I guess it first came out in 1967, but I saw some of the reruns around '83 or so.
It was a cool program about a guy running around in the desert southwest trying to get someone to believe him about alien invaders with weird pinky fingers living among humans. One could feel his pain and frustration, as no matter how hard he tried, no one believed him and everyone thought he was crazy!
It was a very well written, acted and produced program IMHO.
Oh yeah. we loved that show as kids and never missed it. We played around and had the pinkie-thing going for the aliens. Very cool. Cool spaceships too. 
I mentioned it recently on another thread, since Roy Thinnes starred in the awful movie Doppelganger AKA Jrney to the Far Side of the Sun.
The Invaders was sorta proto-X-Files. It had that brooding paranoia, and mysterious things happening, but nothing ever got resolved. The aliens couldn’t move their pinkies, for some reason, and when they got killed their bodies disappeared (a la Buffy’s vampires, only with 1960s vintage F/X). One time an Invader tried to pass as a black guy, but didn’t do his homework right and colored his palms dark as well. There were occasional clever ideas (the black palm thing, killer butterflies), but on the whole it was disappointing to me.
I remember Thinnes and the title, but not much else, no details. Thinnes was hot. I don’t know if this was before or after he was on General Hospital. But he was hot.
Hell yes. The aliens could be identified by their bent pinkies.
The first season was the best. In the second he got some rich guy to back him, and it was a bit less paranoid.
There were three Invaders novelizations. The first was by Keith Laumer, (Pyramid R-1664, August 1967), the second, Enemies from Beyond, also by Laumer (Pyramid X-1689) and the third called Army of the Undead by Rafe Bernard (Pyramid R-1711.)
Good show.
BTW, I’ve heard that in one ep that (for some reason I don’t recall) that you actually get to see the Invaders’ “true” form, something like a scorpion.
If memory serves there was a short lived sequel series in the 90s. I can’t remember the title though.
The Invaders a miniseries with Scott Bakula.
The Invaders was a knockoff of The Fugitive.Same producers…get the guy running.I think Quinn martin also produced ,The Immortal,same get the guy running for different reasons.I actually liked both series.They were sci-fi and anthologies.A good spoof of the running show was,Run,Buddy,Run
I remember “The Immortal”. A test car driver, played by Christopher George, discovers that his blood is special. He never gets sick, and based on tests made he will live for five to ten normal lifetimes. At first it’s thought that if he donates blood to someone they will develop into what he is, but it turns out one would have to keep getting regular transfusions. So his very rich, very ill, elderly employer plans to hold him captive, so as to heve access to the guy’s blood. CG escapes and starts his run, giving us a new cast each week, a la the Fugitive, or the later Hulk.
A Quinn Martin Production, I think.
It was shown over here too and very good it was.
I remember the bulk of the show – the alien was slowly changing from human, and they gave you tantalizing glimpses of distorted hands and the like. I don’t recall a scorpion at the end, though. In fact, I don’t recall them showing you the “real” form at all. That might be my faulty memory, but if it were really m,emorable, I think I would be able to recall it.
Yes, I remember the show well. Enjoyed it quite a lot until towards the end of the series.
On a somewhat different tack, one of the things I liked about was the sort-of realism of when the aliens disintegrated someone with their rays, things close by caught fire from the heat. Now, I know that isn’t a lot, and the heat required to vaporize a human being in a second or so would have done more than set a little brush fire or char the floor, but it was at least a nod toward reality.
I only mention this because even now, 38 years later, science fiction shows are still making huge factual, dumb errors. Come to think of it, so does regular fiction.
The show was not perfect, but in many ways was ahead of its time.
I watched the show regularly as a child. I thought the bent pinky thing was really lame though. These guys come from elsewhere with an advanced technology and they can copy a human’s form exactly except for 1 bent finger. No explanation was ever given why they got all the details correct except for that one. I realize that Thinnes’s character needed a way to spot the invaders but they could’ve done better than a bent pinky finger!
The disintergrating bodies were cool and I really liked their flying saucer space ships. I built 1 from a model kit and had it until I went to college.
I believe Roscoe Lee Brown was the guest star in the black man with black palms show. I don’t recall whether he was one of the aliens though. I think not but am not sure.
I don’t recall a second season but maybe it was on at the same time as another I watched. I also don’t remember that the invaders human copy body were reverting to original phenotype but I sort of remember that there was a show where Thinnes got a glimpse of one of the invaders’ true form. Maybe that’s what I was seeing, the failure of the human form and reversion to original form.
As for Roy Thinnes being hot, I can’t speak to that. Being male, it never even occured to me.
I remember that show, way bakc in the mists of time. I believe it had some killer background music that helped set the tone very nicely. After awhile, I got tired of Thinnes never being able to convince anybody of anything. C’mon, not even one loony in the government?
I remember that show and yes it was a Quinn-Martin production and like the “Fugitive” it had the narration done by William “Voice of Authority” Conrad. (he later starred in his own show “Cannon”). Remember that great introduction? Something like “This is David Vincent on a lonely country road … looking for a shortcut he never found”.
BWA-HA-HA !! Hell, that intro was creepy.
As for the “bent pinky” imperfection in the aliens that does seem a bit unbeleivable.
In “Scary Movie 3”, people are trying to protect themselves from aliens. Somebody starts nailing up a door and Charlie Sheen says “They’ve mastered space flight but they can’t get through a wooden door?”
Oh, he was much more than that – he was the original Matt Dillon on “Gunsmoke”.
No joke!
…on the radio.
He was also the narrator on Rocky and Bullwinkle. And he was Nero Wolfe for while. And had some other series.
I remember the original show from when I was a kid. My mom had the hots for Roy Thinnes, prompting my dad to tease her all the time about “Skinnies Thinnies”. I remember thinking he was handsome, but I had the hots for Chuck Conners from The Rifleman.
I recently saw him on some cop show.It was nice to see a familiar facelift
