by Jeremy D. Wells
If you ask most folks to draw an alien, you know what you are going to get. Short guys. Large heads. Big eyes, that are often solid black. Reduced or non-existent nose, lips and ears. Grey skin. This is the common conception of an alien around most of the world. Or at least, it has been for the last 40 years. But that wasn't always the case. In the 1940s and 1950s, and on up through the 60s, the stereotypical alien, at least in the United States, was the "little green man from Mars," typified by his short stature, green skin, and antennae. Think the Great Gazoo from the Flintstones cartoon.
But while the little green man dominated cartoon and television depictions of aliens, what those who encountered UFOnauts saw was much different. Beings with some of the features that would be associated with the "grey alien" – as we will call them – stretch back to the 1960s. But the presumed occupants of UFO craft remained a rather diverse lot up through the 1970s and 80s. A few things happened then that began to crystalize the image of the grey alien in the public mind. One of the first was the Travis Walton incident.
In November 5, 1975 Travis Walton was working with a crew of other young men thinning timber near Turkey Springs, Arizona on a contract from the U.S. Forest Service. As they left the woods that evening the group saw what they described as a UFO. As they watched Walton inexplicably leapt from the moving vehicle and moved toward the craft. According to his cohorts the craft "zapped" Walton with a beam of light as he approached it. Panicking, the driver of the vehicle took off, leaving Walton behind. After calming down they returned to collect Walton, but he was nowhere to be found. They then reported the incident to the under-sherrif in Heber, Arizona, two hours after Walton was last seen. Walton didn't turn up for six days, when he called his sister from a pay telephone in Heber just after midnight on November 11. His sister and brother described him as confused and trembling on the floor of the phone booth when they fond him. His story was widely carried in the National Enquirer tabloid, and at least some of the beings he described encountering during his missing six days fit loosely into the mold of the alien grey.
Walton's case divided opinion in the UFO community, with the APRO (Aerial Phenomena Research Organization) supporting the Walton story while NICAP (the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomenon) considered it a probable hoax. Regardless of how you feel about the Walton story, it was widely circulated and is considered one of the "classic" stories in the field of UFOlogy, and helped establish this new idea of what an alien looked like in the public imagination.
The next big influence on the idea of the alien came with the debut of the 1977 Steven Spielberg blockbuster, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. After building an entire film's worth of suspense, the aliens needed to be something spectacular when they finally appeared, and Spielberg didn't disappoint. Spielberg's aliens weren't short. They were long and spindly, a feature that would show up a little more often in witness reports after the film's premiere. They also had another feature that would transition from the silver screen and into witness reports – solid black eyes. The reports of eyes also became much larger and slanted, to match the expectation set by Spielberg. Prior to the film witnesses to UFO activity were more likely to report eyes that were more human in the arrangement of the iris, pupil and sclera. Though some of the Walton aliens, for example, had the short stature and oversized head of the grey, the eyes were described and depicted more like human eyes.
The 1987 book Communion, by horror fiction novelist Whitley Strieber, helped cement the image of the modern grey alien with its cover image depicting a pale, black-eyed, thin-lipped, large-headed alien. By the time the X-Files rolled around in 1993, the type was set. This is what aliens looked like.
Or was it? While the Close Encounter/Communion/X-Files type entities were now the default alien image in most of North America, Europe and Asia, folks in South America continued to report a wide variety of types and shapes, echoing the robots, hairy dwarves and other assorted entities that characterized the early years of the UFO phenomena. Meanwhile in the former U.S.S.R and Soviet Bloc nations, where the people were more insulated from the influence of western pop culture, the things seen emerging from UFOs were almost the complete opposite, with pin-headed giants replacing the large headed dwarves of the NATO nations and their trading partners. Dr. Jacques Vallee collects several of these stories in his excellent book, UFO Chronicles of the Soviet Union, a Cosmic Samidzat. In his other books Vallee lays out some compelling conjecture on why this just might be, detailing how the phenomenon appears to want to be seen by those who witness it and how it conforms to our expectations based on the technology and popular opinion of the era. It's why the "eccentric inventors" of the airship flap era was replaced by "advanced beings from another planet" in the space age. (It may also be why sex with aliens that looked human was replaced by the abduction for genetic research of the greys once we had our first test tube babies and regular instances of artificial insemination. But that's a subject for another article.)
But why did the look of the UFOnauts change, and become more alien? Why did the human looking and acting saucer pilots of the contactees become the cold, distant, clinical greys of the abduction era? Do these changes in the phenomenon support a psychological, or psyho-social, explanation of the phenomena? Or do they support a flesh-and-blood biological origin for the UFOnauts? And how do we explain things like Roswell, which happened in the 1940s, was forgotten until the 1980s, and when it regained popularity came to include reports of aliens that looked more like the post-80s conception of an alien than the popular conception of the incident's own era?