Hacker Cinema
The Flying Saucer
1950 · Film · 69 min
Directed by Mikel Conrad
The CIA sends playboy Mike Trent to Alaska with agent Vee Langley, posing as his "nurse," to investigate flying saucer sightings. At first, installed in a hunting lodge, the two play in the wilderness. But then they sight a saucer. Investigating, our heroes clash with an inept gang of Soviet spies, also after the saucer secret.
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I think the cultural fascination started with UFOs started with the first sighting on June 24, 1947: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Arnold_UFO_sighting
After that, it was picked up in movies and TV, with the first movie being the 1950 film: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flying_Saucer Movies and TV continued to imprint the human psyche with the image of flying saucers for many years.
Flying saucers also had the benefit of being much easier to hoax in pictures and video than cylinders or other shapes, for obvious reasons (an old hubcap or pie pan could be a UFO, and spinning them like a frisbee provides gyroscopic stabilization).
The only thing close to flying saucers in terms of mass recognition and capturing the world's imagination would be greys. The movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_Encounters_of_the_Third_Kind in 1977 popularized this image of aliens, even though aliens in fiction have included grey skinned beings since at least 1893: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_alien
Prior to greys, the most common cultural alien in popular culture, or at least in English language, were https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_green_men or anything with antennae, sometimes with helmets. Following these, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reptilians were popular, probably most popularized in the V series in the early 80s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_%281983_miniseries%29
But, nothing beats the flying saucer.