On May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy delivered a speech before a joint session of Congress, making it clear that he wanted that the United States to land a man on the moon before the decade was over.
A little over two years before on October 2, 1959, The Twilight Zone proposed the very same idea in its pilot episode: “Where is Everybody?” Written by series creator Rod Serling and directed by Robert Stevens, the anthology debut starred Earl Holliman as a man who wakes up in a town completely devoid of life with no memory of who or where he is.
The Twilight Zone went to the moon (sort of) a decade before Apollo 11
When the crushing isolation becomes too unbearable, he desperately pleads for somebody help him, leading to the show’s very first twist reveal: The man is an American astronaut named Mike Ferris training for a solitary trip to the moon. He was part of an experiment to see how long the human mind could go without companionship before snapping.
“I got the idea walking through an empty village set at the backlot of a movie studio,” Serling once recalled (via Martin Grams Jr.’s The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic). “There was all the evidence of a community…but no people. I felt at the time a kind of encroaching loneliness and desolation and a feeling of how nightmarish it would be for a man to wind up in a city without inhabitants.”
According to a 2019 article from The New York Times, Serling also cited a Time magazine article about NASA isolation experiments as one of the pilot’s main inspirations.
The article in question was entitled, titled “Rehearsal for Space,” chronicled the experience of Airman Gerald Farrell as he climbed into what “looked like a home furnace 3 feet wide, 6 feet long, 5 feet high encrusted with tanks, pipes and electric cables. It was firmly anchored to the concrete floor, but it was the Air Force’s closest approximation to the type of cabin in which a man might solo into outer space.”
Among the goals set forth by the “Air Force’s space medicine men,” was “to study his reactions, both physical and emotional, to confinement and fatigue.” Per an annotation: “The Air Force called it isolation, but Farrell knew he was surrounded by solicitous friends who would rush to his aid if he pressed a button.”
That is exactly how Mike Ferris gets out of his predicament in The Twilight Zone.
The Space Race between the United States and Soviet Union had officially kicked off two years prior with the launch of Sputnik. Less than a month before The Twilight Zone premiered on CBS, for instance, the USSR’s Luna 2 became the first-ever human object to reach the moon. Less than a week after the show debuted, the Luna 3 transmitted images of the far side of the moon back to Earth.
The United States was feeling the heat of the cosmic competition by now and eventually made good on President Kennedy’s aforementioned declaration when Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first human beings to set foot on the moon in July 1969.
“Less than a decade later,” Holliman told The New York Times in 2019, “a billion people on Earth heard Neil Armstrong say, ‘That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.’ Promise made, promise kept. Rod made the promise, he kept it—and welcome to The Twilight Zone.”
Our country’s space-faring spirit was recently reignited with NASA’s successful Artemis II mission to circle the moon (the crew members are expected to return to Earth April 10).
Classic episodes of The Twilight Zone air regularly on SYFY. Click here for complete scheduling info!
