One night in 1957, Antônio Vilas Boas was plowing his field in rural Brazil when he saw mysterious red lights flying through the sky. What he presumed was a spacecraft landed in a nearby field.

In space, no one can hear you scream, but they can sure hear you scratching your head as you try to make sense of the sprawling “Alien” universe. While Ridley Scott’s 1979 haunted-house-in-the-cosmos ...