Vacuum Tube Sky Armada

In 1951, when teletubes blink black-and-white and air-raid sirens still test the suburbs, Britain and America watch as gleaming vacuum-tube craft blot the skies. Mechanical brains map our radar echoes; atom-driven invaders orbit like polished tins, broadcasting hypnotic hymns into radios. This chronicle follows reporters, telegraph operators and civil-defense wardens as they decode alien Morse, jury-rig vacuum-tube countermeasures and barter with a science that is both wondrous and ruinous. Equal parts newsreel, laboratory log and fevered diary, it asks whether progress will save Earth—or be the key to its surrender.