It is strange how some people can get quite far in life, chronologically, without realizing that ANY new story involves rearranging elements that have been used before into a new combination. To use a cooking analogy, a new dish, or recipe, does not require ingredients that have heretofore been undiscovered or at least unused for human consumption. Aliens, conspiracies, flashbacks -- am I to believe there is some body of NON-American science fiction work to which these things are foreign?