The Kanamits of To Serve Man: The Twilight Zone's Cookbook, the 1950 Story and the Gift That Was a Menu

"To Serve Man" aired on March 2, 1962, in the third season of The Twilight Zone, and its aliens are the most famous in the series. The Kanamits land in saucers, address the United Nations by telepathy through an envoy nine feet tall with a domed bald head and a placid face, and offer to end hunger, war and disease; they deliver, with a soil additive that makes deserts bloom, a force field that stops armies and a power source that lights cities, and they open an embassy and, in time, a passenger service to their planet. Michael Chambers, a government cryptographer played by Lloyd Bochner, decodes the title of a book the envoy leaves behind, To Serve Man, and the world relaxes. Chambers is on the ramp of a Kanamit ship, bound for a paradise he has been promised, when his assistant Patty, played by Susan Cummings, breaks through the crowd with the rest of the translation.

Rod Serling adapted the episode from Damon Knight's 1950 story, keeping the twist and adding the frame: Chambers narrates from a cell aboard the ship, refusing and then accepting a meal. Richard Kiel, who would play Jaws in two Bond films fifteen years later, was the envoy, and every Kanamit in the episode is Kiel in the same costume, filmed to look identical; the aliens' voice belonged to Joseph Ruskin, dubbed, since the Kanamits do not move their mouths. The final line, Serling's closing narration observing that man has moved from ruler of a planet to an ingredient, is one of the most quoted in the series.

The Kanamits of the screen are humanoid, enormous and serene. They stand nine feet, have oversized heads with small features, wear long robes, and communicate telepathically, so that their spoken word is never heard; they are unfailingly courteous, they submit to a lie detector at the UN and pass, and they never once claim to be anything but what they are, servants of humanity. Knight's Kanamits were uglier, pig-faced with three-fingered hands, and his narrator notes that the offer to end war was accepted more readily than the beings' appearance suggested it should have been. Their technology is a set of gifts, each of which solves a human problem and each of which, in retrospect, was fattening: no famine, no war, no disease, no reason not to board the ship.

Their intention is the twist and the whole story. The Kanamits are farmers, and Earth is a range; the gifts are husbandry, the passenger service is transport to market, and the book is a recipe collection that a species of ranchers saw no reason to hide, since nobody on Earth could read it. Serling's genius, and Knight's, was to give the aliens no malice. The Kanamits are not lying about serving man, and the episode's horror is that both readings of the title are true.

The twist entered the language. Patty's line about the book, delivered from the foot of the ramp, has been quoted, parodied and reproduced for six decades, in The Simpsons' first Treehouse of Horror in 1990, where Kang and Kodos are wrongly accused of the same intention, in The Naked Gun 2½, in Futurama, in Madagascar, in the mock cookbook titles of a thousand internet jokes; Kiel reprised the Kanamit for a 2000s commercial, and the episode has been at or near the top of every ranking of the series since rankings began. It is the alien twist that most people who have never seen the show can explain.

The episode's structure has been the template for the treacherous-gift story ever since. V in 1983 had the Visitors arrive with cures and take the water; Mars Attacks! in 1996 had the translator promise peace; the Killer Klowns arrived as a circus. The Kanamits were first, and they were first because 1962 was the moment the friendly alien of the previous decade could be turned over and read from the other side.

The Kanamits' offer was the message the contactees had been bringing back for a decade. From George Adamski's meeting with a Venusian in the California desert in November 1952, the beings of the contactee books were tall, serene, telepathic and concerned for us, and their message was that they would help humanity end war and disease if we would put aside the atom; the Adamski article covers the man and his followers, and the Space Brothers entry in the glossary covers the beings. Knight wrote his story in 1950, before Adamski, from the pulps' older tradition of the benevolent visitor, and Serling filmed it in 1962 when the Space Brothers were a national joke and a small religion; the Kanamits are the Space Brothers with the second half of their sentence restored.

They are also the earliest television telepaths, speaking without mouths a year before Uncle Martin and two before Barney Hill described the same thing under hypnosis, and their passive, domed, large-headed look, nine feet tall in robes, is the tall Grey of the later abduction accounts before anyone had described one. The Tall Whites of the modern lore are the nearest reported match, benevolent by their witnesses' accounts, which is what the Kanamits' witnesses thought too. The aliens on TV article begins the television alien's history with this episode, as it should.