I have it!!!!!

I forgot to tell you about the cars. The reason why the aliens have stolen everyone's car is because they need the other aliens to see a sign they've crash landed there. They'd made a crop circle except for the fact that it's probably really hard to make a crop circle in the sand. As for them stealing the visitors luggage and toys, it's not that they're attracted to the toys, it's that they're hiding the evidence.

Leave it to Beaver...and you'll be sorry you did!

if it was ethan, why didnt he call out to them? and why was he walkin/breathin all hard?

i think the mutants/aliens/whatever have the ability to swap bodies. If there are not enough "fresh" human bodies they swap into animals (crow/owl/that mysteroius snake). As the familiy came into town, some old ones got new bodies. The "original" mind/soul(of the photographig boy) could be swapped into the crow (and vice versa).

Thats the point why the "mad" inmate wants to be shot by the sherriff. Bodyswitching could mean living in an almost dead alien/mutant or animal for a while.

They are former victims that take no pleasure in 'new blood'

You guys are going to laugh. I wrote those theories back when I was a huge fan of this film when I was 14! If you'll notice, my writing skills certainly weren't the best ;) But I sure was a clever kid to have come up with a theory like that, eh?

I stand by my same explanation though I'd like to re-iterate on a couple of things and even go a little radical on it. Especially after watching the film again.

Let's go back to 1948 real quick. I actually believe the neutron bomb really did get detonated there after all. Because the calendar in the restaurant back in town (yeah I had a lot of time on my hands back then lol) is circled twice very largely on September 21st, 1948. The same date that the plaque at ground zero said the bomb was tested. Meaning the town's people really were warned by the atomic energy commission that the bomb would be tested and that they couldn't stay. Do I think people stayed behind? Absolutely. And I think Lester's theory about the mutated offspring is true.

However, this is also what I think happened. Coinciding with the neutron bomb's detonation, aliens did come down to or near the town. Body-switching aliens. But by that time the only remaining occupants were the deformed offspring of Weaver's original occupants. Thus the only ones who they were able to switch bodies with were them. Until more people would come into Weaver like the Henley family or the four friends before them for example. So at the time the Henley's came to Weaver, even the actual "offspring" didn't actually exist anymore. The aliens had switched bodies with them probably thinking they were normal human beings and that in the town's mines was how everyone on earth lived.

But as more and more people came into town, the aliens (in the bodies of the mutants) realized this was not the case and still had the power to switch bodies. What I can't figure out, like other people, is why the "people" (aliens) in the diner didn't want them going to the town and pretended like it didn't exist. The only thing I can think of was maybe the Henley's had reached the aliens at a point where too many people had almost gotten away and they didn't want to take the chance of any other humans possibly escaping so they had sort of come to the decision, "We're done taking anyone new. We're just going to live with what we have" though there were still plenty of aliens in mutants' bodies in the town.

I don't speak whatever.