Peter Graves wears a Hamilton

Killers From Space (1954) is remembered, when it is remembered, for its alien invaders, whose bulging eyes were made from ping-pong balls. W. Lee Wilder, Billy Wilder's brother, directed it on a B-picture budget. Peter Graves plays Dr. Doug Martin, a nuclear scientist whose plane goes down during an atomic test; he walks back into the base with a fresh scar, a hole in his memory, and eventually a story about aliens planning an invasion with giant insects. The film slipped into the public domain long ago and now circulates freely online.

The watch on his wrist waited half a century for an audience. When vintage Hamilton collectors froze a frame of Graves' wrist on a watch forum, the thread worked the catalog the way birders work a field guide: one vote for the Eric, a second look at the minute track and the lugs, and a consensus around the DeWitt, a model Hamilton introduced in 1949 and made for about three years, with a 10 karat yellow gold filled case, fluted lugs, and a 17 jewel 747 movement behind a sterling silver dial with solid gold numerals. The Eric and the DeWitt are nearly twins; the taper inside the lugs is what separates them, and the frame showed DeWitt lugs. Hamilton had advertised the DeWitt as especially popular among young men of exceptional judgment.

None of this rises to certainty. The screenshot the collectors examined survives online only as a thumbnail, and no studio record says what Graves wore, so the identification rests on the readers who saw it at full size. What they describe is a Hamilton that had been in the catalog until two or three years before the film was shot.