This weekend, a menace from outer space will invade a dusty town in the Wild West. The movie Cowboys & Aliens is the ultimate genre mash-up — science fiction meets the Western (starring the original space cowboy, no less). It opens Friday.

Studio 360‘s Eric Molinsky thinks there’s a reason why we keep retelling the narrative of the alien invasion over and over: it’s our history. Uninvited visitors arrive in a new world, seize the land, and take human lives — it’s the settlement of North America, as seen by American Indians. (Originally aired December 12, 2008)