One day in 1994 Lanning sat McKenna down for two hours and told her a story about an alien planet called Oddworld.

FORBES: Grow up!

In the second, a model is turned into an alien planet, complete with an army of clone soldiers surrounded by giant war machines and laser bolts.

FORBES: Digital Slide Show: Making Yoda Walk

While billboard in modern day NYC in Grand Theft Auto might fit right in with the environment, how do you plug a product on an alien planet in the year 2553 in Halo, or do the same in a fictional medieval world filled with dragons and orcs in Skyrim?

FORBES: Analyst Says Video Game Advertising Will Double by 2016

Further differentiating itself from our world's whirlwinds, this alien cyclone is locked to its planet's north pole and is fueled by small amounts of water vapor instead of an actual ocean.

ENGADGET

What leaps to the eye most impressively is our planet in ruins decades after an alien invasion so destructive that it shattered the moon.

WSJ: Oblivion: Earth, Plot in Ruins | In the House | Film Reviews by Joe Morgenstern

Some researchers have already started thinking about how they might use instruments like the planet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope to detect alien moons.

MSN: News editor

Soon, a mere mention of the planet inspired visions of foreign worlds and fears of alien invasion, and it has since been the subject of countless science-fiction tales.

ECONOMIST: Martian chronicles

Whatever the answer, a planet once strikingly similar to ours has become a thoroughly alien place.

NEWYORKER: The Martian Chroniclers

If the new object were a captured alien, it could give astronomers their first good look at an extra-solar planet, or a brown dwarf if that is what it turns out to be.

ECONOMIST: X marks the spot

The company has done a good deal of the hard and necessary work of turning itself around and transforming itself, like those alien robots in those awful movies, into something that can survive under the new conditions on planet Earth.

FORBES: Kodak: Is Everyone Fearful Enough Yet?