Mariko Mori's Wave UFO shows how people in the late 1990s imagined the future via a pearlescent, teardrop pod that carries three viewers at a time. Inside, electrodes attach to your head like an EEG, and your brainwaves get projected onto the domed ceiling as six colored orbs, two for each hemisphere of each person's brain. The Japanese artist spent three years building it from fiberglass, Technogel, carbon fiber, and magnesium, inspired by the automobile factories of Turin and the Buddhist principle that all consciousness is interconnected.

What's striking, watching it now, is how sincere it is. Wave UFO doesn't joke about UFOs or wink at sci-fi. It takes the shape completely seriously — as a vehicle, literal and spiritual, for an unfamiliar interior experience. You can find all the declassified government UFO files on Cosmos, but as far as we know this is the only one that asks you to lie down inside and look up at your own brain.