History Main / AliensInCardiff

* In ''VideoGame/Persona4'', it turns out [[spoiler:that the identity of the Gas Station Attendant was Izanami, Goddess of the Underworld, who had been responsible for bestowing Adachi, Namatame and the protagonist the Persona of Izanagi, giving them powers to enter the Midnight Channel and created the being responsible for the fog.]] And all this is done from Yasoinaba, a town considered out in the "boonies" in Japan.

** Ever since the show returned in 2005, it made Cardiff, the capital city and most populous county of Wales and the headquarters of BBC Wales (the producers of the show), a WeirdnessMagnet courtesy of a dimensional rift. This trope is repeatedly lampshaded by characters in both ''Series/DoctorWho'' and ''Series/{{Torchwood}}'' who have dumbfounded reactions to the thought of supernatural stuff happening in Cardiff. While the Doctor only visits Cardiff on occasion (to "refuel" the TARDIS with energy from the rift), the first two series of ''Torchwood'' are set there.
*** Even gets {{lampshade|Hanging}}d during Season 2 when Gwen tries to tell Rhys what she really does at work. His reaction is (obviously) "Aliens? In Cardiff?!"

** Fairport's Cropredy Convention - also known as the Cropredy Festival - is Music/FairportConvention's own festival with a lot of guest artists thrown in. And for three days (sometimes even four!) 20,000 people descend on to the small English village of Cropredy, which has a population of ''717''.

** Hellfest Open Air brings 150,000 visitors to a site near Clisson in France, which has a population of 7, 000.

** In ''Anime/MobileSuitGundamIronBloodedOrphans'', the Earth is divided into [[SpaceFillingEmpire 4 major economic blocs]]. The capital of Arbrau, one of these 4 blocs, is located in [[CanadaEh Edmonton, Alberta, Canada]], and becomes the major goal of Tekkadan to get to in the tail end of the series. Episode 23 sees Tekkadan approaching the city by train, and Episodes 24 and 25 feature the show's big climactic battle occurring on the city outskirts and moving into downtown proper. A local Edmonton newspaper even [[Quotes/AliensInCardiff wrote an article on it.]]

* Earth made its first real appearance in ''VideoGame/MassEffect3'', something that was heavily marketed in the game's advertising. Namely, the Reaper attack on London. However, the first we see of the Reaper invasion is the scorched remains of... [[CanadaEh Vancouver]]. Justified in that Creator/{{Bioware}} is Canadian and Vancouver is one of Canada's largest and most famous cities, and averted [[spoiler:in the final battle, which takes place in London]].

* ''Series/TheTwilightZone1959'': In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E97TheGift The Gift]]", Williams' ship crash-landed in the vicinity of the mountain village of Madeiro, UsefulNotes/{{Mexico}}, just over the border with Texas.

** The old series does, nevertheless, go to even less common locations at times, such as Time Lord criminals hiding out in Cambridge or Amsterdam, an alien time experiment in Seville, a secret underground base where scientists create natural disasters in Australia and a mad super-computer plotting to take over the world from South Wales.

* In the 4-issue ''ComicBook/GreatLakesAvengers'' series, Maelstrom manages to create his universe-ending device successfully, and has only the titular D-List team to face him. He notes that he succeeded in creating his doomsday device because he didn't go to a major city like Los Angeles, London, or New York, but instead went to Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

* In ''ComicBook/HaloUprising'', when a captured UNSC colonel is [[ColdBloodedTorture tortured]] by the Covenant, he tells them the "Key of Osanalan" is in Cleveland. [[spoiler:It was a ruse to keep them from wiping out the city from orbit and so give his brother there a chance to escape.]]
* In ''ComicBook/GoldDigger,'' the Diggers family lives in Atlanta, Georgia. Consequently, all the supernatural and superscientific friends, enemies, and acquaintances they make during the course of their globe-trotting and multiverse-hopping adventures inevitably end up finding their way there.

* Not only are ''ComicBook/AlphaFlight'' superheroes in Canada, but it was revealed that ComicBook/{{Wolverine}} is a former member and the Weapon X Project that gave him his adamantium skeleton was the Canadian government's attempt at creating their own SuperSoldier.
* ''Franchise/MarvelUniverse'': The whole point of The 50 State Initiative. A super hero team for every state, even Iowa. And of course, our friends The Great Lakes Avengers patrol Wisconsin as The Great Lakes Initiative.
* In Creator/AlanMoore's first ''ComicBook/SwampThing'' story line the Franchise/{{Justice League|OfAmerica}} is caught completely off guard when the Floronic Man makes his move.
-->'''Green Arrow''': Man, I don't believe this! We were watching out for New York, Metropolis, for Atlantis... But who was watching out for Lacroix, Louisiana?
* ''ComicBook/HowardTheDuck'' was based in UsefulNotes/{{Cleveland}}.
* ''ComicBook/RomSpaceKnight'': a major center of the Dire Wraith invasion is Clairton, West Virginia.

* ''ComicBook/{{Empowered}}'' has a ninja clan in New Jersey.

* In the Post-''Comicbook/{{Civil War|2006}}'' Creator/MarvelComics world [[Comicbook/TheMightyThor Asgard]] - the home of the gods of [[Myth/NorseMythology Norse legend]] - is floating over Broxton, Oklahoma.
* ''Comicbook/SecretAvengers'': The secret empire has built their underground teleporting city beneath Toledo, Ohio for two reasons: It has no subway systems and there is very little chance of any government or media attention.
* The new ''[[Comicbook/MsMarvel2014 Ms. Marvel]]'' is Jersey City's very own (well, only) superhero. Granted, Jersey City is right across the Hudson River from Manhattan and isn't out of reach of the NYC heroes, but it's still a nice change of pace.
* The ComicBook/XMen's most well-known base of operations is North Salem, New York. Like Jersey City, it's still within the NYC metro area, but the writers deserve credit for using a specific town rather than generically plopping them in Manhattan.
* The ''ComicBook/{{PS238}}'' issue "Saving Alternate Omaha" sets a deciding battle for TheMultiverse in Omaha, Nebraska, after Victor [=VonFogg=] conquers it and makes it the capital of his new empire. The same issue also reveals the town is [[spoiler:Zodon's]] hometown.
* In ''ComicBook/{{Mampato}}'' it all begins when an alien and his spaceship crash in the vicinity of a small rural town in central Chile.
* ''Punx'' featured a {{Notzilla}} looking to mix things up because the people of Tokyo gave him an EmbarrassingNickname. A friend helps narrow down targets, noting that [[NoFourthWall the creators of this series promised they wouldn't futz around with anything that would affect the wider Valiant Comics universe]], until they reach... Acclamation, Oregon (not a real place, but then again neither is Monster Island). Acclamation appears to be a bustling cyberpunk metropolis on the sea, oddly enough.

* ''Franchise/TheTransformers:''
** ''WesternAnimation/TheTransformers'': The Autobots and the Decepticons crashed into an unidentified desert somewhere in the American southwest. Also, the episode [[Recap/TransformersG1APlagueOfInsecticons "A Plague of Insecticons"]] takes place in Bali in UsefulNotes/{{Indonesia}}, a place that doesn't get seen often in Western media. When the Insecticons are sighted there eating crops, both the Autobots and Decepticons go to investigate.
** Minor example: While most of ''WesternAnimation/TransformersAnimated'' takes place in UsefulNotes/{{Detroit}}, Megatron's [[ItMakesSenseInContext disembodied head]] landed on the farm Isaac Sumdac grew up in near [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paw_Paw%2C_Michigan Paw Paw,]] a village with a population of about 3,300. It's also [[CreatorProvincialism where the art director/lead character designer is from]].
** ''WesternAnimation/TransformersPrime'' takes place in the middle of a Nevada desert.

* Minor example: While most of ''WesternAnimation/TransformersAnimated'' takes place in UsefulNotes/{{Detroit}}, Megatron's [[ItMakesSenseInContext disembodied head]] landed on the farm Isaac Sumdac grew up in near [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paw_Paw%2C_Michigan Paw Paw,]] a village with a population of about 3,300. It's also [[CreatorProvincialism where the art director/lead character designer is from]].

* ''WesternAnimation/TheTransformers'': The episode [[Recap/TransformersG1APlagueOfInsecticons "A Plague of Insecticons"]] takes place in Bali in UsefulNotes/{{Indonesia}}, a place that doesn't get seen often in Western media. When the Insecticons are sighted there eating crops, both the Autobots and Decepticons go to investigate.

* ''Film/LetMeIn'': The vampire Abby stalks and hunts in the small town of Los Alamos, New Mexico.
* In ''Film/StarTrekFirstContact'' the Vulcans first land in Montana, though they had a pretty good reason as they were looking for [[spoiler:the people who had built a spaceship with warp technology in their basement.]] This is a case of AuthorAppeal: Brannon Braga is from Bozeman; he even named a USS starship after it.

* The nuclear war film ''Film/{{Threads}}'' takes place in the city of Sheffield in South Yorkshire. This is one of the examples where it makes sense, as it is far enough from major population centres that most of the inhabitants could be expected to survive the immediate effects of a nuclear war[[spoiler:, the poor barstards]].
* ''Film/DevilGirlFromMars''. A leather-dressed female alien seeking men to repopulate her race crashlands in a small town in the Scottish moors and has to make the best of a bad situation.
* In the Brazilian film "Segurança Nacional", [[ItMakesSenseInContext the non-Brazilian Latino traffickers, from the middle to the end of the film, planned to drop an atomic bomb from the Amazon in Santa Catarina]]. If they wanted to take revenge on the government, they could attack Brasília, if they wanted to do something iconic, they could attack Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo.

* ''Film/SupersonicSaucer'' involves a young [[https://aliens.fandom.com/wiki/Venusian_(Supersonic_Saucer) Venusian]] named Meba landing at a boarding school in Surrey (although he does travel to London briefly within the film).
** There is a touch of irony here as the film was written and produced by Frank Wells, younger son of Creator/HGWells -- who also wrote a [[Literature/TheWarOfTheWorlds1898 particularly famous story about aliens]] ([[AliensAreBastards albeit more hostile ones]]) landing in Surrey and progressing to London.
* The events of the 2018 film ''UFO'' revolve around proving that [[FirstContact an actual UFO may have appeared]]... in the skies over Cincinnati International Airport.
* ''Film/KoiMilGaya'' has the aliens, including Jadoo, visiting the hill station of [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kasauli Kasauli]] in Himachal Pradesh, a town of less than five thousand. Justified in that they were inadvertantly called there by Rohit using his father's computer.
* ''Film/SuperDeluxe'' lampshades it when [[spoiler:the alien girl]] mocks Vasanth for his skepticism that she is, in fact, an [[spoiler:alien girl]] born in the unnamed setting of the movie.
-->''"Do you think [[spoiler:aliens]] only visit America?"''

* Hawkins in ''Series/StrangerThings'' used to be a sleepy Indiana town, until the government opened a laboratory for energy research. Bizarre and deadly things have ensued since then. Robin, in season 3, does not understand why these things are happening in a place she describes as a "piss stop on the way to Disneyland".

* Hawkins in ''Series/StrangerThings'' used to be a sleepy town in Indiana, until the government opened a laboratory for energy research. Bizarre and deadly things have ensued since then. Robin, in season 3, does not understand why these things are happening in a place she describes as a "piss stop on the way to Disneyland".

* Almost all the supernatural happenings in Creator/HPLovecraft's stories happen in a semi-fictional town located on the coast in New England called Innsmouth. The name is a combination of two real town names "Innsbruck" and "Portsmouth". It's not named after the towns with these names in Maine which are famous tourist destinations (Innsbruck Maine is nowhere near the fairly large city of Portsmouth, and also not on the coast). Rather, Lovecraft's Innsmouth is named after the towns right next to each other on Cape Cod which are small, and famous for precisely nothing. The most notable thing about either is that Portsmouth has a large and very old cannery, where a lot of the fish caught on Cape Cod is processed. The spin off D20 tabletop game manual ''TableTopGame/CallOfChthulu'' also encourages game masters to invoke this trope by setting the game in their local area or an off-the-beaten-path locale.

* In an ''Webcomic/ItsWalky'' storyline, Head Alien experiments with his new time freezing technology in a small town in Canada, leading to the exchange in the page quote. It's also an excuse for a {{crossover}} with another webcomic, ''Webcomic/{{Avalon}}'', set in small-town Canada, which was in the middle of a long hiatus.

Not to be confused with AliensOfLondon (though this doesn't mean they are mutually exclusive), NothingExcitingEverHappensHere (where the location is just generically boring). Contrast with CanadaDoesNotExist, where it's forbidden to name the semi-known location, as well as WashingtonDCInvasion, when the aliens don't feel like faffing around and cut right to the chase. '''When adding an example, try to keep a global outlook--the capital city of an African nation with nearly five million people, for example would not count.

Are aliens landing in [[FlyingSaucer UFOs]]? They'll land in [[Film/District9 Johannesburg, South Africa]]. Is there a neighborhood full of world-class martial artists with superhuman powers? It's in UsefulNotes/{{Luxembourg}}. Is there a [[HellGate Hellmouth]] opening? It's opening in UsefulNotes/{{Singapore}}. Is there a magical gateway between worlds? It's in [[WesternAnimation/DannyPhantom the Midwest]] ([[Series/BuffyTheVampireSlayer one of them]] in UsefulNotes/{{Cleveland}}). Is there a mysterious gigantic cavern hidden just beneath the earth's surface, wherein aliens once upon a time created all life on earth? It's underneath [[UsefulNotes/RioDeJaneiro Sugarloaf Mountain]]. Is there a huge, creepy castle home to a ruthless villain who wants to conquer the universe? It's smack dab in the middle of [[HollywoodNewEngland the Berkshires]]. Is there a forest home to talking animals following legends? That forest's in [[WesternAnimation/ToadPatrol Ontario]] or [[Literature/{{Redwall}} somewhere]] [[Literature/WarriorCats in England]]. Are you looking for TheLeader of a secret den of werewolves? He's enjoying a day of fun at [[Ride/SixFlags Six Flags Fiesta Texas]]. Has a ZombieApocalypse or ThePlague broken out? The epicenter is in SweetHomeAlabama.

Not to be confused with AliensOfLondon (though this doesn't mean they are mutually exclusive), NothingExcitingEverHappensHere (where the location is just generically boring). Contrast with CanadaDoesNotExist, where it's forbidden to name the semi-known location, as well as WashingtonDCInvasion, when the aliens don't feel like faffing around and cut right to the chase.

* Bonnybridge in Scotland has an average of three-hundred U.F.O. sightings per annum, earning it the nickname "U.F.O. Capital of the World" despite the fact it's a fairly obscure town (even in Scotland).

* The Flatwoods monster/alien that was seen in Flatwoods, West Virginia, in 1952. The town has a population of 348.

* The original Woodstock concert took place on a dairy farm in the Catskills near Bethel, UsefulNotes/{{New York|State}}. Most of the area's few thousand residents felt the same way about its attendees and performers as they would have about alien invaders.

** Music/{{Phish}} held a series of huge festivals in the '90s and 2000s, with them as the only performing act, but none of them were held in traditional hotspots for such things. Three of them (The Great Went in 1998, Lemonwheel in 1999, and It in 2003) were held on an air force base in the small town of Limestone, Maine, which is on the Canadian border in the far north-east of the state far away from any significant population center (It is ''173 miles'' from Bangor, the nearest large city). 20 years on from these festivals, the locals in Limestone still [[https://thecounty.me/2018/09/01/news/after-two-decades-phish-concerts-continue-to-evoke-strong-memories/ talk about them]] with bewilderment, particularly how peaceful Phish's traveling fanbase was despite its enormous size.
* The Niihau Incident, during UsefulNotes/WorldWarII. One of the Pearl Harbor bombers crash-landed on the Hawaiian island of Niihau, believing it to be uninhabited. The island is privately owned and access is restricted, but a tiny community who still speak the native Hawaiian language are allowed to live there. The Niihauns, who could not communicate with the outside world, were left to deal with the Japanese pilot all by themselves.

* Used in the ''VideoGame/{{Fallout}}'' series, for good reason: many big cities were nuked into oblivion during the war (Los Angeles was destroyed so badly that it was called "the Boneyard", San Franciscio is mostly deserted, and it's implied that New York is just a radioactive crater). Therefore, the capital of the New California Republic isn't New Sacramento or anything like that, but instead a formerly small, post-apocalyptic community called Shady Sands. Played with in ''VideoGame/Fallout3'', ''VideoGame/FalloutNewVegas'' and ''VideoGame/Fallout4'', which take place in Washington, DC, Las (New) Vegas, and Boston, respectively, but in the case of ''New Vegas'' and ''4'', it's justified: the de-facto ruler of New Vegas, Robert House, had a missile defense system set up that destroyed most of the nukes before they could land, and most of the conflict in ''4'' comes from the actions of the Institute (formerly CIT, the ''Fallout'' version of MIT), which wasn't founded in its current form until after the war. However, {{DLC}}s for the post-''2'' games take place in exotic locales such as Zion National Park (''Honest Hearts''), Pittsburgh (''The Pitt''), Maine (''Far Harbour''), Anchorage (''Operation: Anchorage''), Point Lookout State Park (''Point Lookout'') and quite often, areas that, in real life, are empty or just don't exist (''Lonesome Road'' and ''Old World Blues'').

** Notable examples of this crossing with ThrowAwayCountry include Australia being the victim of a ColonyDrop bad enough to leave a crater visible from space in Universal Century ''Franchise/{{Gundam}}'', a big portion of the American midwest getting colony dropped by Zeon remnants to cripple the Federation's grain production in ''Anime/MobileSuitGundam0083StardustMemory'', Ireland getting destroyed in ''Anime/MobileSuitGundamZZ'' when Neo Zeon dropped another colony on it, and the Chinese-Tibetan city of Lhasa getting smashed by an asteroid in ''Anime/MobileSuitGundamCharsCounterattack'' because the protagonists were headquartered there.