Anybody know where the term “little green men” came from?
I recently heard that it originated in some newspaper stories published in Evansville, IN, in Aug./Sep. 1955. This doesn’t seem very plausible to me, although the timing on that is pretty good, since I have a slang dictionary that cites the OED as saying that the phrase (meaning space aliens) does originate from around 1955 (alhtough I can’t find it in the OED!).
But in the Evansville articles, the term “little green men” is used by an Air Force “flying saucer specialist” who is clearly referring to phenomenon and reports he’s already familiar with. “Of course,” he says, “we’ve had all sorts of descriptions, but the majority vote is for small, green, luminous, smelly types. [I like this guy! – m.] I don’t doubt that the folks in Kentucky … are sincere. But I still don’t believe, after four years of investigation, that any space men have landed here. Still, people keep insisting they’ve seen little green men.”
So it sounds to me like the Air Force itself came up with the phrase, after getting a number of diverse accounts. But it would be interesting to find some other, earlier published accounts. Anybody know of any? Or the use of the phrase in sci-fi before 1955?