Enter the Green Galactic: Films Featuring Weed, Extraterrestrial Encounters

Did you hear we kinda-sorta-but-almost-definitely confirmed aliens exist? In case the hellscape that is human existence pulled your attention from the big news, let’s catch up: 

Last week saw retired Air Force Major David Grusch and two other intelligence community members deliver shocking, highly anticipated testimony on Capitol Hill. During his testimony in front of a House oversight subcommittee on national security, Grusch claimed the Pentagon operates a decades-old program that retrieves and reverse engineers alien vehicles. 

During one interesting exchange, Grusch and pro-pot reform Rep. Nancy Mace exchanged a back-and-forth regarding the U.S. making contact with intelligent extraterrestrials. Grusch could not respond in public, but confirmed a follow up question regarding recovered bodies from crashed UFOs. 

“Biologics came with some of these recoveries, yeah,” claimed Grusch.

The Pentagon denies operating a program centered on unidentified flying objects, or the Fed’s recent terminology of choice, unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). The U.S. now uses UAP instead of UFO.

So now that we’re all caught up, let’s dive into what’s truly important: Movies that have weed and aliens in them. Here’s a list of ET420 films you can enjoy:

Dude, Where’s My Car? (2000)

Dude, Where’s My Car is a memorably dumb comedy featuring Ashton Kutcher and Sean William Scott as Jesse and Chester, two stoner buddies searching for their car after a night of partying. 

To find their car, they’ll need to remember what happened during their blackout, and who joined them along the way. One of those groups is an outer space cult and two sets of aliens hellbent on recovering an interstellar device of significant importance, the Continuum Transfunctioner. 

The film can be fun in a moronic sort of way. But as a late 90s produced movie full of crass and lowbrow moments, it’s not going to be for everyone. That includes one scene involving Jacko the catatonic dog that only comes alive to smoke weed. You better not touch his pipe. 

Paul (2011)

Paul is an oft-underdiscussed stoner sci-fi comedy. The film features comedy giants, including Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Kristen Wiig and Seth Rogen, who voices the titular Alien. 

Paul is a pot smoking alien who breaks out from Area 51 and soon joins British travelers Graeme (Pegg) and Clive (Frost), who are trekking across the states to get to Comic-Con in San Diego. With the Feds on their asses, the group still finds time for various memorable times, including smoking some government-grade weed around the campfire. 

The movie is a fun watch, but top compliments go to the animators. Stellar work on bringing this alien to the big screen.

Star Leaf (2015)

Star Leaf centers around a group of friends traveling to Washington State for some medical relief and truly out of this world weed. 

Tim and James are Marine veterans, with the latter struggling with PTSD symptoms. On their trip, they learn about some ET-produced weed grown in the mountains not too far away. The Star Leaf lives up to the billing, but the group breaks several rules on the grow-op, including no phones, videos, photos and, most important, no clippings. 

Star Leaf hasn’t gotten much critical love in the mainstream media. But, pot lovers have raved about it for years, calling it a fun, trippy experience with some pretty good acting from a cast of largely unknown talents. The film was popular enough for the producers to roll out a branded ET Weed in 2017.

Welcome to Willits (2016)

Set in the heart of American weed, California’s Emerald Triangle, is the town of Willits—a community plagued by regular attacks and abductions from unknown entities. 

The town’s on edge after contending with these encounters for years. The shaken citizens include Brock, a pot grower, meth producer and meth consumer who struggles with PTSD after his own encounter. 

Things turn deadly when a group of traveling teens unintentionally set up camp on Brock’s property. Brock’s drug-induced hallucinations mix with declining mental health to create a world where the teens are aliens and Brock is ready for revenge. 

Alien Addiction (2018)

Alien Addiction is an enjoyable, low budget sci-fi stoner buddy comedy. The movie centers on Riko, a stoner who lives with his aunt in Waikato, a town way off the beaten path in New Zealand. 

Riko doesn’t do much other than hang out with his buds. But his life changes for the better when two aliens crash not far from his home. The two aliens and Riko soon strike up a bond and embark on various adventures. Those adventures include a bit of smoking: weed for Riko and poop for the aliens—to each their own.

But others also saw the aliens land in the area, and they want to cash in. Can Riko keep his new intergalactic buds safe? 

Overall, Alien Addiction is a fun enough watch. Fans of Paul will likely enjoy it as long as they’re okay with the much lower graphics budget. 

Extraterrestrial (2014)

Extraterrestrial is a sci-fi horror that finds a group of young friends traveling into the woods for a getaway at one of their parent’s vacation spots. The typical young adult tension is broken by a UFO crash landing not far from the group’s cabin. Crazy how these spacecrafts always find secluded homes to crash near. 

Like any real American, one the kids shoots an alien. The galactic capping breaches a long-held peace pact between humans and aliens. From there, we discover that the U.S. and aliens have been in cahoots, with Earthlings acting as the lackeys.

Extraterrestrial won’t deliver much pot-alien crossover like the other films on the list. However, the kids do smoke some weed early on in the film. Other than that, this is mostly an alien horror film. It’s a fun watch but there isn’t much weed once you get past the early goings.

Almost But Not Quite: Alien: Covenant (2017)

Alien: Covenant is a star-studded sci-fi horror that expanded on the origins of the iconic Xenomorphs from the Alien franchise. The film didn’t live up to many fans of the series. 

Maybe some weed fans would’ve given the film love if it included a particular scene where Walter (Michael Fassbender) hands out some joints he’s rolled. Making things better, Michael grew the weed himself. Unfortunately, the scene was cut from the final edit, dealing a blow to interstellar home grow advocates across the galaxy.

More on the Way?

It’s unlikely that we’ll see a wave of alien-weed crossover films in the coming years. While possible, it’s a rather niche subject to work with. Most likely, we’ll get a few here and there.

But more projects could soon find their ways into theaters and streaming platforms. They include the comedy spec script The Aliens Are Stealing Our Weed. Paramount Pictures bought the rights in 2020, with Gina Rodriguez attached to star when the news was first released. While spec scripts often change over time, the current working plot finds Rodriguez and her friend as struggling pot growers who discover aliens stealing the planet’s pot supply.