“Resident Alien” showrunner Chris Sheridan is no stranger to alien encounters. Literally.
“The real genesis of the show is, actually, about 20 years ago I saw a UFO on my honeymoon,” Sheridan told a crowd of reporters at the Television Critics Association press tour alongside the cast of the Syfy comedy on Saturday.
“I don’t tell this story a lot because people will think I’m insane,” he said. “But now working on this show for the last few years, I could care less.”
An adaptation of the Dark Horse comic of the same name, “Resident Alien” stars Alan Tudyk as an alien who crash lands on Earth and takes on the identity of a small-town Colorado doctor. During his stay in Colorado, he slowly adapts to human life and begins to question his mission of destroying the entire species.
Of his real-life UFO sighting, Sheridan said, “I was in the Bahamas with my wife. We were walking on the beach and we both saw this dot on the horizon rising up — you can see every star in the sky because it’s the Bahamas — and we both noticed this one star moving up and we stopped and looked at it.”
He and his wife quickly realized, however, that the star wasn’t actually a star at all, but some kind of aircraft. “I swear this is true,” he said.
“In two seconds the thing was over us. It was triangular and it had, like, six circular lights on the bottom of it. It slowly went over us and it had this light sweeping the beach,” he said. “She tried to run and I grabbed her. You know, a ‘take her first’ kind of thing.”
“Resident Alien” also stars Sara Tomko, Corey Reynolds, Alice Wetterlund and Levi Fiehler in the upcoming project from Universal Content Productions in association with Amblin Television and Dark Horse Entertainment.