Independence Day (1996)

Roland Emmerich's Independence Day (1996) stages a worldwide alien invasion around the Fourth of July. Its mothership is over 550 km in diameter with roughly a quarter of the Moon's mass — colossal, yet nowhere near 'the size of the Moon.' From orbit it releases multiple 'City Destroyers,' each about 15 miles (24 km) wide, that hover over major cities and level landmarks with a bottom-mounted beam. Blending large-scale physical miniatures with early CGI, Emmerich delivered the era's most iconic disaster image — the White House erupting in flame — and helped revive the 1990s alien-invasion genre, grossing over 800 million dollars worldwide.^[1] More tellingly, the plot builds its entire backbone on the conspiracy theory that the U.S. government recovered an alien craft from the 1947 Roswell crash and hid it at Area 51.^[2]