Star Wars - lightsaber sound

As War of the Worlds is a sci-fi film, I decided to go back to the one of the greatest sci-fi series of all, Star Wars. The sound for the films was done by Ben Burtt who in the video below talks about how he heard the sound that fit the lightsaber after seeing a painting of it. He recalls recording the sound of a projector motor that made a 'wonderful humming sound' that inspired him for the lightsaber, but says that it was missing a scintillating sound. He happened to record this sound by accident from the signal from a television set inferring with his microphone. He put together with the hum of the projector and that made the lightsaber noise. Although he had the noise, he had to get the sense of movement, so he played the sound he had created over a big speaker and then used a microphone to move towards the speaker and away from it which created a pitch shift and 'an authentic verisimilar of a moving sound.'

This process of creating a layer of sounds and then creating a sense of movement is exactly what I need to do create my alien probe sounds as I am having difficulty creating a effect that sounds like it is moving. I think I will use a pitch shifter, volume and panning to create the sense of space that the alien needs to appear realistic in the sound clip.