking in a flat mechanical monotone, eating and drinking in bulk, and explaining to neighbours, teachers and dates that they were from France. Aykroyd wrote the sketches with Tom Davis, and the cones, foam-latex extensions rising a foot above the actors' foreheads, were the joke's whole engineering: nobody on Earth found them strange. The sketch returned roughly a dozen times through 1979, when Aykroyd left the show, and became one of the era's best-known recurring bits, alongside the Blues Brothers and the Wild and Crazy Guys.

Aykroyd has traced the design to two sources, the stone heads of Easter Island and, by his account, a Remulakian-sounding word he liked the sound of; the name Remulak came first and the planet was invented around it. The characters were also a parody of a specific type, the immigrant family whose accent and habits mark them out and whose neighbours politely pretend not to notice, and the 1993 film made that reading explicit by giving the Coneheads an immigration agent as their antagonist.

A Remulakian is human from the eyebrows down and a cone above them, with a bald, tapering skull that the family covers, when they cover it, with hats and wigs that fool no one and need not. They speak in sentences assembled from technical descriptions, they eat mass quantities, they drink beer and, in the film, spray shaving cream directly into their mouths, and they have small sharp teeth that let Beldar chew through almost anything. Their courtship involves a ring of sensory organs, the senso rings, that the pair wear at moments of intimacy, and their sex life is a matter of touching cones, a joke the sketch could gesture at and the film could show. They are strong, durable, unbothered by pain and, in every scene, entirely convinced that they are blending in.

Remulak, seen in the 1993 film, is a world of tall spires, a Highmaster who rules by whim and an arena in which Beldar must fight a garthok, a many-legged beast, to earn his way back into favour. Its society sends out conquest missions, and Beldar's original assignment was to prepare Earth for invasion; two decades of suburban life change his mind, and the film ends with the family choosing New Jersey over the home world. The cones, the film establishes, are not a helmet or a hat. They are the head.

Coneheads, released by Paramount in July 1993, was directed by Steve Barron from a script by Aykroyd, Davis, Bonnie Turner and Terry Turner, and reunited Aykroyd and Curtin with Michelle Burke as Connie. It filled in the sketch's backstory: Beldar and Prymaat crash in New Jersey on a scouting mission, take jobs, have a daughter and are pursued for years by an Immigration and Naturalization Service agent, Gorman Seedling, played by Michael McKean, who is certain they are illegal aliens in the ordinary sense. The cast of SNL's 1990s generation, Chris Farley, David Spade, Adam Sandler, Phil Hartman, Jan Hooks, filled the supporting parts, and the film was a modest box-office disappointment that became, on video and cable, a fixture.

The immigration plot was the sketch's subtext made text, and it dated well. The Coneheads work hard, pay taxes, keep to themselves and are loved by their neighbours, and the only person who wants them gone is a federal agent whose objection is procedural; the film's argument, made in the register of a family comedy, is that the aliens are the good Americans. It was the first alien film to put the word "alien" back in its legal sense, and Men in Black four years later opened on the same joke, at the Mexican border.

The man who invented the Coneheads is one of Hollywood's longest-standing believers. Dan Aykroyd grew up in a family whose interest in the paranormal was serious, his great-grandfather having been a spiritualist who held séances, and he has said that Ghostbusters came out of that inheritance; on UFOs he has been explicit for decades, describing his own sightings, serving as an official consultant to the Mutual UFO Network, and recording a feature-length interview, Dan Aykroyd Unplugged on UFOs (2005), in which he lays out the crash-retrieval story, the abduction evidence and his conviction that the visitors are hostile. He has also told, repeatedly, the story of the day in 2002 when he was filming a paranormal series called Out There, stepped outside, saw two men in dark suits watching him from across the street, and learned within the hour that the show had been cancelled. The men in black entry in the glossary covers the legend he was placing himself inside.

The Coneheads themselves are the passing alien, the visitor who hides among us badly and is not caught, and that figure runs through the lore from the contactees' Venusians in business suits to the Reptilians who are said to wear human skins. The Solomons of 3rd Rock from the Sun are the same joke with the cones removed, and the aliens of Men in Black are its 1997 successor, immigrants processed at a bureau in Manhattan. For the real whistleblowers whose claims Aykroyd has championed, see the UFO whistleblowers article.