Well, what did educated guesses look like any way?
What is “Gray”? And are you talking about fictionalized representations of what extraterrestrials might look like? This may be better suited for the Cafe.
I saw a documentary on “UFOs” once that had some footage from the 1950s. One guy described the “aliens” as looking rather Nordic and wearing costumes that sounded like what you’d see in a 1950s science fiction film.
That classic paragon of cheese, This Island Earth showed aliens as really tanned people of apparently Germanic extraction with enormous foreheads and white hair.
The “Gray” alien most notably associated with the Roswell incident was the first major incident of people seeing aliens. Before that was only a few isolated instances of UFOs (including a reference in the Bible that UFOlogists love to quote).
Other than that you’re talking straight fiction and I don’t know how accurate Superman is.
Well, there’s always the classic BEM.
Are you referring to the “grays” in King’s Dreamcatcher? If so, this belongs in Cafe Society.
I highly doubt he is refering to dreamcatcher.
Before people saw greys, they saw angels and demons. People hallucinate things that are in popular culture more often than other things.
They looked like every darn thing imaginable.
There was considerable excitement in the mid-1890s about a giant “airship” which was apparently first seen in California and then sighted across the nation as it appeared to move gradually eastward. Daniel Cohen wrote an excellent book on this called The Great Airship Mystery. Various newspaper articles at the time “proved” that the airship was the invention of a lone genius or a secretive society, or else an alien spacecraft. Cohen concludes it was nothing at all–a few sightings of the planet Venus when it was unusually bright and other natural phenomena combined with hoax stories, hysteria, etc.
There were scattered sightings throughout the first half of the 20th Century. In the early 1930s there were a number in Canada. W.D. Fard, founder of the Nation of Islam, announced that these were the “Mothre Ship”, a craft from Japan which was going to decimate the U.S. until an elect 144,000 people were left. Fard disappeared shortly thereafter.
During World War II Allied pilots spotted, and occaisionally photographed, mysterious lights they called “foo fighters”, a phrase borrowed from the comic strip Smokey Stover. After the war it was found that Axis flyers had seen them too. It is thought that these were mostly sightings of St. Elmo’s Fire, a natural electrical phenomenon. In the Pacific theater Allied air crew reported for a time that they were tracked in the pre-dawn hours by a Japanese plane with an extremely powerful searchlight. It was eventually decided this was, in fact, the planet Venus during one of its unusually bright appearances as the “morning star”. It has been similarly suggested that Jimmy Carter’s famous sighting of a UFO was actually of Venus as the “evening star”.
The modern era of UFO spotting is generally figured to have begun when Kenneth Arnold, a private pilot who was a former U.S. Marshall, reported seeing glowing objects over the Cascade Mountain range in Washington state in the summer of 1947. Interestingly, he did not say that the objects were saucer shaped; instead he said they were curved at the front and had a long tapered tail. What he did say was that they moved sort of like a saucer being skimmed across water. A wire service editor, apparently misreading this, attached a headline which used the phrase “flying saucers”; this struck some kind of nerve in the collective consciousness, and people started seeing saucer-shaped UFOs thereafter.
The Rosswell incident occurred a few weeks later, after their had already been a number of other sightings. The famous radio announcement that there had been the crash of a “flying saucer” should be viewed in historical context. At the time the myth that flying saucers were alien space craft was not firmly entrenched. In fact, a good deal of the early speculation was that the sightings might be of some kind of Soviet spy craft. At the time the term “flying saucer”, a brand-new addition to the language, merely meant an unidentified flying object, a UFO–the term “UFO” having not yet been coined.
The stories of alien bodies being found at Rosswell did not begin to circulate until the 1950s. Interestingly, various accounts over the years have varied as to whether the aliens had one more or one less finger than a human.
The image of the “Gray” came into vogue after the television movie The Interupted Journey, produced and starring James Earl Jones, which came out around 1975. The film, which Jones meant seriously, was based on a book of the same title concerning the experiences of Betty and Barney Hill, an interracial couple who, in the early 1960s, told somewhat contradictory accounts while under hypnosis of being taken aboard a flying saucer and being examined.
The most conspicuous feature of the “Grays”, their “wraparound” eyes, was not mentioned by the Hills until they had described their experiences numerous times over a period of months. It has since been noted that the original Outer Limits series premiered an episode about an encounter with space aliens with these goggle-type eyes the weekend before. In fact, their eyes were central to the plot of the story; they could communicate telepathically with humans while making eye contact, but not otherwise.
It has also been noted that a number of details in the Hills’ stories, such as how they were examined with needles, resembled a movie with Arthur Franz, directed by William Cameron Menzies (was it Invaders from Mars?) in which there are two types of aliens–a master alien who consists almost entirely of a head with huge, “oriental”-looking eyes, and drones who have dark goggle-type eyes.
Other aspects of their stories, particularly Betty’s, which were much more detailed, have a nonsensical, dreamlike quality. As a child Betty was an extremely avid reader–so avid that her mother used to restrict her reading so that she would engage in other activities. Betty told about how some of the small aliens gave her a book but a big alien came and took it away from her. She also said that the aliens have no concept of time, yet a short while after telling her this an alien used the expression “in a minute”. She also had a discussion with them about how she liked to eat squash and liked its color.
A great many suggestions have been raised over the years to explain the possible psychological significance of the Grays’ appearance. Laymen often assume that evolution will cause man’s brain to continue to develop as his body diminishes; this is consistent with the Gray’s oversized head and diminished body, something Steven Spielberg repeated in the design of his aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It has also been suggested that the Grays may suggest a subconscious pessimism about the future; Grays sometimes have distended bellies, and otherwise look like the images of starving children in famine-afflicted countries.
Many contactee stories from the 1950s described “Nordics”–tall, Caucasian-looking aliens with blonde hair. There were a series of books published in the early and mid 1950s by people claiming to be contactees. Interestingly, each one claimed to be the first to be contacted, as they said their experience happened just before whatever date was set out as the earliest contact by books already published. One author had a picture of an alien dog as proof of his experience. The dog looked remarkably like a lot of terrestrial hound dogs. IIRC, this same author said that when the aliens took him flying in space the sun was dark because they went at night.
Years ago–I guess it was in the late 1980s–I caught the end of an interview on the NPR show All Things Considered in which an author claimed that the U. S. government concocted a cover story which it leaks to UFO enthusiasts who inadvertently see tests of secret aircraft. This story concerns an interstellar war between gray aliens and white aliens, in which the U.S. government is secretly aiding whichever side is supposed to be the good guys by giving them places to land and repair their ships. T
The government story is said to sometimes include details of how certain pivotal people in history such as Moses and Jesus were actually good guy aliens. The net effect of disseminating the story, it is hoped, is to make people who really have seen something remarkable (though not an alien spaceship) into laughing stocks everyone will ignore. Unfortunately I have never been able to find anyone who can tell me who the author was, or what his book or article was called.
A number of stories from the 1950s and 60s concerned small, hairy aliens–they were covered in brown fur.
There were also stories–though rare ones–about little green men with huge ears.
Occaisionally contactees have expressed the opinion that the aliens they claim to have met were not alive at all, but were robots.
Finally, the Mothman stories of the mid-1960s in West Virginia described a huge winged shape with glowing red eyes and a head which appeared to be mounted directly onto, or barely extending above, its chest.
And of course, the LGMs.
Or, like our favourite Martian.
No, the greys are the ‘X-files’ and ‘Close Encounters’ type aliens. You know the little bald guys with the big eyes? Looks like this: (<>…<>).
Amongst modern UFO loonies Aliens are traditionally either Greys, Reptilians (which look like men in rubbe lizard suits) or Nordics (which are what Johnny L.A. and Lodrain described.)
There have never been many educated guesses on what intelligent ET life might lok like. The reason is of course that there is no basis for even basic speculation. Environmental factors and evolutionary history play a huge part on determining what an intelligent life form looks like. The actual intelligence plays very little role. Intelligent races will look like whatever they evolved form. They could be upright chimps, they could be elephants, or squid or centaurs or something entirely different to anything we can imagine. Greys are the product of imagination, not intelligent speculation.
If you’re talking about what popular fiction described them as looking like, then the first (serious) reference to space aliens I can think of would be ‘War of the Worlds’. The aliens there were described as octopus like.
On an interesting and slightly related topic, the image of the Greys was fist created by Wells over 100 years ago, but not as an alien species. In his short story ‘The Man of the Year One Million” Wells envisioned an evolutionary progression form modern humans to a species with no legs, huge hands, massive eyes, no hair and no teeth or jaw. Along the progression was a bald, big brained, large eyed, small jawed, noseless, hairless creature almost identical to the Greys. This was a genuine, if somewhat weak attempt at educated speculation, but it wasn’t speculation on what aliens looked like. Rather it was Wells’ favourite topic of what the future of humanity will be.
Later writers tended to describe aliens in any number of ways. Lovecraft’s work form 25-30 years after Wells had any number of aliens. Some were the classic humanoids with rubbers masks on their heads but most weren’t even vaguely human. A small book can, and has, been written on Lovecraft’s aliens.
The humanoid alien is actually a fairly late invention AFAIK. It seems to only become popular after movies become popular. And I think this tells us why. It’s easier to dress a man up in a rubber suit than it is to make a convincing intelligent octopus, or a starfish column with wings. Of course even after film and TV there have been non-humanoid aliens such as the Daleks.
But to describe what Aliens in fiction looked like prior to the greys, which AFAIK only appeared in the late 60s, would be a big task.
Why is that?
Thanks Slipster.
No, I was not referring to Dreamcatcher. I’m not talking about sci-fi movies or novels. Even though there is no proof that aliens are real, I’m wondering about what people believed they looked like before the Gray prototype.
Anyone have links to illustrations of the Nordic/furry or other types of aliens?
What is a BEM?
That dog comment reminds me of an episode of the original Star Trek. They encountered an alien creature that was nothing more than a dog that had curly hair with strips of metal foil in it :dubious:
Okay, I know Bug-Eyed Monsters. But what’s an LGM?
Oh, yeah… Keep watching the skies!
BEM = Bug-Eyed-Monster. Insectoid; or sometimes a sort of vertebrate-insectoid mix.
LGM = Little Green Men, of course
Maybe “The Blob” got it right.
There was a pretty interesting program on (Science TV I think it’s called) the preview channel last night that addressed what life on other planets, and Earth, might be like in the future. I didn’t pay a lot of attention, but I’m pretty sure there were no grays.
Pulp magazine covers show the various types of aliens imagined in the '30s and '40. Whether they had bug-eyes, tentacles, or robot brains, they all shared one characteristic: lust for women of earth.
With rare exceptions, Papermache Prince. There were maybe two movies with beautiful female space aliens with a lust for men of earth.