For this week’s Weekend Matinee, we’re rocketing off to the planet Venus in The First Spaceship on Venus!

Engineers in the Gobi Desert uncover a mysterious artifact, one that they link to the Tunguska explosion of 1908. It’s a flight recorder from an alien spacecraft from Venus, and in response, flight planners redirect a Mars mission to Venus.

This film was actually based on Stanislaw Lem’s novel The Astronauts, and was originally filmed in East Germany in 1960 as The Silent Star. In 1962, American filmmakers redubbed the film and released it as First Spaceship on Venus.