Tractor Beam

A little too literal, do you think?

John Crichton: Pilot, get a tractor beam on that shuttle.
Pilot: Tractor beam? What's that?
Crichton: Graviton field, attracto-ray, superglue? Whatever it is you yanked me aboard with.
Pilot: You mean the docking web?

— Farscape, "Throne For A Loss"

Classic Applied Phlebotinum found on many, many space ships in fiction. At the press of a button, a beam of light comes out of the ship and sucks in anything in its reach. Occasionally used to move things already on the ship, too. The Tractor Beam thus allows space travellers to capture enemy ships, travel to the surface of planets, and steal the farmer's cows.

Many stories with Alien Abductions use this as the means of abduction — a small tractor beam just big enough to pull one human. Of course, that kind tends to run in reverse as well.

Surprisingly now just barely defictionalized, albeit a long way from practical useability.

See also Mind over Matter, another unrelated trope that nevertheless this one occasionally resembles.

---

Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Cannon God Exaxxion: "Gravity Cranes" are explained as an application of Artificial Gravity technology, the series gets a lot of mileage out of the different uses they have. For instance, using them in reverse to crush things or shoot holes in buildings with blasts of pure, concentrated gravity.

Comic Books

• Superman storyline "Brainiac Rebirth": When Superman flies into space, Brainiac chases after him and tries to draw him into his ship with a tractor beam.
• Wonder Woman (1942): At one point, Diana gets pulled right out of her plane, leaving Etta to scramble for the pilot's seat, by an otherworldly queen wanting help saving her husband.

Comic Strips

• Garfield: Aliens trying to abduct Garfield fail because their tractor beam isn't strong enough. Garfield reacts by telling the aliens he's not fat.

Fan Works

• Examples from Swing123 and garfieldodie's Calvinverse:
  • Sherman's invention in Retro Chill is missing a tractor beam, and Calvin gets really mad about it.
  "THAT DUMB HAMSTER BUILT IN A SHIELD, LASERS, AND HIGH TECH LAVA PROOF METAL, BUT HE CAN'T PUT IN A STUPID BEAMER!"
• In The Many Worlds Interpretation, Penny finds herself stranded in space owing to Sheldon Cooper letting his excitement get the better of him and stealing a Steampunk spacecraft he doesn't know how to pilot. Penny rages with frustration at being close enough to see the International Space Station, only to be told it doesn't have a tractor beam installed to haul them to safety. She heatedly points out that "every freaking spacecraft in every freaking show you guys watch" has a freaking tractor beam installed as standard.
• Rocketship Voyager. The initial reaction of the crew to an alien spacecraft 'switching on' a gravity well and focusing it like a beam on Voyager is This Cannot Be! This later gives B'Elanna Torres a "Eureka!" Moment that the aliens might be able to do other things with such technology, like fold space for Faster-Than-Light Travel.

Films — Animation

• The Incredibles: Syndrome has "zero-point energy gauntlets" that allow him to immobilize his enemies and move or throw them around as he pleases. He accidentally flings Mr. Incredible far off into the distance while carelessly gesturing during his Evil Gloating.
• In Recess: School's Out, the villain's plan is to aim the tractor beam at the moon to redirect its orbit causing a global ice age, eliminating summer vacations and forcing kids to study indoors making test scores go up.

Films — Live-Action

• In Austin Powers in Goldmember, both Goldmember and Dr. Evil came up with designs for a tractor beam to allow them to pull in an asteroid down to Earth. Dr. Evil calls his "Preparation H" (a reference to a popular OTC drug for treating hemorrhoids), as Preparations A-G were unsuccessful. The project itself is called the Alan Parsons Project after the head researcher. Scott mentions that it's the name of a band, but Dr. Evil doesn't get the reference.
• Ghostbusters (1984) has the team invent portable tractor beams that only work on ghosts, anything material gets burned and/or irradiated. Also, be careful not to cross the streams.
• Guardians of the Galaxy:
  • Yondu's Ravager spaceship is equipped with a tractor beam, visualized by a cone of light. Used early on abduct little Peter from Earth.
  • Later, Yondu saves Peter Quill and Gamora from freezing to death in space by dragging them to his ship with the same tractor beam.
  • Nebula's Necrocraft has one too, which she uses to collect the orb with after blowing Gamora's ship apart.
• Star Wars:
  • In A New Hope, the Millennium Falcon is tractored into one of the Death Star's landing bays. The heroes have to deactivate the tractor beam before they can escape.
  • The Empire Strikes Back: At the end of the movie, Vader's Super Star Destroyer is about to grab the Millennium Falcon with a tractor beam when the Falcon's hyperdrive finally starts working.
• In the trippy sci-fi musical Toomorrow, a huge, yellow beam is used as a method of bringing someone aboard a spacecraft hovering over London. It's slow enough the human-faking alien antagonist checks his watch as he is drawn up into the ship.
• In Twinkle Twinkle Little Star (a Star Wars spoof made by Shaw Brothers) Cheri Chung's character gets sucked into a beam by a Flying Saucer.

Literature

• In the first Arrivals from the Dark novel called Invasion, an alien starship pulls an Earth cruiser in for a closer look. Since the starship's Deflector Shield is masking it from human radar systems, the cruise's captain has no idea why the ship is suddenly moving forward despite the retro-rockets firing.
• Rudyard Kipling's 1912 short story "As Easy as ABC", features an effect referred to as a "flying loop," which John Brunner called the first-ever use of the tractor-beam concept. When a woman tries to commit suicide to make a political point, the "loop" yanks the knife out of her hand:
  She threw out her right arm with a knife in it. Before the blade could be returned to her throat or her bosom it was twitched from her grip, sparked as it flew out of the shadow of the ship above, and fell flashing in the sunshine at the foot of the Statue fifty yards away. The outflung arm was arrested, rigid as a bar for an instant, till the releasing circuit permitted her to bring it slowly to her side.
• In Fortunately, the Milk, the protagonist's adventure begins when a Flying Saucer hovers overhead and a beam of light draws him up into it.
• David Weber's Honor Harrington series uses gravity-based tractor beams for tugboats, search and rescue operations, and towing missile pods. Apparently, with the limiters turned off, they can shred a ship at short range. Powered up even further, they form the basis for a stealth drive that pulls itself by poking hole into hyperspace and grabbing it.
• In Jules (and Michel) Verne's The Meteor Hunt (AKA The Chase of the Golden Meteor), written in 1901 and published in 1908, a beam is used to bring the eponymous meteor down to Earth. Michel Verne is apparently the inventor of the whole concept, because his father's original draft didn't feature any tractor beams and Jules apparently abandoned the novel (which featured a huge gold asteroid and the chaotic attemps of a colorful bunch of various crooks to profit from it) for the lack of way to bring it to Earth. Michel, when reediting the novel for publication seven years later, introduced the tractor beam as a probable mean to do it, and made its inventor, an excentric scientist Zephirin Xirdal, the novel's true protagonist.
• Vital in cargo handling and rescue operations in James White's Sector General series. One weapon system consists of using a tractor beam and a pressor beam on the same target.
• In an early Star Trek novel, Spock Must Die!!, it's stated that tractor beams can only be used to pull, not push. To achieve a "push" effect, Scotty has to use a tuned beam from the main deflector.
• Star Wars Expanded Universe:
  • A New Dawn: Calcoraan Depot has tractor beams serving as parking attendants for spaceships arriving and departing.
• Star Wars Legends: Tractor beams and ways to get out of them appear regularly.
  • In The Thrawn Trilogy, Luke got out of one by dropping a hastily reprogrammed proton torpedo, letting it get drawn up by the tractor beam to destroy its projector, and doing something unorthodox with his engines at the same time. Later in the trilogy he's caught again and escapes by making an empty freighter explode into a cloud of highly reflective particles, breaking the lock despite the operator's best efforts. Thrawn did not kill that operator, instead recognizing that he made a novel effort and tasking him with figuring out an effective counter. And evidently he did; the trick doesn't work in the Hand of Thrawn duology.
  • The X-Wing Series makes it clear that if a ship tractors something with a larger mass, the ship is pulled towards that mass instead of the other way around. In Wraith Squadron, Wedge uses this to move a ship without giving off drive emissions. In a simulation in Isard's Revenge, Corran tractors a space station, using it to make an even tighter turn than the TIE Defender he's flying is normally capable of.
  • In Galaxy of Fear there's a book with scenes on an asteroid too small to have much gravity. There's Artificial Gravity on a base, but otherwise characters use special boots with tractor beams in them to move about. They can also be used to climb vertical surfaces in gravity, but with difficulty; they're very heavy.
• Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga features tractor beams at military scale, including on starships, but also in civilian use at smaller scale — 'hand tractors' are used for cargo manipulation, and 'medical hand tractors' are used for delicate surgical work — ideal for battlefield medicine as they're fundamentally sterile, never physically touching the patient.

Live-Action TV

• Doctor Who:
  • "Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS": The plot kicks off when salvagers manage to grab the TARDIS, whose defences the Doctor took down because he was showing Clara how to fly, with a "magno-grab", a kind of tractor beam the Doctor describes as being illegal in most galaxies because of the damage it can do to computer systems.
• Farscape:
  • The Flax is a tractor net designed to capture ships for destruction and salvage by pirates.
  • Moya has a "docking web", which is usually used to help damaged ships aboard. Much to Pilot's confusion, Crichton ends up calling it a tractor beam in an early episode.
• A joke on Mock the Week by Hugh Dennis, for a Scenes We'd Like To See: Unlikely Things to Hear in a Sci-Fi Show, went: "There's something in the tractor beam! Ed?" This was in reference to Ed Byrne, who in the week that Grand Theft Auto V came out had been playing Farming Simulator instead.
• Used as a large scale, multipurpose tool in the Star Trek series. Except on Enterprise, where grappling-cables are used instead. Tractor beams have been invented, but the Vulcans didn't feel like sharing.
  • On the somewhat notorious early Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Naked Now", the Enterprise's engines end up disabled while a derelict ship is under tow via tractor beam. To buy them some time to escape the catastrophe of the week, Wesley Crusher figures out how to Reverse the Polarity and turn it into a repulsor beam, allowing them to shove off from the other ship and gain some distance and time.
  • The Borg, recurring villains for TNG, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager, use tractor beams as a weapon in combat, using their beam weapons to hammer a ship's shields into submission before locking them in place with the tractor beam so they can be easily boarded or blown apart at leisure. On their first encounter with Starfleet, they slice out a section of Enterprise's hull with a cutting beam, then use the tractor beam to pull it out of the ship entirely.
• There are monsters from the Ultra Series who uses this method to feed, instead of chomping their targets.
  • Return of Ultraman has a sentient iceberg monster called Priz-Ma who lacks a mouth, and devours objects by firing a beam of light through it's core to absorb into it's body.
  • Ultraman 80 has the Flying Saucer-based monster Robo-Fo which uses a beam on it's side to port it's occupants in and out. It can also target planes and tanks for self-defense, and be converted into an energy rope when battling Ultraman 80.
  • The iconic Ultraman Gaia monster, Gan-Q, can fire one of these from it's central eye, to absorb objects like buildings and planes — and even Ultraman Gaia himself — into it's body. A later mechanical monster called Sigma-Zuigul has a core firing a smaller tractor beam, used to collect objects.
  • Ultraman Nexus has a rodent monster called a Nosferu, whose forehead can fire another beam for absorbing and collecting humans. NOT for consumption, though, but for converting them into brainwashed slaves.
  • Ultraman Mebius brought back the monster Vakishim, this time with a new ability of firing a green beam from it's eye to collect victims to Yapool's dimension.
  • Ultraman Orb introduces another iconic monster, the Humongous Mecha Galactrom whose stomach core can fire another capturing beam to assimilate humans within. This ability shows up in the later series, Ultraman Taiga.
  • Ultraman Taiga, besides bringing back a Galactron who assimilates another human, also introduces a new monster, Gorothunder, who can fire a yellow beam from it's navel, to capture and imprison human victims.
  • The Ultraseven robot kaiju, King Joe, seems to be granted this new ability in it's subsequent future appearances, firing a captuing beam from it's central eye capable of capturing humans, displayed in capturing Asahi in Ultraman R/B and collecting the Ultra Medals in Ultraman Z.

Music

• They Might Be Giants: "The Bee of the Bird of the Moth":
  All are irresistibly directed by the suction
  Of the hypnotizing tractor beam presenting a production...

Pinball

• Both Attack from Mars and its sequel Revenge from Mars have aliens using tractor beams to abduct various objects (including cows).
• Lexy Lightspeed - Escape from Earth: Shooting the orbits will sometimes result in a tractor beam temporarily capturing the pinball.
• Foo Fighters (2023): Several animations show the Overlord using tractor beams (more specifically "magnetic abduction beams") to steal various things, most prominently various instruments and other music-related items.

Tabletop Games

• Attractor and pressor beams exist as superscience devices in GURPS Ultra-Tech and GURPS Spaceships. They're mainly construction tools but powerful ones can be used in combat.
• Task Force Games:
  • Starfire has tractor and presser beams. These not only pull (or push) enemy starships around, they also make it easier for your weapons to lock on to a tractored target, and can tear small fighters to pieces. They can be countered by installing a Shearing Plane on a starship, which negates all tractor and presser beams attempting to lock on to it.
  • Star Fleet Battles is based on the Star Trek universe and most starships have tractor beams as standard equipment. In addition to grabbing enemy ships for the usual purposes (e.g. towing), they can be used in combat as well. Above the simulator room doors at Star Fleet Academy is written "Use your tractors, dammit!"
• Games Workshop games:
  • Warhammer 40,000:
    • The Orks have a number of weapons based on tractor beam technology such as the Lifta-Droppa (giant nuclear-powered tractor beams often mounted on their Humongous Mecha for anti-tank duty – as well as anti-infantry, by dropping the tank onto the infantry) and the anti-aircraft Traktor Kannon used to grab hold of enemy aircraft and smash them into the ground, much to the amusement of the crew.
    • The tension cannons mounted on some Kataphron Breacher battle servitors capture an enemy with a trio of tractor beams known as gaol-fields that then rotate in different directions to tear the target apart.
  • In Battlefleet Gothic the Ork Fleet has the Grunt Assault Ship. A more sophisticated version of the Brute Ram Ship, the Grunt incorporates a massive traktor field reactor that not only increases the damage done when it rams into an enemy but also allows it to stick to the enemy vessel so that the mobs of Ork Boyz it carries can perform a more effective boarding action. On the downside, the poorly distributed mass of the ship considerably reduces its manoeuvrability.

Video Games

• Iva's Energy ability in Battlerite. In addition to pulling in enemies, it also nullifies any attacks from the front.
• Beyond Good & Evil's gravity lift's function as a voluntary tractor beam, allowing you to move up or down.
• Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3: As nuclear weapons no longer exist in this timeline, Soviet Superscience focused on magnetism in addition to their usual electrical weapons.
  • The Hammer Tank's Leech Beam secondary ability pulls away bits and pieces of vehicle and building armor, slowly repairing the tank (and has better range than its main gun). A vehicle that dies under the effect gives the tank a secondary weapon based on the killed vehicle (i.e. Anti-Air, Anti-Infantry, Anti-Armor...).
  • The Apocalypse tank is now even better at killing enemy tanks thanks to its Magnetic Harpoon, which drags vehicles towards its front-mounted grinders (and can drag ships towards the shore to kill them). Heavy vehicles and buildings drag the tank towards themselves instead, but the effect is much the same as the grinders do more damage per second than the guns. However, only one magnetic harpoon can affect a target at a time.
  • The Magnetic Satellite is a support power that drags vehicles into orbit, starting with light vehicles all the way up to Apocalypse Tanks and battleships. If the player takes the Orbital Drop power as well, those same vehicles are sent crashing down.
• In Crying Suns, Nano Drones emit a tractor beam which prevents their current target from moving away. Since Nano Drones also have an ability that prevents adjacent squadrons from attacking them, this allows them to lock down an enemy squadron where it can’t do any harm.
• The Ultharians from Cthulhu Saves the World use a tractor beam to pull cattle up to their spaceship. A defector aboard this ship can use this beam get your party inside as well.
• The Dead Space series has gravity tethers, which can move massive amounts of rock into orbit. The player also has a smaller version in the form of the Kinesis module, which quickly brings small items into user's reach.
• Crypto's flying saucer in Destroy All Humans! has the Abducto Beam, which you can use to pick up tanks, smash them against buildings, drain them of their energy, and fling them out to sea; or you can use it to, you know, abduct people.
• Present in the first two games in the Escape Velocity series, and possible but unused in the third. If one ship tractors another, the least massive ship is the one that gets pulled along. A larger ship can even use the tractor beam to prevent a smaller one from entering hyperspace. Mechanically, they're created by putting a negative number into the "impact" field^note i.e. the kinetic "kick" imparted to the subject of a weapon strike of an Energy Weapon. There are also (equally unused but possible in the third) repulsion beams, who mechanically are simply beams with a positive number in the impact field but (like tractor beams) doing zero damage.
• In the Everybody Edits Universe website background, a Flying Saucer uses a Tractor Beam to carry a duck.
• The Fallout 3 add-on Mothership Zeta has the player abducted using a energy beam.
• There is a tractor spell in Final Fantasy XI. It's used to pull dead players' corpses only, thought (still useful to pull them out of monster reach before resurecting them).
• The Galaga flagship (a.k.a. Boss Galaga) from Galaga occasionally stops in mid-flight to emit a tractor beam in order to capture your ship.
• In Gaplus, your ship can emit a tractor beam that can capture aliens and use them to increase your firepower.
• Frigates and Cruisers in Gratuitous Space Battles can be mounted with (blue) Tractor Beams, slowing the pesky-deadly fighters down to the point where slow tracking beams and missiles can kill them.
• The gravity gun from Half-Life 2 is portable tractor device which can be aimed at anything to bring it close to the gun, which can then either hurl it away or drop it at the user's feet. It can also knock things away without having to grab them.
• The War Blimp boss in Heavy Weapon has a "Meteor Tractor Beam", it makes meteors rain on you shortly after it is fired.
• Iron Helix: The Indiana is able to latch onto the Obrian using its tractor beam, which keeps it in tow as the Obrian heads towards Calliope.
• In The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, a golden tractor beam is used by the 'ghosts' to abduct cows (and the unfortunate Romani).
• The Jetman games (Lunar for the ZX Spectrum, and Solar on the NES) make heavy use of a tractor beam for carrying ship parts and fuel.
• The Metroid series has the Grapple Beam, a Grappling-Hook Pistol in tractor beam form.
• The Brain Aliens from Otto Matic have a fleet of standard flying saucers that emit green beams that send reinforcements and red beams that kidnap people.
• Grappler-archetype ships in Ring Runner: Flight of the Sages can mount tractor beams, which were originally used by Asteroid Miners to grab rocks, but are now being used by you to grab opponents and pull them close enough for your ship's melee abilities.
• The main charater of Rocket: Robot on Wheels has a small, personalized tractor beam he uses to pick things up and throw them.
• Star Control II: The Chmmr Avatar has a tractor beam as a special ability. Very useful against slow ships, less so against fast ones, and draining the battery quite fast.
• Star Ruler features two versions of the tractor beam; one which pulls objects towards the ship (or station), and another which pushes objects away from the ship. The devices are largely pointless, though it's always entertaining to use them to catapult an enemy's defense station out of orbit. Micromanaging a station with a repulsion tractor beam allows players to assist their ships when leaving the system, effectively giving them a big push; very useful with very large ships that are very heavy or have weak engines.
• In Starscape your fighter ships have a tractor beam used to suck in minerals from recently exploded asteroids.
• Star Trek Online, given its source material, allows science bridge officers to learn a skill to use the ship's tractor beam in combat. It's a heavy speed debuff, though unless the target ship is already very slow it doesn't stop the target entirely. The Borg and the Tholians use this to deadly effect. There are also two other player-based Tractor Beams: Tractor Beam Repulsors, which push away enemies, and a DOFF skill that inverts the Repulsors, pulling them toward you.
• The first two Star Trek: Starfleet Command games use tractor beams as a passive defense against incoming missiles. If a tractor beam is set to missile intercept mode, it captures the nearest enemy missile and holds it in place relative to the ship until one of three things happen: the beam's power runs out and the missile continues on its course, the missile's fuel runs out and it disappears, the missile is destroyed by one of your point-defense phasers. They can also be used to keep enemy or friendly ships in place for a time. However, in the first game, a tractor beam cannot be rotated, which means the positioning can be a bit of a crapshoot. To counter a tractor beam, the enemy can change their tractor beams to "push".
• The final Bowser level of Super Mario Galaxy has tractor beams that pull you from one planet to the next, but a Launch Star is actually used to get from the second-to-last planet to the one you fight Bowser himself on.
• In Super Mario Galaxy 2, tractor beams are produced by large doors (which can only be opened by smashing meteorites into it) leading to the planet you fight Bowser on at the end of all three Bowser levels.
• Tractor Beams in Sword of the Stars can be mounted in nearly any large turret socket in the game. They're especially effective when mounted on rotating defense satellites orbiting planets, where they can grab attacking ships and smash them into the planet's surface. The game's AI for some species actually takes advantage of this.
• A staple of Tales Series is Tractor Beam, a non-elemental spell which lifts enemies upwards and then drops them for damage.
• Thrust is an old computer game where you pilot a spacecraft through tunnels to pick up an object with your tractor beam and pull it out again.
• Time Crisis 4: Wild Dog, in previous games, has outfitted his gun-arm with flamethrower and rocket launcher attachments, but in 4 he employs a tractor beam for the final phase of his fight, throwing all manners of cargo containers at you. Elizabeth is surprised that an actual tractor beam exists. When defeated, the tractor beam malfunctions and pulls in the cargo towards him, crushing him under it...although he survives.
• Ships in VGA Planets can't actively pull other ships to them, but they can lock on a tow-beam and drag the target along as they move. The Crystal and Privateer factions can use this beam to capture ships which have been drained of their fuel. (Everyone else has to tow such ships to a starbase to be captured.)
• Warframe features Tenno and Corpus dropships, which can pull cargo up to them using what looks like a powerful electromagnets. The Tenno landing craft use them at the end of Hijack missions to haul the escorted object, while Corpus Condors are seen using them to carry Ambulas units to Frohd Bek's spaceship.
• Wing Commander:
  • In Wing Commander II, one mission has the player flying a Broadsword, using its tractor beam to retrieve a data pod.
  • At the end of Wing Commander III, Blair's crippled fighter is retrieved by a Kilrathi Dreadnought that uses a tractor beam to draw it in.
  • In Wing Commander: Privateer, loot sometimes drops from destroyed ships, which can be picked up with a tractor beam if mounted, then sold at the next station.
• In World of Horror, if you follow the Blue Gem's hidden sidequest to the very end, your character gets sucked up into the sky by aliens comprised entirely of dogs. Turns out they're here to save humanity from the incoming Old God as Earth is doomed. Unsurprisingly, this ends your run as a Game Over.
• In X3: Reunion and X3: Terran Conflict, tractor beams are a player-usable weapon, used mainly for towing ships and moving stations around. In a symptom of those games' broken economy, the factories that create them sometimes disappear before the player can buy one, forcing one to build a factory for an item the player only ever needs one of.
• X-COM: Interceptor has a ship mountable tractor beam. Using it disables the energy weapons, but not the missiles. The effort of the ship trying to fight loose would damage both ships: the intended use of the device is to disable the enemy ship (using the specially-built EMP lasers), then use the tractor beam to grab it and high-tail it out of the area before the other ships retaliate. In practice, disabling a ship makes it unable to do anything for the rest of the combat sequence, and it's automatically retrieved if you complete the mission anyway, so you never need to mount a tractor beam at all. They could also be mounted to stations, which would slow attacking alien ships for weapon turrets and defending fighters.
• The ZIG shuttle in Zero Wing can emit a short-range beam to capture enemies and then toss them forward.
• The player's ship in Zigfrak has an electromagnetic tractor beam for the purpose of collecting loot and materials in space.

Webcomics

• Robot #1 in The Easy Breather uses a tractor beam to pull Ant Woman into its cargo hold.
• Wikipedian Greg Williams created an illustration◊ discussing tractor beams (with a side helping of Aliens Steal Cattle) in December 2007 as part of a series.
• The xkcd strip "Tractor Beam" shows Cueball being pulled up into a Flying Saucer by a cone of light its emitting, but instead of panicking he's asking the sort of questions writers usually don't ask themselves about tractor beams, which annoys the aliens enough to put him back and fly away.

Western Animation

• Various alien species have this technology in Ben 10, one such example being the Highbreed from Ben 10: Alien Force, which ther ship uses in "Inside Man" to try to steal the Oscillator Key and abduct Tyler.
• The Pixar short film Lifted is about an alien trainee ineptly trying to use a tractor beam to lift a sleeping human out of a bed and into their Flying Saucer, to messy results.
• Spoofed in just about every alien abduction episode of The Simpsons. In one, the tractor beam isn't strong enough to lift Homer and they end up having to use two. In another, Marge is hit with what looks like a tractor beam... and then a lasso drops down instead and yanks her into the flying saucer.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars: "Brain Invaders" has tractor-beam tugboats, used to slow down the out-of-control medical frigate Ahsoka is on when it drops out of hyperspace before it crashes into the Ord Cestus medical station.
• Star Wars Rebels: In "The Siege of Lothal", the Ghost is nearly caught in an Imperial tractor beam after Darth Vader realizes that Ahsoka Tano is aboard the ship, but Hera manages to outmaneuver Vader and gets him caught in the beam instead, to Admiral Konstantine's horror. The Admiral adapts quickly though...by scapegoating the tractor beam operator.

Real Life

• Scientists at the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom were able to create a tractor beam, although at a microscopic level. This can have many applications, like for medical usage.

---