It is a missed opportunity, when you think about it, the fact that aliens have never landed in George Square before.

A huge open space in one of Europe's largest cities; where could be better for any passing extra-terrestrial to set down? And yet when the aliens come, they bypass Glasgow. Instead, their intergalactic satnav inevitably takes them to New York or London. Frankly, thanks to Doctor Who, Cardiff has had more alien visitors than Glasgow and Edinburgh put together.

And yes, as Scottish science fiction author Ken Macleod has pointed out, the future will happen here too. It already happens all the time in print, in Macleod's books, and you can trace the genre back via the late Iain M Banks through the New Worlds magazine covers of Eduardo Paolozzi in the 1960s to Naomi Mitchison's Memoirs Of A Spacewoman and even Lewis Grassic Gibbon who, as well as writing Sunset Song, dabbled in sci-fi.

But as the upcoming British Film Institute sci-fi season Days Of Fear And Wonder reminds us, Scotland has been ill-served by science fiction on the big and small screens. A Doctor Who adventure here (Terror Of The Zygons in 1975, set at Loch Ness), a pre-Line Of Duty Jed Mercurio sci-fi thriller Invasion Earth there, and the isle of Harris standing in for Jupiter in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's Scotland's absence that's most visible.

Perhaps just as well. Because when it does turn up, the same tropes appear time and time again. A mixture of geopolitical isolation and historical kitsch. For the latter look no further than Highlander, Russell Mulcahy's brainless fantasy drama with its Conan the Barbarian-style rewriting of clan history as one long 1980s music video. Through Mulcahy's eye, medieval Scotland becomes a world of kilts and castles, big swords and bosomy women (hello Celia Imrie) set against a backdrop of picture-book scenery (never have Scotland's mountains looked so mountainous).

And all in stark contrast to the film's punk pantomime New York, all neon and broken glass. The question is, will the new TV series Outlander, as yet sight unseen here, cleave to the same unreal vision of Scotland's past?

Highlander at least has the merit of being dumb fun (come on, men with giant swords running around New York trying to cut each other's heads off and Sean Connery sounding like the most Scottish Egyptian who has ever lived; what's not to love?). British sci-fi in the 1950s had none of Mulcahy's bonehead bravura. Instead it offered poverty-row production values, paternalistic politics and a vision of Scotland as being at the edge of the world.

But it was not without kitsch either. Devil Girl From Mars, from 1954 (set in Inverness-shire, though mostly taking place in and around a stage set pub), imagines its Martians in the shape of a leather-clad Patricia Laffan looking like an escapee from an Eric Stanton bondage comic, accompanied by her cardboard-boxy robot. They have come to Earth to pick up some virile human males. The Martian males have already lost the battle of the sexes on the red planet and are clearly not up to the job.

Landing in Scotland wasn't the plan. The capital was the proposed destination. And we're not talking Edinburgh. "How do you propose to subdue London?" one of the human males says to Patricia. The film clearly believes that real power (and maybe real men) are to be found elsewhere. Scotland was just a wrong turn.

Where are Scotland's urban centres in all of this? Nowhere to be seen until the late 1970s and Bertrand Tavernier's Death Watch, a cinematically eloquent, dramatically inert precursor to Big Brother (the TV series with an added dash of Orwell). One of the films in the BFI season, it sees Harvey Keitel - complete with his own internal camera - stalk a dying Romy Schneider around the streets of Glasgow. A Glasgow in which no-one, not even Robbie Coltrane, speaks with a Glaswegian accent.

How familiar a story this is. In some ways things have actually got worse in the years since. Think of Glasgow standing in for Chicago in World War Z or San Francisco in Cloud Atlas. A reflection of the globalised nature of urban spaces in the 21st century perhaps (as well as the fact that there are financial advantages of filming here). But what does it say to Scots when their own cities are taken from them?

At least David Mackenzie's Perfect Sense allows Ewan McGregor to speak in his own voice. It also recognises that the future - embodied here in a virus that strips people of their senses one by one - will happen in Glasgow too.

Better still is this year's Under The Skin, Jonathan Glazer's urban recasting of Michel Faber's novel and a strange, oblique, possibly alienating vision of an alien Scarlett Johansson (speaking in a posh English accent) hunting down Scottish men for food.

Under The Skin is a discomfiting watch. It took me a while to work out why I found it so chilly and distancing when everything about it spoke of the care and craft and imagination of the people behind it. And I think in the end it's because it manages successfully to do something that should be essential in any sci-fi movie - presenting us with an alien vision of the world around us - in this case Glasgow's more down-at-heel corners.

And maybe too it's because it has uncomfortable things to say about Scotland in a way. Not what some people saw as its negative stereotypes of Glasgow men (an unfair criticism I always felt). Nor even the crude nationalistic reading that is there if you want it - is ScarJo's English accent and violent intent a comment on class and nationality? Is ScarJo maybe even a stand-in for Cameron or Clegg or Miliband?

No, it's the fact that so successful is it in its depiction of an alien vision of our part of the world that, in the end, something else emerges. We spend so much time looking through Scarlett Johansson's eyes that eventually it becomes clear that it is us - me and you - who are different here. To her, it is we who are alien.

You could argue that, in one way or another, almost all of these films - either by marginalising Scots or rendering them invisible - are giving us the same message. In which case there is no reason for aliens to land in George Square. There never has been. We've been here all the time.

The BFI season Days Of Fear And Wonder runs in cinemas from October to December; for full details of the programme, see www.bfi.org.uk/sci-fi-days-fear-wonder

Death Watch is on at the GFT in Glasgow on Monday, October 6 and Wednesday October 8