Unfortunately, John's credibility is mocked when members of the press arrive ("Star Gazer Sees Martians") -- as Matt (Charles Drake), the local sheriff, puts it, the town has always been suspicious of renegade astronomers living on the outskirts of the desert.
John and Ellen leave in a huff, only to encounter a gargantuan, protoplasmic eyeball -- one of the inhabitants of the crashed ship -- blocking the highway.
The eye nimbly dodges them, but is run over the next day by two telephone repairmen, Frank (Joe Sawyer) and George (Russell Johnson, who will later make one of those Faustian film bargains and reign as the smartest man on a desert isle).
Understandably upset, the aliens take Frank and George hostage and replicate them in an effort to stroll undetected into town for spaceship repair parts.
However, John sees through the ruse because the replicants stare unblinkingly into the sun. When he corners them in a dark alley, they warn him off, reassuring him that they just want to repair their ship in peace and leave.
Talk is cheap. John waits almost a full minute before running to the sheriff and telling him about the aliens walking among us. Matt is skeptical, but changes his mind after Ellen turns up missing and John bullies her alien duplicate into emerging in its full orbital splendor.
This gets Sheriff Matt fed up with the aliens, so he stomps meaningfully on a spider and tells John that he'll kill anything he doesn't understand. Ignorance is contagious -- the next time alien-Frank wanders into town, he's killed by Matt's quickly-rallied mob.
John runs off to warn the other aliens, who are almost done fixing their ship. Depressed, the aliens consider redirecting the ship's power towards the destruction of Earth, but John pleads instead for the release of the human hostages.
As a show of good faith, he buys the aliens time by sealing the entrance with dynamite. When the lynch mob arrives, they can only stand and watch the spaceship depart, while John gives a sage sermon: "It wasn't the right time for us to meet. They'll be back."
Hidden espionage, orbital slime
The aliens, composed of a sole, ever-watchful cyclopean eye, have Orwellian overtones (1984 was written only few years earlier). As their optical forms indicate, they are seemingly omniscient, but are extremely reluctant to be seen themselves.
This need for secrecy drastically undermines their credibility in town, while their every act screamed of espionage to an audience already conditioned to fear the unknown by the McCarthy trials.
The aliens hide their spaceship, mask their physical nature and sneak into private houses and steal clothes (and bodies), leaving trails of eye slime. Their very technological mastery is suspect, marking them as masters of secrets of space travel and the human soul that the film warns us Americans may not be ready to hear.
As a final threat, the aliens walk among us undetected, always observing with their unblinking stare, germinating the seeds of paranoia.
The astronomer's gaze
To a lesser degree, John the astronomer employs a similar frightful gaze - his own gigantic eye or telescope - in his observation of the night sky.
The townspeople view John (and, by extrapolation, all scientists) as an oddity, perhaps one that has exerted a supposedly unhealthy influence on Ellen. It's not too far of a stretch to imagine the townsfolk lynching John shortly after the aliens depart.
Can science grow and flourish in such a climate of xenophobia? Perhaps the final message the year 1953 offers is that, if we can make it to the top of the largest peak on Earth, perhaps we can make it to the stars. Just so we keep a wary eye on the humans along the way.
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