# Do grey aliens exist?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-grey-aliens-exist/691683
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion
**Created:** [June 26, 2014, 10:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-grey-aliens-exist/691683 "2014-06-26T10:47:11Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 2
### Author:  [@GoodOmens](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GoodOmens)
#### Post date: [June 26, 2014, 2:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-grey-aliens-exist/691683/21 "2014-06-26T14:57:57Z")
protoboard, are you really asking “do they exist” or “have they visited Earth”? Those are two functionally different questions. Your post leads me to assume you’re really asking the second question.
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### Author:  [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)
#### Post date: [June 26, 2014, 3:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-grey-aliens-exist/691683/22 "2014-06-26T15:00:11Z")
> [@Shakes](#):
>
> 2.) The grey alien thing is just an anomally as is the light at the end of the tunnel people see in near death experiences. It has something to do with a built in coping mechanism for when you die.
I don’t doubt the substance of what you’re asserting here, except for the graped part. Why would an organism need such a thing as a coping mechanism for when it dies? How would such a thing evolve?
(I mean, I think it’s plausible that it’s an artefact of the system breaking down in a more or less repeatable way)
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### Author:  [@Revtim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Revtim)
#### Post date: [June 26, 2014, 3:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-grey-aliens-exist/691683/23 "2014-06-26T15:47:36Z")
I thought I read somewhere that the vast majority of grey alien reports happened after ‘Close Encounters Of The Third Kind’ was released. Either that put the idea in people’s heads, or they all came here to see how they were portrayed.
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### Author:  [@Sir\_T-Cups](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sir_T-Cups)
#### Post date: [June 26, 2014, 3:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-grey-aliens-exist/691683/24 "2014-06-26T15:54:27Z")
> [@Knowed\_Out](#):
>
> Instead of asking “Do aliens exist,” try asking “Why would they want to come here?”
>
> When dealing with unknowns and unverifiables, you lack credible data. You only have isolated accounts. Therefore, to determine some kind of likelihood or possibility, use comparative analysis.
>
> So why would gray aliens, or aliens of any color, want to come to Earth?
>
> Earth history observes great explorers such as Columbus, Magellan, Hudson, and so on. What motivated them to sail to parts unknown? It wasn’t just curiosity. They had to enlist help from sailors who had no home lives. They had to find backing from rich entrepreneurs. They had to make sure they could renew resources such as food and water. They had to arm themselves for potentially dangerous situations.
>
> Gray aliens are in it for the long haul, if they were able to travel hundreds of light-years without dying of old age. If they’re exploring Earth for usable resources and harvest their finds, they’re going to be noticed, and not just by Billy Bob out in the swamp. If they have ships in orbit, they’re going to be noticed. Yes, maybe they have cloaking devices like from Star Trek, but we’ve got satellite dishes scanning for radio waves and anything funny looking on all light spectrums. We can find blips light-years away, so we can certainly detect anomalies orbiting around our planet.
>
> Point is, alien explorers need some place to park and recharge. If they’re sending scout teams to Earth, we’d see some kind of evidence of travel activity. Maybe they parked too far away for us to notice. They still have to expend resources to slink here and implant those anal probes. Maybe cow vaginas are their dilithium crystals.
In the same vein as this, I would assume that the logical progression of space exploration would be translatable to all manner of species. Meaning, before you can go into space yourself, you have to send other things into space to make sure you CAN go into space, then progress from there. If aliens did exist, why would they come here themselves to explore and therefore we have only seen aliens themselves. Why haven’t we seen any alien satellites? Recon drones? Observational machinery? I hold true to believe that our first encounter with aliens won’t be “little green men attacking the White House” but rather and announcement from NASA saying “something is coming our way, something handmade, and we didn’t make it”
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### Author:  [@dracoi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dracoi)
#### Post date: [June 26, 2014, 4:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-grey-aliens-exist/691683/25 "2014-06-26T16:10:16Z")
> [@protoboard](#):
>
> I’m a skeptical person but I really do think they exist. It’s interesting how so many people have reported seeing them. I’ve never seen one but I’ve “felt” their presence and had highly disturbing dreams involving them.
I think the really important thing to understand here is that eyewitness testimony is not as reliable as people think it is. I don’ really have time right now to go digging up cites, but you can see how unreliable it is in a number of ways. For example, my wife did some police training as a volunteer and one of their tests for observation is not just to ask you what you saw, but to realize what you didn’t see. Most people, if they see A and they see C, then their brain fills in B, which they assume they must have also seen. They form “real” memories of B - by real I mean they don’t think they’re either lying, guessing or making stuff up - and are later surprised to learn that they never saw that at all.
If the eyewitness testimony is from a dream… well now we have an unreliable witness of a likely fictional event. I would say that finding anything true in a dream is an unlikely exception to the rule.
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### Author:  [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)
#### Post date: [June 26, 2014, 4:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-grey-aliens-exist/691683/26 "2014-06-26T16:11:30Z")
> [@Ethilrist](#):
>
> We don’t know. It’s a big universe and we haven’t searched all the habitable planets yet.
It’s so fucking big that\* somewhere\* there almost certainly are grey aliens. None are here on Earth, nor have they been recently.
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### Author:  [@Mr\_Quatro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr_Quatro)
#### Post date: [June 26, 2014, 4:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-grey-aliens-exist/691683/27 "2014-06-26T16:18:05Z")
I’ve never heard of his term before, “grey alien”, but if they do exist I suppose the only reason they would be grey is due to having to travel at the speed of light for however many years it is from their home universe.
What about the men in black they are more easier to find and try to understand than “grey aliens”?
I’ll go do a SD forum search 🙂
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### Author:  [@DrFidelius](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrFidelius)
#### Post date: [June 26, 2014, 5:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-grey-aliens-exist/691683/28 "2014-06-26T17:29:43Z")
> [@Mr\_Quatro](#):
>
> I’ve never heard of his term before, “grey alien”, but if they do exist I suppose the only reason they would be grey is due to having to travel at the speed of light for however many years it is from their home universe.
>
> What about the men in black they are more easier to find and try to understand than “grey aliens”?
>
> I’ll go do a SD forum search 🙂
Color is dependent upon light. If they travelled faster than light, their natural colors might still be catching up to them, making them look grey right now.
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### Author:  [@BlueOhio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BlueOhio)
#### Post date: [June 26, 2014, 5:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-grey-aliens-exist/691683/29 "2014-06-26T17:32:00Z")
My not-too-serious take on ‘greys’ is that they are our earliest recollections as we emerged from the womb. Doctors and nurses in grey/green hospital garb, surgical masks that cover their features except for their eyes (accentuating their size too), and then lots of handling and probing and bright lights.
If that turns out to be the case I’m posting this to take credit.
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### Author:  [@running\_coach](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/running_coach)
#### Post date: [June 26, 2014, 5:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-grey-aliens-exist/691683/30 "2014-06-26T17:35:52Z")
> [@DrDeth](#):
>
> It’s so fucking big that\* somewhere\* there almost certainly are grey aliens. None are here on Earth, nor have they been recently.
Or they’re just rich kids from other planets messing with us. 😉
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### Author:  [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)
#### Post date: [June 26, 2014, 5:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-grey-aliens-exist/691683/31 "2014-06-26T17:50:09Z")
> [@Mr\_Quatro](#):
>
> I’ve never heard of his term before, “grey alien”
They’re enough of a “thing” that there’s a [Wikipedia article](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_alien), albeit one that “has multiple issues.”
I suppose one could say they exist _as a psychological phenomenon_.
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### Author:  [@buddha\_david](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/buddha_david)
#### Post date: [June 26, 2014, 5:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-grey-aliens-exist/691683/32 "2014-06-26T17:57:26Z")
> [@chiroptera](#):
>
> And [nearly 8 in 10 Americans believe in angels](http://www.cbsnews.com/news/poll-nearly-8-in-10-americans-believe-in-angels/)
Yet only 2 out of 10 angels believe in Americans.
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### Author:  [@chiroptera](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/chiroptera)
#### Post date: [June 26, 2014, 6:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-grey-aliens-exist/691683/33 "2014-06-26T18:05:24Z")
> [@buddha\_david](#):
>
> Yet only 2 out of 10 angels believe in Americans.
Cite?
😃
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### Author:  [@Twoflower](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Twoflower)
#### Post date: [June 26, 2014, 6:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-grey-aliens-exist/691683/34 "2014-06-26T18:19:41Z")
Elephants are pretty alien if you think about them for a bit. And they’re definitely gray.
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### Author:  [@Mr\_Quatro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr_Quatro)
#### Post date: [June 26, 2014, 6:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-grey-aliens-exist/691683/35 "2014-06-26T18:28:38Z")
> [@DrFidelius](#):
>
> Color is dependent upon light. If they travelled faster than light, their natural colors might still be catching up to them, making them look grey right now.
Good point, but what if the alien is like a chameleon:
> [@](#):
>
> Chameleons are a distinctive and highly specialized clade of lizards. The approximately 160 species of chameleon come in a range of colors, and many species have the ability to change colors.
In that case the alien could be imitating a cloudy day that he arrived on earth, uh uh how about that theory?
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### Author:  [@cochrane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cochrane)
#### Post date: [June 26, 2014, 6:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-grey-aliens-exist/691683/36 "2014-06-26T18:58:21Z")
> [@protoboard](#):
>
> I’m a skeptical person but I really do think they exist. It’s interesting how so many people have reported seeing them. I’ve never seen one but I’ve “felt” their presence and had highly disturbing dreams involving them.
Did Scott Baio give you pinkeye? 😃
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### Author:  [@Grrr](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Grrr)
#### Post date: [June 26, 2014, 7:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-grey-aliens-exist/691683/37 "2014-06-26T19:09:53Z")
> [@Mangetout](#):
>
> I don’t doubt the substance of what you’re asserting here, except for the graped part. Why would an organism need such a thing as a coping mechanism for when it dies? How would such a thing evolve?
>
> (I mean, I think it’s plausible that it’s an artefact of the system breaking down in a more or less repeatable way)
Eh, I’m sure I’m getting the details wrong somewhere. I was just going off a documentary I saw several years ago.
I think **Ferret Herder** response sounds more closely to what I was trying to remember. I’m not sure what the NDE connection was though.
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### Author:  [@Kenm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kenm)
#### Post date: [June 26, 2014, 7:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-grey-aliens-exist/691683/38 "2014-06-26T19:18:39Z")
> [@DrFidelius](#):
>
> I prefer to believe in the “benevolent observers of an elder race” aliens we had during the Fifties. You remember them, they were about to welcome us into the Brotherhood of Advanced Beings because we finally made atom bombs. The robes were cool.
And they were grey because 99 per cent of TVs were black and white, and most theatre movies were, too.
Anyway, some police-force cars were [**Nashes**](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-VesMx46ixtw/UsSa1M9S4lI/AAAAAAAAJic/XtL_XuUo-PQ/s1600/1950+Nash+Ambassador+Police_01.jpg), so people believed anything.
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### Author:  [@Yllaria](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Yllaria)
#### Post date: [June 26, 2014, 8:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-grey-aliens-exist/691683/39 "2014-06-26T20:09:44Z")
> [@Lord\_Feldon](#):
>
> Once I had a disturbing dream about flying pies that could bite you.
Two dimensional electric beavers. They could slide along any flat surface. They could slide through the gap of a closed window.
I’m pretty sure they don’t exist.
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### Author:  [@Desert\_Nomad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Desert_Nomad)
#### Post date: [June 26, 2014, 9:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-grey-aliens-exist/691683/40 "2014-06-26T21:09:41Z")
All the ones I’ve met are green.
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