The most glaring omission has to be the absence of the face that appears on the cover of Whitley Strieber’s bestselling book Communion. Since it is blatantly the template of most images of the Grays since 1987—and easily the most significant image in the history of alien images—this omission is astonishing. The omission of representations of Grays from the works of Budd Hopkins, the most visible of alien abduction authors, is also troubling if one seeks to understand the present standardization of the form of the Grays.
The aliens rendered by Steven Kilburn in Missing Time (Hopkins, 1981) are, for example, the first known examples of large-headed degenerate humanoids to display completely black eyes. The thin arms, disproportionately short legs, and slight paunch to the abdomen are distinctive and demonstrate an unambiguous relationship to the main alien in Steven Spielberg’s 1977 blockbuster Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Hopkins’ next book Intruders (1987) introduced the thin, high necks into Gray iconography. This trait is clearly related to the Art Deco style of the main alien in Spielberg’s film. Prior to that film none of the Grays drawn by alien abductees had such necks. Reinforcing the assumption is the presence of all-black eyes and a number of facial features in both the film alien and drawings in the Intruders book.
Whether or not Hopkins recognized the similarities, he failed to understand the influence of the film for a simple reason. He thought the aliens in the film were designed to look like aliens that had already been reported in the UFO literature. He knew that J. Allen Hynek served as a consultant, and he thought that guaranteed a basis in prior cases. He stated this in a radio interview published in the Spring 1988 Skeptical Inquirer: “Allen Hynek had many drawings that he gave to Steven Spielberg for use when he made Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which of course was one of the biggest box office successes of all time. There was a serious attempt to follow the data that Allen Hynek and other people had gathered. So I think you can say Steven Spielberg popularized the essential physical type that the UFO reports had engendered before that time.”
This misimpression is easy to understand since Newsweek (November 21, 1977) reported that the chief alien was “designed by Carlo Rimbaldi out of a consensus of reports.” An essay by Hynek for the noveli-zation of the film also creates such an impression with the line, “In particular, the appearance of the ‘extraterrestrials’ were based on the most frequently reported features of such beings.”
Neither Newsweek nor Hynek offer direct quotes by the builders of the film alien. A comprehensive article on the effects work for the film in a special double issue of Cinefantastique in 1978 has the builders denying this. Carlo Rimbaldi specifically states, “When we met, he told me he wanted something about 4 feet tall with a very large head and a slender body, but he gave me no actual designs.” Rimbaldi then goes on to explain his reasoning for why the alien appears as it does:
I felt that, though humanoid in form, the extraterrestrials would be at least ten to twenty thousand years more advanced than humans, so I designed the head proportionately larger. But with their increased reliance on pure intellect, they would have a decreased need for such senses as hearing and smelling, and so the ears and nose and other facial features would become less prominent. And because of their extreme technological orientation, I felt they would no longer smile as broadly as we do on earth; but since they would still retain certain emotions, I gave them a slight smile. Also, as the brain expanded, other parts of the body would take an opposite course. The need for muscular movements would diminish, and so their limbs would become thinner and longer. (Shay, 1978)
This is recognizably the same argument that H.G. Wells introduced many decades earlier about the future evolution of the human form. It was repeatedly used in the early science fiction pulps and even found its way into science journalism. Anyone who thinks Rimbaldi is just hyping himself in these quotes should dig up the Cinefantastique article and observe the paper trail of discarded concepts and drawings made by the alien builders in the course of their work. Add to this the readily confirmed observation that none of the drawings of Grays in the abduction accounts before that time had the combined traits of all-black large eyes and thin, high necks, and the role of the film in influencing subsequent UFO iconography is solidly established.
Nickell’s Time Line presents a grasshopper alien over the year 1973 and labels it insectoid, implying either its origin or dominance at that time. Mike Shea said nothing about it until 1988, and he is fuzzy about whether it was 1973 or 1974. Ted Owens claimed contact with a pair of grasshopper aliens named Twitter and Tweeter as early as 1965 and was a bit more vocal about it at the time. Insectoids do not present a major presence until the 1990s after the introduction of ancient Lovecraftian godlike mantis beings by Whitley Strieber and John Lear. (Kottmeyer, 1999)
The significance of the Owens case and the intersection of UFO culture with Big Bug culture are discussed elsewhere. (Kottmeyer, 1996, 1997) The use of the Shea case on the Time Line introduces a systemic problem of method. Should the historian put a given drawing on the year a claimant alleges or believes he made contact, or on the year we can document the image was first presented?
If the interest is in the evolution of iconography, historians should favor the latter. The backdating could be fictitious for various reasons and the image subject to cultural influences between the claimed date of the experience and the putting of pen to paper. Nickell places Betty Andreasson’s drawing in 1967, but no drawing was made before 1977. This is important because in 1975 the television movie The UFO Incident aired, presenting the true-life story of the Hill abduction. The film followed the hypnotic regression narratives of Betty and Barney Hill more faithfully than we normally expect Hollywood productions to be, but the aliens are not exact replicas of what either of the Hills described and drew.
Note the complaints by Betty Hill in a 1978 interview:
My only serious criticism concerns the movie’s depiction of the aliens’ physical appearance. They did not look like that. The real ones looked more human than their humanoid counterparts. Also the movie shows them as being very short, but they weren’t. I’d say the leader was my size and I’m 5 feet tall. And they weren’t of such slender build.” (Clark, 1978)
Similarly a comparison of the TV movie’s depiction and the drawings by David Baker (done in collaboration with Barney Hill and published in the April 1972 issue of NICAP’s UFO Investigator) uncovers a number of important differences. There is a sharp angle to the inner corners of the eye sockets in the telefilm where the original shows a rounded curve. The pupils of the eyes are larger in the film. A crease above the eye is more pronounced in the film than in the drawing. The film alien has a slit mouth and a line in the film says it has no mouth at all. Baker is told a membrane hides the mouth. The eyes in the film also display a probably unintended effect that makes one eye appear blank when seen from a glancing camera angle.
Betty Andreasson proved Raymond Fowler’s statement that “her powers of visual recall seemed unusually acute” by incorporating all the film’s modifications into her drawings of Quazgaa and his companions. (Fowler, 1979.) The 1967 date claim makes no sense in the appearance of these details.
The drawing labeled “little green men” and set on 1947 was first published in 1964 (by Johannis Luigi). By Johannis’s own account, the drawing probably was not faithful to drawings allegedly made in 1947 and subsequently lost by others. (Creighton, 1969) Of greater concern is the fact that the expression “little green men” does not seem to have been used in flying saucer journalism in 1947. (Bloecher, 1967) There is also no evidence it appeared in any newspaper clippings from the 1952 saucer wave, or for that matter in any saucer journalism between 1947 and August 1955. It seems to first appear in conjunction with the Kelly-Hopkinsville shoot’em up (in August of 1955). The press described the case as involving “an army of little green men” though in fact the witnesses denied the presence of any green color.
A wire service story on A
ugust 25, 1955, by Air Force public relations man Captain Robert White reacting to the story also gave wide distribution to the phrase “little green men” and it appears in frequent use thereafter. There is no evidence whatever that little green men were a common form of saucer pilot and what little evidence we have suggests the phrase got transplanted from science fiction pulps. Fredric Brown, for example, speaks of the expression as a cliché in a September 1954 story Martians Go Home! (Kottmeyer, 1999)
The 1978 Zanfretta alien is labeled reptilian, but one should beware that it is neither the first or significantly influential. Curiously, the Time Line’s drawing lacks the third eye that appeared in the original drawing. This caused some amusement among badfilm buffs for it made Zanfretta’s alien look rather like a cross between the reptilian Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) and the three-eyed Mutant from The Day the World Ended (1956).
There is one Reptoid type being as early as 1967, but the more significant omission here is any representation of the current version of reptoids seen in places like the M.I.T. conference (Pritchard, 1994), Linda Howe’s volumes, or Discover and Omni magazines around 1982, among other places. (Craft, 1996; Lewels, 1997)
Lastly, we come to the issue of the use of the Time Line to demonstrate the anachronistic character of the Alien Autopsy Gray. We are told the type of alien described a “a little, big-headed humanoid with wraparound eyes” first appeared in 1961 with the Hill abduction. The initial descriptions of the entities in Betty Hill’s nightmares after the 1961 sighting are described as normal sized men with dark hair. Barney’s descriptions initially suggest military pilots. The wraparound eyes get added in 1964, and his version only turns fully humanoid after hearing tapes of the hypnotic regressions. (Kottmeyer, 1994, 1998) By the time of the Baker drawing, the hair and nose are gone. It is the 1975 telefilm that makes them little. This is a complex situation and hard to represent on a Time Line, one would have to agree. Yet it can’t be skirted given the importance of the Hill case. It has to be added that the drawing offered on the Time Line adds to the general confusion by making the shape of the head too globular and adding a thin neck. Such a neck is thoroughly anachronistic for a pre-Spielberg abductor Gray.
The more serious error is the implication that there were no little, big-headed humanoids before the Hill case. As early as July 9, 1947, there appeared an item in the Houston (Texas) Post of a seaman who encountered a two-foot tall saucer pilot with a round head the size of a basketball. (Davis & Bloecher, 1978)
In 1950, the Wiebadener Tagblatt (Germany) published a photo of a short alien with a large oval head and described as having large, glaring eyes. Berlitz and Moore published it The Roswell Incident (1980) with a cagey caption refusing to say “whether it may or may not pertain to certain significant aspects of the Roswell Incident.” Klaus Webner subsequently researched it and proved conclusively it was an April Fool’s joke perpetrated by reporter Wilhelm Sprunkel. He had confessed it in print two days afterwards and with Webner upon contact. (Webner, 1991)
Additionally there are cases involving humanoids with big heads and short frames appearing during the 1954 French wave. These are contemporary enough to the alleged autopsy film to rebut the charge of anachronism. Big-headed men with degenerated bodies was a commonplace in the science fiction pulps in the early part of the century and pretty surely trace their ancestry to H.G. Wells’s writings about the future form of man. Wells himself never intended this form of future-man to be taken seriously as a scientific extrapolation. It started as a jest upon Herbert Spencer’s writings and the doctrine of orthogenesis that had a degree of acceptance among paleontologists. (Kottmeyer, 1998)
Where the alien autopsy truly runs into trouble is when it bumps into a more compelling anachronism. During the film, the “doctor” removes a black membrane from the eyes. As discussed above, all-black eyes are unambiguously a post-Spielberg development without precedent among earlier Grays in the UFO literature. The notion of aliens having a removable covering membrane seems unknown prior to the 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth with David Bowie.
The David Bowie character inserts membranes over his eyes so he can walk among humanity undetected as the alien that he is. In an interesting bit of malpractice, doctors who later examine him manage to fuse the membrane onto his eyes. I suppose one can consider it appropriate to have promoters of the Roswell crash, intended or unintended, borrowing material from a film with such a title.
My final advice is to erase the numbers and use Huyghe’s drawings to prove what he intended to prove, namely, the diversity of the imagination in UFO culture.
—MARTIN S. KOTTMEYER
References
Berlitz, Charles, and William Moore. The Roswell Incident (Grosset & Dunlap, 1980).
Bloecher, Ted. Report on the Wave of 1947 (privately published, 1967).
Clark, Jerry. “Betty Hill—The Closest Encounter,” Saga UFO Report (January 1978).
Craft, Michael. Alien Impact (St. Martin’s Press, 1996).
Creighton, Gordon. “The Villa Santina Case” in The Humanoids edited by Charles Bowen (Henry Regnery, 1969).
Fowler, Raymond. The Andreasson Affair (Prentice-Hall, 1979).
Gross, Loren. UFOS: A History—1952 in 6 volumes (privately published, 1987-1999).
Howe, Linda. Glimpses of Other Realities: volume 1: Facts and Eyewitnesses (publisher? and date?).
Kottmeyer, Martin S. “The Eyes That Spoke,” REALL News (July 1994).
________. “Space Bug a Boo Boo,” Talking Pictures (Summer 1996).
________.“Bugs Baroque,” UFO Magazine (July/August 1997).
________. “Varicose Brains,” Magonia (February 1998); also on the Magonia Web site.
________. “Heading into the Future,” Magonia (September 1999).
________. “The Fool on the Hill Case,” Doubting Thomas (October-November 1998).
________. “Graying Mantis” REALL News (May 1999).
________. “Little Green Men” (unpublished manuscript).
Kroll, J. “The UFOs are Coming!” Newsweek (November 21, 1997).
Lewels, J. The God Hypothesis (Wild Flower Press, 1997).
Pritchard, Andrea, ed. Alien Discussions—Proceedings of the Abduction Study Conference (North Cambridge Press, 1994).
Shay, Don “Close Encounter Extraterrestrials” Cinefantastique (1978).
Webner, Klaus. “The Strange Case of Mister X” The Probe Report (September 1981).
Alien Identities (Govardhan Hill, 1993). Richard Thompson relates how ancient Vedic texts from India may not be folklore and myth, but could accurately preserve accounts of human interaction with extraterrestrial visitors. These stories portray the peoples of India from 3000 B.C. onward being in contact with advanced beings from a host of other worlds who traveled here in aerial vehicles that resemble modern accounts of UFO craft.
—RANDALL FITZGERALD
Alien Impact (St. Martin’s Press, 1996). To help himself understand his own “strange, UFO-type encounters,” Michael Craft explores the role of consciousness in the UFO experience. He concludes that UFO contactees, shamans, channelers, and white and black magic practitioners may all be seeing the same thing, a deliberately deceptive phenomena stage-managed by cosmic tricksters who are conditioning our species to engage in new behaviors.
—RANDALL FITZGERALD
alien motives A fundamental question in the great UFO-ET debate is: “If aliens are indeed visiting us, why are they here?
Carl Sagan once wondered disdainfully “Why would all the anthropologists in the neighborhood suddenly come to Earth?” J. Allen Hynek once asked why would aliens visit Earth to scare people by swooping near their cars? Clearly these are inappropriate questions since there is no basis for suggesting a significant number of visitors are anthropologists. Furthermore, people who travel a great deal on Earth rarely bump into anthropologists. Because people in autos may be frightened by close approaches of flying saucers certainly doesn’t mean that the purpose of t
he flights are to frighten the people. Surely drivers of the crude automobiles of a century ago weren’t driving for the purpose of frightening horses, even though horses were sometimes frightened by the vehicles.
Before considering a host of possible reasons for visiting Earth, it is useful to examine travel by Earthlings. The reasons for travel and the locations to which one travels depend on a number of factors such as how long will the trip take? What will it cost and who will pay the bill? How much time and money can be spent? How important is the trip?
Between 1890 and 1910 millions of poor immigrants came from Europe to North America in steerage class in ships seeking an opportunity to improve their lives and their families or to escape tyranny. Many had to save for years to obtain money for their passage. Before WW II, sleek luxury liners carried many people, most of them quite rich, between Europe and North America in great comfort. During WW II the Queen Elizabeth served as a troop carrier hauling 15,000 soldiers per trip at government expense. Their objective was to fight in a war against tyranny.
In May, 1927, Charles Lindberg received great acclaim for the first solo flight across the Atlantic. Last year ten million people flew across the ocean with very few of them being pilots. Some have gone to London or Paris or New York on the Concorde at great expense to spend a weekend. Impossible with the Queen Elizabeth. It is interesting that many military bombers depend entirely on aerial refueling to reach distant targets. Commercial airliners land for refueling.
The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters Page 8
