Jack Albertson
Harold Albertson professionally known as Jack Albertson, was an American actor, comedian and singer who performed in vaudeville. Albertson is known for his role as John Cleary in The Subject Was Roses, for which he received an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. For his contributions to the television industry, Albertson was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1977 at 6253 Hollywood Boulevard. Albertson was born on June 16, 1907, in Malden, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants Flora and Leopold Albertson, his older sister was actress Mabel Albertson. Albertson's mother, a stock actress, supported the family by working in a shoe factory; until at least the age of 22, Albertson was known as "Harold Albertson". His father abandoned his mother before Jack was born, the boy was raised by his stepfather, Alex Erlich, a barber. Albertson's formal education ended after a single year in high school. During a New York Daily News interview with Sidney Fields he reminisced: "I was bright but disruptive.
I didn't do homework. To cover, I made funny faces at the teachers, they told me to take my business elsewhere." For a while Albertson worked at the local General Electric plant and in one of the many shoe factories in the Lynn, area. He was a rack boy in neighborhood pool parlors, where he was by his own admission a good pool hustler, although he was always on guard to avoid playing anyone who could "out-hustle" him. At one point he ran away to sea, an undertaking not as romantic as it sounds, since his parents helped him pack for the voyage, his pool hall days provided Albertson with an opportunity to learn a few tap-dance routines from his fellow hustlers, when he was eighteen he began to be paid for his prize-winning shows. His sister Mabel taught him the first "time" steps in tap-dancing, he picked up additional routines by watching vaudeville acts that played his hometown. About that time he started singing with a group called "The Golden Rule Four," who held their practice sessions beneath a railroad bridge.
Albertson dropped out of high school to join the vaudeville road troupe known as the Dancing Verselle Sisters. He worked in burlesque as a hoofer and straight man to Phil Silvers on the Minsky's Burlesque Circuit. Besides vaudeville and burlesque, he appeared on the stage in many Broadway plays and musicals, including High Button Shoes, Top Banana, The Cradle Will Rock, Make Mine Manhattan, Show Boat, Boy Meets Girl, Girl Crazy, Meet the People, The Sunshine Boys – for which he received a Tony Award nomination for Best Actor, The Subject Was Roses – for which he won a Tony for Best Supporting Actor. Albertson appeared in more than 30 films, he had an early minor role in Miracle on 34th Street as a postal worker who redirects dead letters addressed to "Santa Claus" to the courthouse where Kris Kringle is on trial. He won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in the 1968 film The Subject Was Roses, he apologized to child actor Jack Wild for winning the award. Albertson appeared as Charlie Bucket's Grandpa Joe in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, in The Poseidon Adventure, where he played Manny Rosen, husband to Belle, played by Shelley Winters.
Albertson said that his one regret was that he did not reprise his role in the movie version of The Sunshine Boys. When producer Ray Stark acquired the film rights from Neil Simon in 1973, Albertson was expected to play the part, but by the time MGM had bought the rights in 1974 and was preparing to begin filming in February 1975, Albertson was not available because he was appearing on Chico and the Man on TV. Albertson was a radio performer early in his career. Among the shows he appeared on were Just Plain Bill, That's My Pop and The Jack Albertson Comedy Show. In the late 1940s he was for a time a regular on the Milton Berle Show. Albertson appeared in many television series, such as Hey, Jeannie! with Jeannie Carson, the syndicated Western series Frontier Doctor with Rex Allen, Rod Cameron's syndicated crime drama State Trooper, the 1961–62 drama series Bus Stop. He guest-starred on Private Detective. From 1960–1961, Albertson was cast in three episodes of Pete and Gladys, with Harry Morgan and Cara Williams.
On January 2, 1961, Albertson was cast as Sampson J. Binton, with DeForest Kelley as Alex Jeffords, in "Listen to the Nightingale", the series finale of Riverboat, starring Darren McGavin. Albertson had a recurring role as the neighbor Walter Burton in eight episodes of the 1962 ABC sitcom Room for One More, with Andrew Duggan and Peggy McCay, he had recurring roles in Ensign O'Toole and Run, Run. Other 1960s series on which Albertson appeared were NBC's sitcom, Happy starring Ronnie Burns, Glynis, starring Glynis Johns and Keith Andes, which aired for 13 weeks in the fall of 1963. Albertson appeared in two episodes of The Twilight Zone. In a 1967 episode of The Andy Griffith Show, he played the ne'er-do-well cousin, Bradford J. Taylor, of series character Aunt Bee, he appeared in a 1969 episode of the TV series "The Virginian" entitled Girl in the shadows. He co-starred as "The Man" Ed Brown in Chico and the Man, with Freddie Prinze, for which he earned an Emmy, he resided for many years in California.
In 1978, he was diagnosed with colorectal cancer, but kept this information private and c
East Germany
East Germany the German Democratic Republic, was a country that existed from 1949 to 1990, when the eastern portion of Germany was part of the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War. It described itself as a socialist "workers' and peasants' state", the territory was administered and occupied by Soviet forces at the end of World War II — the Soviet Occupation Zone of the Potsdam Agreement, bounded on the east by the Oder–Neisse line; the Soviet zone did not include it. The German Democratic Republic was established in the Soviet zone, while the Federal Republic was established in the three western zones. East Germany was a satellite state of the Soviet Union. Soviet occupation authorities began transferring administrative responsibility to German communist leaders in 1948, the GDR began to function as a state on 7 October 1949. However, Soviet forces remained in the country throughout the Cold War; until 1989, the GDR was governed by the Socialist Unity Party, though other parties nominally participated in its alliance organisation, the National Front of Democratic Germany.
The SED made the teaching of Marxism -- the Russian language compulsory in schools. The economy was centrally planned and state-owned. Prices of housing, basic goods and services were set by central government planners rather than rising and falling through supply and demand. Although the GDR had to pay substantial war reparations to the USSR, it became the most successful economy in the Eastern Bloc. Emigration to the West was a significant problem – as many of the emigrants were well-educated young people, it further weakened the state economically; the government fortified its western borders and, in 1961, built the Berlin Wall. Many people attempting to flee were killed by border guards or booby traps, such as landmines. Several others were imprisoned for many years. In 1989, numerous social and political forces in the GDR and abroad led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the establishment of a government committed to liberalisation; the following year, open elections were held, international negotiations led to the signing of the Final Settlement treaty on the status and borders of Germany.
The GDR dissolved itself, Germany was reunified on 3 October 1990, becoming a sovereign state again. Several of the GDR's leaders, notably its last communist leader Egon Krenz, were prosecuted in reunified Germany for crimes committed during the Cold War. Geographically, the German Democratic Republic bordered the Baltic Sea to the north. Internally, the GDR bordered the Soviet sector of Allied-occupied Berlin, known as East Berlin, administered as the state's de facto capital, it bordered the three sectors occupied by the United States, United Kingdom and France known collectively as West Berlin. The three sectors occupied by the Western nations were sealed off from the rest of the GDR by the Berlin Wall from its construction in 1961 until it was brought down in 1989; the official name was Deutsche Demokratische Republik abbreviated to DDR. Both terms were used in East Germany, with increasing usage of the abbreviated form since East Germany considered West Germans and West Berliners to be foreigners following the promulgation of its second constitution in 1968.
West Germans, the western media and statesmen avoided the official name and its abbreviation, instead using terms like Ostzone, Sowjetische Besatzungszone, sogenannte DDR. The centre of political power in East Berlin was referred to as Pankow. Over time, the abbreviation DDR was increasingly used colloquially by West Germans and West German media; the term Westdeutschland, when used by West Germans, was always a reference to the geographic region of Western Germany and not to the area within the boundaries of the Federal Republic of Germany. However, this use was not always consistent. Before World War II, Ostdeutschland was used to describe all the territories east of the Elbe, as reflected in the works of sociologist Max Weber and political theorist Carl Schmitt. Explaining the internal impact of the DDR regime from the perspective of German history in the long term, historian Gerhard A. Ritter has argued that the East German state was defined by two dominant forces – Soviet Communism on the one hand, German traditions filtered through the interwar experiences of German Communists on the other.
It always was constrained by the powerful example of the prosperous West, to which East Germans compared their nation. The changes wrought by the Communists were most apparent in ending capitalism and transforming industry and agriculture, in the militarization of society, in the political thrust of the educational system and the media. On the other hand, there was little change made in the independent domains of the sciences, the engineering professions, the Protestant churches, in many bourgeois lifestyles. Social policy, says Ritter, became a critical legitimization tool in the last decades and mixed socialist and traditional elements about equally. At the Yalta Conference during World War II, the Allies (the U. S. the UK and
Satellite
In the context of spaceflight, a satellite is an artificial object, intentionally placed into orbit. Such objects are sometimes called artificial satellites to distinguish them from natural satellites such as Earth's Moon. On 4 October 1957 the Soviet Union launched the world's first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1. Since about 8,100 satellites from more than 40 countries have been launched. According to a 2018 estimate, some 4,900 remain in orbit, of those about 1,900. 500 operational satellites are in low-Earth orbit, 50 are in medium-Earth orbit, the rest are in geostationary orbit. A few large satellites have been assembled in orbit. Over a dozen space probes have been placed into orbit around other bodies and become artificial satellites to the Moon, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, a few asteroids, a comet and the Sun. Satellites are used for many purposes. Among several other applications, they can be used to make star maps and maps of planetary surfaces, take pictures of planets they are launched into.
Common types include military and civilian Earth observation satellites, communications satellites, navigation satellites, weather satellites, space telescopes. Space stations and human spacecraft in orbit are satellites. Satellite orbits vary depending on the purpose of the satellite, are classified in a number of ways. Well-known classes include low Earth orbit, polar orbit, geostationary orbit. A launch vehicle is a rocket, it lifts off from a launch pad on land. Some are launched at sea aboard a plane. Satellites are semi-independent computer-controlled systems. Satellite subsystems attend many tasks, such as power generation, thermal control, attitude control and orbit control. "Newton's cannonball", presented as a "thought experiment" in A Treatise of the System of the World, by Isaac Newton was the first published mathematical study of the possibility of an artificial satellite. The first fictional depiction of a satellite being launched into orbit was a short story by Edward Everett Hale, The Brick Moon.
The idea surfaced again in Jules Verne's The Begum's Fortune. In 1903, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky published Exploring Space Using Jet Propulsion Devices, the first academic treatise on the use of rocketry to launch spacecraft, he calculated the orbital speed required for a minimal orbit, that a multi-stage rocket fuelled by liquid propellants could achieve this. In 1928, Herman Potočnik published The Problem of Space Travel -- The Rocket Motor, he described the use of orbiting spacecraft for observation of the ground and described how the special conditions of space could be useful for scientific experiments. In a 1945 Wireless World article, the English science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke described in detail the possible use of communications satellites for mass communications, he suggested. The US military studied the idea of what was referred to as the "earth satellite vehicle" when Secretary of Defense James Forrestal made a public announcement on 29 December 1948, that his office was coordinating that project between the various services.
The first artificial satellite was Sputnik 1, launched by the Soviet Union on 4 October 1957, initiating the Soviet Sputnik program, with Sergei Korolev as chief designer. This in turn triggered the Space Race between the United States. Sputnik 1 helped to identify the density of high atmospheric layers through measurement of its orbital change and provided data on radio-signal distribution in the ionosphere; the unanticipated announcement of Sputnik 1's success precipitated the Sputnik crisis in the United States and ignited the so-called Space Race within the Cold War. Sputnik 2 was launched on 3 November 1957 and carried the first living passenger into orbit, a dog named Laika. In May, 1946, Project RAND had released the Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship, which stated, "A satellite vehicle with appropriate instrumentation can be expected to be one of the most potent scientific tools of the Twentieth Century." The United States had been considering launching orbital satellites since 1945 under the Bureau of Aeronautics of the United States Navy.
The United States Air Force's Project RAND released the report, but considered the satellite to be a tool for science and propaganda, rather than a potential military weapon. In 1954, the Secretary of Defense stated, "I know of no American satellite program." In February 1954 Project RAND released "Scientific Uses for a Satellite Vehicle," written by R. R. Carhart; this expanded on potential scientific uses for satellite vehicles and was followed in June 1955 with "The Scientific Use of an Artificial Satellite," by H. K. Kallmann and W. W. Kellogg. In the context of activities planned for the International Geophysical Year, the White House announced on 29 July 1955 that the U. S. intended to launch satellites by the spring of 1958. This became known as Project Vanguard. On 31 July, the Soviets announced that they intended to launch a satellite by the fall of 1957. Following pressure by the American Rocket Society, the National Science Foundation, the International Geophysical Year, military interest picked up and in early 1955 the Army and Navy were worki
The Twilight Zone (1959 TV series)
The Twilight Zone is an American anthology television series created and presented by Rod Serling, which ran for five seasons on CBS from 1959 to 1964. Each episode presents a stand-alone story in which characters find themselves dealing with disturbing or unusual events, an experience described as entering "the Twilight Zone," ending with a surprise ending and a moral. Although predominantly science-fiction, the show's paranormal and Kafkaesque events leaned the show towards fantasy and horror; the phrase “twilight zone,” inspired by the series, is used to describe surreal experiences. The series featured both established stars and younger actors who would become much better known later. Serling served as executive head writer, he was the show's host and narrator, delivering monologues at the beginning and end of each episode. Serling's opening and closing narrations summarize the episode's events encapsulating how and why the main character had entered the Twilight Zone. In 1997, the episodes "To Serve Man" and "It's a Good Life" were ranked at 11 and 31 on TV Guide's 100 Greatest Episodes of All Time.
Serling himself stated that his favorite episodes of the series were "The Invaders" and "Time Enough at Last". In 2016, the series was ranked No. 7 on Rolling Stone's list of the 100 greatest shows of all time. In 2002, The Twilight Zone was ranked No. 26 on TV Guide's 50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time. In 2013, the Writers Guild of America ranked it as the third best-written TV series and TV Guide ranked it as the fourth greatest drama and the fifth greatest show of all time. By the late 1950s, Rod Serling was a prominent name in American television, his successful television plays included Patterns and Requiem for a Heavyweight, but constant changes and edits made by the networks and sponsors frustrated Serling. In Requiem for a Heavyweight, the line "Got a match?" had to be struck because the sponsor sold lighters. But according to comments in his 1957 anthology Patterns, Serling had been trying to delve into material more controversial than his works of the early 1950s; this led to Noon on Doomsday for the United States Steel Hour in 1956, a commentary by Serling on the defensiveness and total lack of repentance he saw in the Mississippi town where the murder of Emmett Till took place.
His original script paralleled the Till case was moved out of the South and the victim changed to a Jewish pawnbroker, watered down to just a foreigner in an unnamed town. Despite bad reviews, activists sent numerous wires protesting the production. Serling thought that a science-fictional setting, with robots and other supernatural occurrences, would give him more freedom and less interference in expressing controversial ideas than more realistic settings. "The Time Element" was Serling's 1957 pilot pitch for his show, a time travel adventure about a man who travels back to Honolulu in 1941 and unsuccessfully tries to warn everyone about the impending attack on Pearl Harbor. The script, was rejected and shelved for a year until Bert Granet discovered and produced it as an episode of Desilu Playhouse in 1958; the show was a great success and enabled Serling to begin production on his anthology series, The Twilight Zone. Serling's editorial sense of ironic fate in the writing done for the series was identified as significant to its success by the BFI Film Classics library which stated that for Serling "the cruel indifference and implacability of fate and the irony of poetic justice" were recurrent themes in his plots.
There is a fifth dimension, beyond that, known to man. It is a dimension as timeless as infinity, it is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination, it is an area. The Twilight Zone premiered the night of October 1959, to rave reviews. "Twilight Zone is about the only show on the air that I look forward to seeing. It's the one series that I will let interfere with other plans", said Terry Turner for the Chicago Daily News. Others agreed. Daily Variety ranked it with "the best, accomplished in half-hour filmed television" and the New York Herald Tribune found the show to be "certainly the best and most original anthology series of the year"; as the show proved popular to television's critics, it struggled to find a receptive audience of television viewers. CBS was banking on a rating of at least 21 or 22; the series' future was jeopardized when its third episode, "Mr. Denton on Doomsday" earned a 16.3 rating.
Still, the show attracted a large enough audience to survive a brief hiatus in November, after which it surpassed its competition on ABC and NBC and convinced its sponsors to stay on until the end of the season. With one exception, the first season featured scripts written only by Rod Serling, Charles Beaumont or Richard Matheson; these three were responsible for 127 of the 156 episodes in the series. Additionally, with one exception, Serling never appeared on camera during any first-season episode (as he woul
Rod Serling
Rodman Edward Serling was an American screenwriter, television producer, narrator known for his live television dramas of the 1950s and his science-fiction anthology TV series, The Twilight Zone. Serling was active in politics, both on and off the screen, helped form television industry standards, he was known as the "angry young man" of Hollywood, clashing with television executives and sponsors over a wide range of issues including censorship and war. Serling was born on December 1924, in Syracuse, New York, to a Jewish family, he was the second of two sons born to Samuel Lawrence Serling. Serling's father had worked as a secretary and amateur inventor before having children, but took on his father-in-law's profession as a grocer to earn a steady income. Sam Serling became a butcher after the Great Depression forced the store to close. Rod had Robert J. Serling, their mother was a homemaker. Serling spent most of his youth 70 miles south of Syracuse in the city of Binghamton after his family moved there in 1926.
His parents encouraged his talents as a performer. Sam Serling built a small stage in the basement, where Rod put on plays, his older brother, writer Robert, recalled that, at the age of six or seven, Rod entertained himself for hours by acting out dialogue from pulp magazines or movies he had seen. Rod talked to people around him without waiting for their answers. On a two-hour trip from Binghamton to Syracuse, the rest of the family remained silent to see if Rod would notice their lack of participation, he did not. In elementary school, Serling was seen as the class clown and dismissed by many of his teachers as a lost cause. However, his seventh-grade English teacher, Helen Foley, encouraged him to enter the school's public speaking extracurriculars, he was a speaker at his high school graduation. He began writing for the school newspaper, in which, according to the journalist Gordon Sander, he "established a reputation as a social activist", he was interested in sports and excelled at tennis and table tennis.
When he attempted to join the varsity football team, he was told. Serling was interested in writing at an early age, he was an avid radio listener interested in thrillers and horror shows. Arch Oboler and Norman Corwin were two of his favorite writers, he "did some staff work at a Binghamton radio station... tried to write... but never had anything published." He was accepted into college during his senior year of high school. However, the United States was involved in World War II at the time, Serling decided to enlist rather than start college after he graduated from Binghamton Central High School in 1943; as editor of his high school newspaper, Serling encouraged his fellow students to support the war effort. He wanted to leave school before graduation to join the fight but his civics teacher talked him into graduating. "War is a temporary thing," Gus Youngstrom told him. "It ends. An education doesn't. Without your degree, where will you be after the war?" Serling enlisted in the U. S. Army the morning after high school graduation, following his brother Robert.
Serling began his military career in 1943 at Camp Toccoa, under General Joseph May "Joe" Swing and Col. Orin D. "Hard Rock" Haugen and served in the 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 11th Airborne Division. He reached the rank of Technician Fourth Grade. Over the next year of paratrooper training and others began boxing to vent aggression, he competed as a flyweight and had 17 bouts, rising to the second round of the division finals before being knocked out. He was remembered for berserker style and for "getting his nose broken in his first bout and again in last bout." He tried his hand with little success. On April 25, 1944, Serling saw that he was being sent west to California, he knew. This disappointed him. On May 5, his division headed to the Pacific, landing in New Guinea, where it would be held in reserve for a few months. In November 1944, his division first saw combat; the 11th Airborne Division would not be used as paratroopers, but as light infantry during the Battle of Leyte. It helped mop up after the five divisions.
For a variety of reasons, Serling was transferred to the 511th's demolition platoon, nicknamed "The Death Squad" for its high casualty rate. According to Sergeant Frank Lewis, leader of the demolitions squad, "He screwed up somewhere along the line, he got on someone's nerves." Lewis judged that Serling was not suited to be a field soldier: "he didn't have the wits or aggressiveness required for combat." At one point, Lewis and others were in a firefight, trapped in a foxhole. As they waited for darkness, Lewis noticed. Serling sometimes went exploring on his own, against orders, got lost. Serling's time in Leyte political views for the rest of his life, he saw death every day while in the Philippines, at the hands of his enemies and his allies, through freak accidents such as that which killed another Jewish private, Melvin Levy. Levy was delivering a comic monologue for the platoon as they rested under a palm tree when a food crate was dropped from a plane above, decapitating him. Serling placed a Star of David over his grave.
Serling la
Racism
Racism is the belief in the superiority of one race over another, which results in discrimination and prejudice towards people based on their race or ethnicity. The use of the term "racism" does not fall under a single definition; the ideology underlying racism includes the idea that humans can be subdivided into distinct groups that are different due to their social behavior and their innate capacities, as well as the idea that they can be ranked as inferior or superior. Historical examples of institutional racism include the Holocaust, the apartheid regime in South Africa and segregation in the United States, slavery in Latin America. Racism was an aspect of the social organization of many colonial states and empires. While the concepts of race and ethnicity are considered to be separate in contemporary social science, the two terms have a long history of equivalence in both popular usage and older social science literature. "Ethnicity" is used in a sense close to one traditionally attributed to "race": the division of human groups based on qualities assumed to be essential or innate to the group.
Therefore and racial discrimination are used to describe discrimination on an ethnic or cultural basis, independent of whether these differences are described as racial. According to a United Nations convention on racial discrimination, there is no distinction between the terms "racial" and "ethnic" discrimination; the UN convention further concludes that superiority based on racial differentiation is scientifically false, morally condemnable unjust and dangerous. It declared that there is no justification for racial discrimination, anywhere, in theory or in practice. Racist ideology can manifest in many aspects of social life. Racism can be present in social actions, practices, or political systems that support the expression of prejudice or aversion in discriminatory practices or laws. Associated social actions may include nativism, otherness, hierarchical ranking and related social phenomena. In the 19th century, many scientists subscribed to the belief that the human population can be divided into races.
The term racism is a noun describing the state of being racist, i.e. subscribing to the belief that the human population can or should be classified into races with differential abilities and dispositions, which in turn may motivate a political ideology in which rights and privileges are differentially distributed based on racial categories. The origin of the root word "race" is not clear. Linguists agree that it came to the English language from Middle French, but there is no such agreement on how it came into Latin-based languages. A recent proposal is that it derives from the Arabic ra's, which means "head, origin" or the Hebrew rosh, which has a similar meaning. Early race theorists held the view that some races were inferior to others and they believed that the differential treatment of races was justified; these early theories guided pseudo-scientific research assumptions. Today, most biologists and sociologists reject a taxonomy of races in favor of more specific and/or empirically verifiable criteria, such as geography, ethnicity, or a history of endogamy.
To date, there is little evidence in human genome research which indicates that race can be defined in such a way as to be useful in determining a genetic classification of humans. An entry in the Oxford English Dictionary defines racialism as "n earlier term than racism, but now superseded by it", cites it in a 1902 quote; the revised Oxford English Dictionary cites the shortened term "racism" in a quote from the following year, 1903. It was first defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "he theory that distinctive human characteristics and abilities are determined by race". By the end of World War II, racism had acquired the same supremacist connotations associated with racialism: racism now implied racial discrimination, racial supremacism, a harmful intent; as its history indicates, the popular use of the word racism is recent. The word came into widespread usage in the Western world in the 1930s, when it was used to describe the social and political ideology of Nazism, which saw "race" as a given political unit.
It is agreed that racism existed before the coinage of the word, but there is not a wide agreement on a single definition of what racism is and what it is not. Today, some scholars of racism prefer to use the concept in the plural racisms, in order to emphasize its many different forms that do not fall under a single definition, they argue that different forms of racism have characterized different historical periods and geographical areas. Garner summarizes different existing definitions of racism and identifies three common elements contained in those definitions of racism. First, a historical, hierarchical power relationship between groups. Though many countries around the globe have passed laws related to race and discrimination, the first significant international human rights instrument developed by the United Nations
Third from the Sun
"Third from the Sun" is episode 14 of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone. It is based on a short story of the same name by Richard Matheson which first appeared in the first issue of the magazine Galaxy Science Fiction in October 1950. Will Sturka, a scientist who works at a military base, has been producing a great number of H-bombs in preparation for imminent nuclear war. Sturka realizes that there is only one way to escape—steal an experimental, top-secret spacecraft stored at the base, he plans to bring Sturka's daughter Jody. The two plot for months, making arrangements for their departure; when production of the bombs increases, Sturka realizes. He and Riden decide to put their plan in action—take their families to the craft to tour it, overpower the guards and take off. Sturka's superior Carling overhears the two men talking; that night, everyone gathers for a game of cards where Riden reveals that he has found a place to go—a small planet 11 million miles away. During the game, Carling unexpectedly appears at the door and hints that he knows what the group is planning.
He hints at trouble: "A lot can happen in forty-eight hours." After he leaves and Riden inform the women that they must leave that moment. When the five arrive at the site of the spacecraft and Riden spot their contact, who flashes a light; when the contact steps forward, though, he is revealed to be Carling, armed with a gun. He prepares to call the authorities; the women, who have been waiting in the car, watch as Carling orders them out. Jody throws the car's door open, knocking the gun from Carling's hand and giving the men enough time to overpower him; the group rushes into the ship. That evening, the group has safely escaped their doomed planet and are on course. Sturka comments. Riden smiles as he points out on the ship's viewer their mysterious destination, 11 million miles away—the third planet from the Sun, called "Earth". Todd VanDerWerff of The A. V. Club rated it A and called the twist "justifiably famous". "Probe 7, Over and Out", another Twilight Zone episode with a similar plot. "The Invaders", another episode in which a farm woman encounters tiny "alien" astronauts, who are Earthlings.
"Death Ship" is a TZ episode again featuring the Forbidden Planet Cruiser, where explorers find their ship E-89 has somehow crashed on the alien planet they have just found. Ancient astronaut theory DeVoe, Bill.. Trivia from The Twilight Zone. Albany, GA: Bear Manor Media. ISBN 978-1-59393-136-0 Grams, Martin.. The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic. Churchville, MD: OTR Publishing. ISBN 978-0-9703310-9-0 "Third from the Sun" on IMDb "Third from the Sun" at TV.com Matheson, Richard. "Third from the Sun". Galaxy Science Fiction. P. 61. Retrieved 17 October 2013
