:smack: Funny, I’d never seen it abbreviated before.
I always imagined aliens having small triangular noses, stringly black hair, extremely white faces and freakishly little girly voices. Oh wait, that’s Michael Jackson.
Here’s an old thread about “little green men.” Note the problem with trying to find a first reference, and that every time it has been traced back it was obviously already a well-known phrase.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=23238
BTW, it’s been three years. . . Wonder if David B’s friend ever dug up anything else???
Didn’t the Aztec people think the Spaniards were from another world?
About the little green men:
Before people saw space aliens they saw elves and fairies. Back when people actively believed in them, “elf” and “fairy” meant more-or-less the same thing.
From time to time people with certain epileptic conditions, sufferers from migraines, and other people with similar afflictions see small figures which aren’t there. Some people are prone to seeing a group of small figures moving in single file–and in the Middle Ages in Ireland people used to see “trooping dwarfs”, little people who marched in line.
When a schizophrenic imagines things, he or she develops an ideosyncratic belief system to account for them. When a good many mentally sound people imagine the same or similar things, a common folklore is likely to develop to account for them.
Elves were sometimes said to be little green men–either because they wore green to blend in with the countryside, or, in come instances, because they actually had green skin. Historians of UFO phenomena have sometimes dusted off old legends of people having encountered lost children of the elves and passed these off as early encounters with space aliens, conveniently dropping the part where, in the original accounts, the children were identified as belonging to the “little people” .
Blake raises an interesting point. Space aliens in contactee stories tend to be anthropomorphic in appearance with a striking regularity.
Carl Sagan wrote about this at some length. While science fiction writers are commended for their imaginations, he said, in fact they have tended to be rather pedestrian in their ways of imagining extraterrestrials. One reason we tend to imagine aliens as looking like Vulcans or Klingons is that in films and on TV aliens are typically played by actors in makeup, or in rubbery suits. Back in the heyday of pulp science ficiton, however, aliens tended to be rather anthropomorphic too; a BEM generally looked like an actor in a big, silly costume.
The problem is that all of our experience of life is limited to a sample of one–life on this planet. As Sagan argued, evolutionary biology teaches that life here evolved as the result of millions of chance events influenced by the complex circumstances of this planet’s environment. Even such broad, fundamental concepts as the kingdoms of life: plant, animal, fungus, etc., are based on observations limited to this planet.
Possibly the universe is fairly teeming with intelligent life, and possibly some or all of it resembles humans. Then again, there does not seem to be a compelling reason to assume that any other intelligent life form has two arms, two legs, and walks upright. Sagan argued that if the environmental conditions were right, intelligent life on another planet may have evolved wheels. Possibly intelligent inhabitants of another world would be as likely to resemble a squid, or a slug, or a centipede, or a cloud of glowing plasma.
Better known as The UFO Incident (1975), but James Earl Jones is not listed as the producer or executive producer. Finally acted, though, by both Jones and Estelle Parsons.
I always thought the “Grey” originated with Whitley Streiber in Communion.
I’ve read a couple of UFO books from the '60s. One of the big ones seemed to be Flying Saucers: Serious Business by Frank Edwards. He described two types of aliens; the tall “Nordics” described above and a smaller humanoid alien with a bald head and big eyes (which may or may not have corresponded with the Greys). But, though the term may have been around longer, I didn’t hear the now-standard “Grey” description until the Streiber book.
The Betty and Barney Hill episode was written up in Incident at Exeter by John Fuller.
One of the earliest UFO abuction stories was called “From Outer Space” by Howard Menger (1950s). If no one has a copy, I’ll try to dig mine out of a box (I moved a while back, and most of my books are still all boxed up) and see how he described them.
Before the Greys, the standard cliche was “little green men” (as noted by other posters).
You see numerous representations of aliens in general (and Martians in particular) as little green men in the mass media from the the late 40’s through the early 70’s.
Two examples off the top of my head are The Great Gazoo character on The Flintstones, and the “little green men” episode of The Beverly Hillbillies.
But of course. Mars needs women, you know
OTOH alien women, when there were any, were most often shapely amazon types. Funny how exobiology works 
Yes, and I believe that there was another American Indian group that spoke of a warrior god with white skin … I remember it reference vaguely in “The Technicolor Time Machine”, a cute little time travel book.
Well, it’s nice to know there is a physiological explaination for what I see … looks to me like I keep seeing little cats out of the corner of my eye. Sometimes the same one over and over, sometimes a different one.
I wonder if it’s related to living for the last 7 or so years catless (and not by choice).
[Marvin]
There was supposed to be a kaboom , a very big kaboom
I am VERy verY angry
[/Marvin]
Declan
I recommend the Alien Time Line especially if you can find a way to magnify the images on this page…
it shows the aliens before and after ‘Grey’ quite well…
UFO-type aliens have become less interesting now that everyone expects to see a little grey humanoid.
SF worldbuilding at
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html
As I noted above, Wells provided a classic description in about 1890, but the descripton was of advanced humans rather than people from other worlds.
Looking at eburacum45’s timeline there is a classic grey repoted in 1961 and probably 1947 and 1951.
As I noted above, Wells provided a classic description in about 1890, but the descripton was of advanced humans rather than people from other worlds.
Looking at eburacum45’s timeline there is a classic grey repoted in 1961 and probably 1947 and 1951.
You may want to check out Magonia, a magazine very critical of the Extraterrestial Hypothesis (ETH). The evolution of the Grey is a frequent theme in their articles. You can view archived articles by decade at the left of the linked page.
The more sophisticated fairies=ufonauts position is not that fairies were how previous generations interpreted ETs, but rather both phenomena have a common source which is neither really fairy nor ET – and this source may be actually physical or it may be a purely a psycho-social construct. The UFO experience is certainly influenced by pop culture, but it is also not certain in some cases whether it is the culture that has influenced the phenomena or vice versa.
OK, I found my copy of “From Outer Space,” published in 1959. Mr. Menger notes that the aliens look just like us, which is why they’re able to blend in.
He also mentions some of the places that the aliens took him in their flying saucers (he made numerous trips), including their base on the moon. Venus is a tropical paradise, and thats where a lot of the aliens hail from.
Although they look like us, they have lifespans of about 800 years, and communicate telepathically–although they can, of course, use normal speech. He also backs up his story with compelling photographic evidence. I’ll have to reread the entire book this summer and give some highlights. Mr. Menger would be 81 now, so he might still actually be alive.
Howard Menger is alive and living in Vero Beach, Florida. I suppose he doesn’t do as many interplanetary travel at his age as he used to.
Slipster if that ain’t a word doc you already had saved, I recommend you save it for future use.