As a child, Poughkeepsie-born Edward Davis Wood, Jr., was often punished by his mother Lillian by being made to wear frilly girls' dresses. Consequently, Wood was a heterosexual cross-dresser all of his adult life.

"Junior" Wood got his start in films as an usher at the Bardavon Theater on Maple Street, eventually working his way up to ticket taker and assistant manager.

Ed Wood joined the Marines at age 17 and saw action during World War II. As part of Operation Galvanic, Wood participated in the three-day invasion of Tarawa in November of 1943, during which over a thousand American lives were lost.

Wood once roomed with independent producer Alex Gordon, who eventually moved out for fear that Wood's cross-dressing might reflect badly on his own career. Gordon remained on good terms with Wood and introduced him to Bela Lugosi.

Ed Wood's favorite movie was Karl Freund's The Mummy (1932).

Executive producer J. Edward Reynolds hoped the profits from Plan 9 would underwrite a film biography of evangelist Billy Sunday.

Previewed as Grave Robbers from Outer Space at the Carlton Theater in Los Angeles on March 15, 1957, the film went into general release as Plan 9 from Outer Space in July of 1959, on a double bill with the British suspense thriller Time Lock (1957), which featured a pre-James Bond Sean Connery.

Interiors were filmed at Quality Studios on Santa Monica Boulevard.

Leading actor Gregory Walcott was at the time a busy Hollywood contract player who attended the same Baptist church as executive producer J. Edward Reynolds and acted in Plan 9 from Outer Space as a favor.

Walcott's onscreen wife, Mona McKinnon, was a roommate of Dolores Fuller, a former girlfriend of Ed Wood and star of Wood's autobiographical Glen or Glenda (1953). McKinnon and Fuller had acted together in Ron Ormond's Mesa of Lost Women (1953), often short listed as one of the worst movies of all time.

Dressed as a morbid Charles Addams character, Maila Nurmi had won first prize at the Bal Caribe, a Hollywood masquerade ball in 1953, and was subsequently hired by KABC-TV's program director Hunt Stromberg, Jr. to be an on-air horror movie hostess the following year. Thirty years later, Nurmi sued Cassandra Peterson, aka "Elvira, Mistress of the Dark" for trademark infringement.

Cast in Plan 9 as UFO-chasing Colonel Tom Edwards, Tom Keene was born George Duryea in Rochester, New York, and studied at Columbia University and Carnegie Tech before heading west. After undergoing a name change at RKO Studios, Keene enjoyed a long career in Poverty Row westerns and episodic television. The one-time "Honorary Mayor of Sherman Oaks" Keene died of cancer in 1963.

Color blind cinematographer William C. Thompson had also lensed such cult favorites as Dwain Esper's Maniac (1934), Dementia, aka Daughter of Horror (1955) and The Astounding She-Monster (1957).

Paul Marco's "Kelton the Cop" got his screen surname from the street on which his agent lived.

Top-billed Tor Johnson was a Sweden-born pro wrestler who also appeared in such studio films as Shadow of the Thin Man (1941) with William Powell and Myrna Loy, Road to Rio (1947) with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby and State of the Union (1948) with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. Johnson died in 1971.

In 2006, Tor Johnson was honored by MTV as one of "10 Actors Who Can Take a Folding Chair to the Face."

In the footage used in Plan 9 from Outer Space, Bela Lugosi wears one of the Dracula capes he wore when playing the part on stage. After his death, he was buried in the same cape.

Cast member Dudley Manlove had been the announcer for the NBC Radio mystery program Candy Matson, Yukon 2-8209 in San Francisco and migrated to Los Angeles after the series' cancellation in 1951.

The contemporary six-man lounge combo The Dudley Manlove Quartet takes its name from the California-born actor, who died in 1996.

Manlove's onscreen amanuensis, Joanna Lee, enjoyed a successful late life career as a Hollywood scriptwriter and director. Lee penned the topical TV movies Cage Without a Key (1975), I Want to Keep My Baby (1976) and Mary Jane Harper Cried Last Night (1977).

Special Guest Star John "Bunny" Breckinridge was a direct descendent and namesake of 14th American Vice President John Cabell Breckinridge.

Seen briefly as an army general, Lyle Talbot is the father of Stephen Talbot, who played Gilbert on the television series Leave It To Beaver.

Plan 9's atmospheric score was cobbled together from existing library tracks by music packager Gordon Zahler, paraplegic son of Poverty Row music director Lee Zahler. The film's infamous main title is actually composer Trevor Duncan's "Grip of the Law," written for Great Britain's Impress Mood Music Library. In 1960, CBS Television used the cue to score a broadcast covering Soviet premiere Nikita Kruschev's visit to America.

Ed Wood never profited from the theatrical release or belated cult acclaim of Plan 9 from Outer Space and died homeless in 1978.

Sources:
Cult Movies by Danny Peary
Cult Movies by Karl & Philip French
AFI
www.scifilm.org
imagesjournal.com/issue09
wald.heim.at/redwood/510196/soundtracks
Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood Jr. by Rudolph Grey
www.brightlightsfilm.com
The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film
Incredibly Strange Films (Re/Search)
Science Fiction and Fantasy Film Flashbacks: Conversations with 24 Actors, Writers, Producers and Directors from the Golden Age by Tom Weaver
The Immortal Count: The Life and Films of Bela Lugosi by Arthur Lennig
The Horror People by John Brosnan
The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror by David J. Skal
It Came From Weaver Five by Tom Weaver
Return of the B Science Fiction and Horror Heroes by Tom Weaver
Video Watchdog