Alien Spell, the adversary in the banned twelfth episode of Ultraseven, which has recently been uploaded at various places on the Net, including the Internet Archive.
Initially there was no objection to Alien Spell or the episode, and a repeat played on Japanese television in 1969 with no uproar.
However, in 1970 a trading card included in a magazine called the kaiju Alien Hibaku. Hibaku was a reference to hibakusha, the survivors of the atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Many hibakusha had keloid scars on their bodies, which resemble the markings on Alien Spell. Hibakusha were also the victims of terrible discrimination by the rest of Japanese society.
Hibakusha survivors protested the name on the trading card, and soon there was a public outcry against Alien Hibaku. Tsuburaya Productions issued a public apology (although they had never called the kaiju Hibaku), and promised that the episode would never be shown again, nor would anything related to Alien Spell ever be released.
