From the unexplained to the mundane, come join us on a journey to the fringe.
Hello and welcome to Journey to the Fringe, where one times one has not yet been discussed
much to the dismay of Terrence Howard.
At the recording this episode, fairly topical.
Joke, so maybe one or two of you will get it.
The rest of you can look up who Terrence Howard is, what the hell that is.
We are your podcast host, Taylor and Chelsea, here today to give you a background on the
cultural phenomenon that is grey aliens, the history of it and just an overall synopsis
of why it is that we are talking about greys or for the most part when we say picture an
alien that we're all going to have the same idea in our mind.
Oh I'm excited about this.
Chelsea, surprisingly we're going to start well before the idea of greys in this episode
and I'm talking well before the start of that, but are you ready for it?
Give me a second.
I'm ready about the greys.
Okay, perfect.
I just want to start first and foremost so that I want to make sure we're all picturing
the same thing.
So greys are typically depicted, the main alien that people talk about, as soon as you say
close your eyes, like if an alien this is what you're going to see.
A greyskinned humanoid who's missing parts such as noses, ears or sex organs, just basically
anatomically incorrect plush doll like that.
And their bodies are usually depicted as being elongated having a small chest, lacking
muscular definition, invisible skeleton structure, and their legs are depicted as being shorter
and jointed differently than humans with limbs portionally different from a human.
Greys are also depicted as having unusually large heads and proportionate to their bodies
with no hair on their body, and no noticeable outer ears or noses, sometimes with small
openings or orifice for ears and nostrils.
So that is-
Large black eyes right?
Large black eyes, almond shape.
Large black eyes and I think they are spotted as being both short and tall?
Yes, and that might come up a little later, but for the most part we're going to talk
large head, no real features on the face other than the large eyes and maybe slits for noses
and mouths.
And can I put here or will it come up a lot of people would say that they're like androids?
That's not going to come up at all just so you know because I'm trying to keep it of
just where this idea comes from and not people's beliefs in what they are.
Okay, well then I just put it out there for your consumption whether or not you accept
it is.
Sure, why not.
Chelsea, where do you think I'm going to start this episode?
I'm going to go with like creation.
Okay, a little far.
I'm in fact going to start it-
Too far, I thought you're going to say not far enough.
Yeah, not far enough, no too far, at least as far as I'm concerned.
We're just going to start this episode in ancient Greece where we're going to talk about
the idea of aliens and themselves and the fact that we really-
That's where it comes from?
No, we didn't believe in aliens at that time.
So I'm just saying that this is like, and sorry, we are taking out of this, there are
theories that there are ancient peoples who believed in alien visitation, Hopi Indians
or Hopi indigenous peoples in Southwest US that could be an episode in itself.
They have supposedly in their rich history alien visitation as well as cave drawings
that may or may not depict great like beings.
We're not going to be talking about those.
We're going to be talking about kind of a European look at belief in extraterrestrial
life.
So Greeks believed and this is coming straight from Aristotle.
Didn't write anything down so he had to have his students write about his stuff.
We're sorry, I get them backwards, he might have written things down anyhow.
He believed the earth was the innermost sphere in a universe or world surrounded by various
other spheres containing the moon, sun, planet and stars.
Those heavenly spheres crystalline and transparent, rotated about the earthly core comprising
four elements, fire, air, water and earth.
I like that concept.
Yeah, and it makes for better TV that are normal lives anyways and people can harness
those.
Those elements layered themselves on the basis of their essence or nature as earth's natural
place was at the middle of the cosmos which was why solid matter fell to the ground seeking
the inaccessible center far and below.
On the basis of this principle, Aristotle decided that it was an impossibility for other
worlds and life to exist.
If some other world existed, its matter would seek both the center of its world and of our
world as well and such opposite imperatives pose a logical contradiction in his mind.
And he also applied further reasoning to point out that there is no space outside the known
world for any other world to occupy.
So Aristotle concludes, two worlds cannot both exist.
It is just our world and therefore there's nothing living outside it.
There was apparently some pushback or some debate on this and some Greeks disagreed with
Aristotle's interpretation.
Hey, but guess what?
I was like the four Greek people's names you know, Aristotle's one of them.
So guess what we believe for the most part going forward, Aristotle.
Yeah, there's only a handful of Greek people that I wouldn't know to name.
And they're probably all in a direct line around Aristotle.
Plato, Aristotle, Socrates.
They're all like a direct line of each other.
And Zeus is Greek too, right?
Well, he's a god.
He might not have existed.
Sorry, spoiler there on 4000 year old mythology.
I can go back and edit in a spoiler alert so people can jump ahead.
Don't worry.
Anyhow, because Aristotle said this, this kind of carries forward all the way into medieval
Europe.
By the 13th century, Aristotle's writings have been rediscovered in medieval Europe
for the Renaissance and most scholars defended his position.
And in fact, in 1277, the Bishop of Paris, Etienne Tempier, he banned scholars from teaching
over 200, no, exactly not over 219 principles, many associated with Aristotle's philosophy.
And among the prohibited teachings on this list was item 34 that God could not create
as many worlds as he wanted to.
And since the penalty for violating this decree was excommunication from the church, Persian
scholars suddenly discovered rationales allowing multiple worlds empowering God to defy Aristotle's
logic.
And since Paris was the intellectual capital of the European world, scholars elsewhere
followed the Persian lead.
So from here, while several philosophers asserted God could make many worlds, most intimated
that he probably wouldn't have bothered.
And hardly anyone addressed the likelihood of alien life, although there are two Jean
Buridan in Paris and William of Occam in Oxford considered the possibility.
Here's a quote from them, God could produce an infinite number of individuals of the same
kind as those that now exist.
But he is not limited to producing them in this world.
End quote.
Populated worlds showed up more prominently in writings by the renegade thinkers Nicholas
of Cusa from 1401 to 1464 and Giordano Bruno 1548 to 1600.
They argued not only for the existence of other worlds, but also for worlds inhabited
by beings just like or maybe better than Earth's humans.
No.
Yeah.
And you gotta realize this is all happening pre Darwin.
So the idea of evolution and particularly things happening in different natural environments
wouldn't be an idea that people contemplate.
So if they're thinking of God creating beings on another planet, it's just going to be humans.
So if anybody at this point thinks there's extra trust in your life, they're literally
just thinking humans or smarter humans.
Okay.
It doesn't sound like anybody's thinking that.
Well these two are Bruno and Cusa.
Right.
Here's a quote from Nicholas of Cusa.
I did.
In every region, inhabitants of diverse nobility of nature proceed from God, wrote Nicholas,
who argued that space had no center and therefore the Earth could not be central or privileged
with respect to life.
Bruno, an Italian friar, asserted that God's perfection demanded an infinity of worlds and
beings.
Well, infinite perfection is far better presented in innumerable individuals than in those which
are numbered and finite.
End quote.
Bruno Averde burned at the stake for his critical belief so Bruno did not live to see
the triumph of Copernicus during the 17th century.
During that time, there were some people who believed it, but it's all from a religious
standpoint and again, no idea of evolution.
So everybody just thinks about it the same way as other people on different planets if
they do exist.
Then of course, Copernicus comes along says that, hey, where maybe Earth isn't the center
of the universe.
Fix everything up a little bit.
It's scary.
Eventually the idea of other worlds became no longer speculation, but astronomical fact,
inviting the notion of otherworldly populations as the prominent.
As a prominent, Dutch scientist Christian Huygens pointed out in the late 1600s that
quote, a man that is of Copernicus's opinion that the Earth of ours is a planet like the
rest of the planets cannot but sometimes think that it's not improbable that the rest of
the planets have their inhabitants too.
End quote.
This kind of a move from, you gotta remember, we've known about planets for a long time.
Venus, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus a bit.
So these are the planets they're talking about.
If we're just like those other planets, then hey, they have inhabitants too.
And that's kind of the shift that happens in the 16th, 1600s.
But again, still under the Christian idea of divine intervention is what creates life.
They're going to be humans.
Yeah.
Did you say what year this is?
This is in the 1600s.
1600s, okay.
I'm going to continue on his quote here.
It would be very strange that Earth was as populous as it is and the other planets weren't
at all.
This is just kind of becoming the belief as everything's moving.
Although they didn't think people could live on the sun, they did side with those who envisioned
inhabitants on other planets and even the moon.
Again, continuing quote, just as there have been and still are a prodigious number of
men foolish enough to worship the moon, there are people on the moon who worship the Earth.
End quote.
Early modern times onward discussion of aliens was not confined to science and philosophy.
They also appeared in various works of fiction, providing plot devices that remain popular
to the present day.
Often authors used aliens as stand-ins for evil humans to comment on current events.
I wonder how that would go.
Like what the speculation would be on the portraying them as evil too.
Yeah.
And I unfortunately, I couldn't find any direct quotes on kind of like how they were
portrayed at that time.
Where I start things off in the 1800s with writings.
This really hit a head in the late 1800s when speculation about life on Mars increases following
telescopic observation of apparent canals on Mars, which end up being an optical illusion.
But despite this, 1895, there's an astronomer by the name of Percival Lowell.
Nice name.
And he publishes his book, Mars Followed by Mars and Its Canals in 1906.
And this is him proposing that canals were the works of a long-gone civilization.
Now it should be noted spectroscopic analysis of the Mars atmosphere began in earnest in
1894 when US astronomer William Laws Campbell showed that neither water nor oxygen was present
in the Mars atmosphere.
Would they know that?
Basically, because you can see from the reflection of light.
Okay.
We know what colors and what you should see from different atmospheres coming off them
and what is present is in oxygen.
Okay.
And by 1909, better telescopes and the best perihelic opposition of Mars since 1877,
inclusively put an end to the idea of canals on Mars.
But around this time too, there's an idea going around Western civilization called spontaneous
generation, which basically says if life can exist, it will exist and it'll just spontaneously
occur.
So it was kind of assumed that everywhere there could be life, there is life.
This theory was disproved in the 19th century by Louis Pasteur, who, you know, famous for
the pasteurization, which we use for milk.
But yeah, up until he came along, it was absolutely common knowledge that life can just spring
up out of nowhere.
And so when we're...
And it can't.
It can't.
We can get a little weird with it, especially with the idea of panspermia, because basically
that means that life does have to come from nowhere at some point.
Oh no.
I'm thinking too hard about this.
Okay.
But just because Pasteur disproved it didn't mean that people still didn't believe in spontaneous
generation and that life could pop up.
And it's very common knowledge at this time.
There are aliens on Mars.
This time being today, right?
Because I believe that.
Okay.
It still does exist.
Yeah.
That's a bad idea.
So what's the theory if it's not the theory that life can create itself then?
Well, you need something.
The idea of panspermia is in absolutely the right circumstances.
There are the genetic building blocks of life in many parts of the universe that when submitted
to the right situation can give rise to life.
But basically...
It would have to be.
Yeah, but it's only in the right circumstances that it would pop up.
Whereas the idea of spontaneous generation is it's just...
Everything needs to be correct.
Everything, everywhere is becoming life.
Okay.
Which, yeah, okay.
I'll agree with that.
The conditions need to be right.
But I was like, what, like how else are you going to get life if you can't create something
out of nothing somehow?
Okay.
And for the most part, popular belief in alien civilization somewhere in our solar system
remains strong until we sent probes out past Mars in the sixties.
Which debunked forever the existence of Martians and decreased the previous expectations of
finding alien life in general.
Yeah.
Well, there's Martians, Venussians.
They all had inhabitants for a while.
Yeah.
So that's kind of how it evolved from there's no alien life out there at all to what we
kind of believe today for whether or not aliens can exist out there.
But I always find it interesting even today when people are talking about alien sightings,
they don't say grays.
The most common thing you're going to hear, particularly from people who are skeptical
is little green men, correct?
Yes.
But that's not what people picture at all.
Where the hell does that come from?
I think it is the how they work portrayed, how people have been portrayed as experiencing
something with aliens, whether it be an abduction or a sighting.
It was the spin that the media would put on it.
I think something similar to how a flying saucer was coined.
It was people saying, you know, the little green men because everybody says that's
sarcastically.
Well, yeah, but this idea has to come from.
I guess it would have had to come from somewhere.
Yeah.
And this does actually have roots way back in the day.
I don't actually put a time on it because little green men was commonly used to describe
various supernatural beings and old legends and folklore fairy tales and children's books.
You got all of the supernatural beings in these books and all these stories are green,
whether you're talking goblins or ogres or monsters.
A lot of them are green beings.
The idea of supernatural others being green pretty much goes back to as far as our languages
can.
I'm learning so much.
During flying saucer sightings in the 1950s, this term started to become associated green
men as popular usage in referencing aliens when it came to UFO sightings.
And the use of little green men was already deeply ingrained in English at this time.
It also seems to have easily extended beyond the imaginary to real people.
So they would be used for actors like the little people in the Wizard of Oz.
And even at some point, camouflage Japanese soldiers were called little green men.
So in 1947, when Kenneth Arnold sees these UFOs, it just kind of becomes the vernacular
of this supernatural thing that people just used it as the modern equivalent.
Really?
Yeah.
The 1960s is really when this shifts, so little green men use vernacularly up until
the 1960s when stories that are coming out about interactions with the beings within
the crafts start to come out.
So that's for the most part, like this association is with little green men.
So how do we end up with the idea of the greats?
Well, it's the late 1800s that we're going to start with where science fiction writers
start to talk about gray beings.
There are a few around this time talking about it, but the most prominent is H.G. Wells,
who wrote in 1893 in the Man of the Year Million.
He writes what he projects humanity to evolve into and basically just calls them great skinned
beings with enlarged heads and eyes.
That's the first time.
There are a few right around that time, but he's the most prominent.
That's pretty cool.
H.G. Wells also talks about them in his book, The Time Machine with the Morlocks, who are
the highly evolved humans in the future.
And then in 1933, there's a book by a man named Gustav Sandgren.
It's called The Unknown Danger and he writes this.
It's about an extraterrestrial species.
The creatures did not resemble any race of humans.
They were short, shorter than the average Japanese, and their heads were big and bald
with strong square foreheads and very small noses and mouth and weak chins.
What was most extraordinary about them were the eyes, large, dark, gleaming with a sharp
gaze.
They're clothes made of soft gray fabric and their limbs seem to be familiar to those
of humans.
So, he's really talking about these big headed creatures.
And weirdly enough...
You picture a gray when he says that.
Yeah, exactly.
He describes it well, although he doesn't technically in that first say that they're
gray, but it is more or less what we would think here.
And right around this time, strangely enough, Alistair Crowley is going to come up because
in 1917, he communicates with this being known as LAM.
L-A-M.
Go Google a picture of what LAM looks like, both Chelsea and you listeners, when you have
a chance.
I know exactly what LAM looks like.
He does look like a gray.
Yeah, he's right around these parameters.
Now, you should also make note.
This also looks exactly as what H.G. Wells described as a future human.
So maybe he took inspiration when he was creating this picture.
But LAM wasn't an alien.
Crowley believed that LAM was a Tibetan llama from Lung between China and Tibet.
LAM is Tibetan for way or path, which Crowley said, or sorry, Crowley, I'm saying it wrong,
Crowley, said had the numerical value of 71 or no thing, a gateway to the void and a link
between the stars between systems of serious and andromeda, LAM was to fulfill the work
initiated by IWAS.
And he drew this portrait of LAM that you probably hopefully have looked at so you can see what
we're talking about because he doesn't really describe it.
He just drew it and said that gazing on the portrait enables one to make contact with this
entity.
And many people who say they make contact with LAM, it brings up implications, but we're
just going to kind of skip over that and say that this is something that looks exactly
like what we're talking about.
From there, we're going to actually talk about the first people who come forward saying they
add contact with Grace.
And Chelsea, are you ready for it?
Bill Moore, just kidding, it's Barney and Betty Hill.
Yeah, that's what I thought.
But in our last episode, I don't know if we're foiling it.
Nope, we're not.
Bill Moore comes up later on.
Don't worry about it.
No, it was what's his face that we just had?
John Lear said that at least came up in the John Lear episode that Bill Moore says he
coined the term Grace, which he might have.
It's very minute in this entire thing.
Yeah, well, whoever coined it, like what they're calling them.
So this idea of this character that we've been seeing through science fiction or at least
non-actual contact entities really comes to fruition in 1965 when Betty and Barney Hill
come forward with their story.
So they are allegedly, we've covered this a long time ago and only part of it.
So Betty and Barney Hill allegedly were abducted in 1961 by alien beings with grayish skin.
They were in their car.
They see these guys.
They get taken on to the spacecraft.
I don't think we actually covered the abduction.
No, we never covered the actual abduction.
And we're not going to cover it here either.
Other than the fact that Betty apparently gets shown the star map and people have alleged
that this looks like a map of Zeta reticuli based on where the stars are.
And you might sometimes Zeta reticuli if I ever saw it.
Yeah, exactly.
You might see people refer to the grays as Zeta reticulants.
So that's as far as we need to go with that part.
And I just make a comment.
Maybe I should hold my comment.
Should I say it or should I hold it?
You can say it.
It seems like at this point there's enough kind of in the subconscious of popular culture
at the time for this to come into fruition to something.
Yes, there definitely is.
And that's going to be kind of the next portion of this episode.
Okay.
That this is kind of all over science fiction.
And this is something that is on TV at the time.
Oh yeah, I guess it would be on TV.
Yeah.
Even if you're just kind of reading science.
Like I don't read a lot of science fiction, but there's things that you know you hear
in passing and stuff like that for it to be something that is known or at least in your
subconscious.
I have speculation as to why too.
Everything kind of works out the way it does from this point based on the technology of
the time.
Anyhow, Barney and Betty Hill don't remember any of this.
They have some missing time.
They end up going to a hypnotist.
When they go to the hypnotist, they each end up talking about these entities who abducted
them.
That's what they end up kind of describing the same thing.
They even draw kind of a sketch of it.
And it's a gray entity that has more facial features than you'd be used to.
Slightly smaller heads, but they're gray.
And this is where the idea originally comes from for abductions with grays.
And Chelsea, when I did some research on the Betty and Barney Hill case for this, I feel
like we need to do an episode on Betty specifically because she has some interesting things she
does later in life.
I think I know that, but yeah, I would love to do an episode on which we actually talk
about what happens and not just...
Can we just allude to most of that?
Sorry, let's not spoiler that episode in the future.
Yeah, don't spoil it.
Sorry.
Anyhow, it comes out very famous case.
It ends up going internationally famous.
And pretty much most people would know at least if they're talking about aliens, this
is the Betty and Barney Hill case and that they saw these gray aliens.
Goes huge from there.
I do want to make a note that their war euphologists have looked at this and way later on, in fact,
it wasn't alleged until in 1990 in an article called Entirely Unpredisposed, Martin Koppmeyer
suggested that Barney and Betty's memories revealed under hypnosis kind of really line
up to an episode of the Outer Limits, which came out two weeks before their hypnosis.
And Chelsea...
What?
I'm going to share my screen with you just so that you can see this.
Who sketches that?
This is Barney and Betty's Hill.
The top most sketch is Barney's while the lower two were David Baker's based on Barney's
description.
So that's what they have.
And this is the alien in the Outer Limits.
That's the same guy pretty much.
Now I do want to say that maybe the nicer sketches that guy was influenced by the Outer
Limits episode.
Who knows?
Did they watch?
I don't know.
The Outer Limits is the same thing.
Is it not?
No, the redo was Canadian.
It wasn't originally 1960s show.
I don't know if that was Canadian.
But Barney wasn't a great artist.
So his doesn't line up as much as the other guys.
But the other guys do seem to line up pretty well.
But again...
I mean even looking at his, it looks very similar.
But it should be noted too that this was an allegation made 26 years after the abduction
case happened and all this came out.
That allegation has never actually been made up until that point.
And that also brings up at least I didn't see it discussed too much.
But this starts to get big in the 1960s Chelsea.
Do you know what wasn't big in the 1960s?
Other TVs.
So I'm wondering if the whole point or at least one of the reasons that we end up with
gray beings is because of hypnotic regression.
It's something that they saw on TV.
This wasn't the only TV show at the time.
You wouldn't know what to color it if it's something that you saw on the other end of
the...
Unless it's specifically stated.
But if it's shown in the background or something you weren't paying too much attention to,
definitely gray.
I mean if you're going under hypnosis and that's something in your subconscious, that's
something that if your subconscious has nothing to put there that it could pull from somewhere
else to put something.
If you're not careful when you're hypnotizing somebody.
Yeah, I am really curious if anybody could do the research on that and see if that's
kind of one of the things that could be a factor in the prominence of gray aliens.
The fact that we didn't have color TV when it rose to prominence, but we did have TV.
That's a good point.
And it could very well have...
Did H.G. Wells say a color?
I can't remember if you did say.
He also said that those were future humans.
It's hard to say.
Yeah.
Hmm.
Point.
But that's just purely my speculation.
I think it's valid and we'll hold on.
I think it is too.
It's a really good point.
I don't.
I have no research to back it up other than what we're talking about now.
So the report from the regression features a scenario that was in some respects similar
to the television show and also it featured wrap around eyes which are an extreme rarity
in science fiction films.
I know of only one instance.
They appeared on the Alien of an Episode of an Old TV series The Outer Limits entitled
The Bellarrow Shield, a person familiar with Barney's sketch in the interrupted journey
and the sketch done in the collaboration with the artist David Baker will find Jejavu creeping
up his spine when seeing this episode.
The resemblance is much abetted by an absence of ears, hair, and nose on both aliens.
Could it be by chance?
Consider this.
Barney first described and drew the wrap around eyes during hypnosis session on February 22,
1964.
The Bellarrow Shield was first broadcast on February 10, 1964.
Only 12 days separate the two instances and if the identification is admitted the common
sense of wrap around eyes in the abduction literature follows two cultural forces.
So that's where we get kind of the shaping and that's that theory that that's where
the grays come from is hypnotic regression bringing back a memory from something else.
Okay, I can get behind that.
There are a few other sightings in their abductions during that time that mentioned grays but
we're gonna kind of skip over that for now and go to 1977 when a young up and coming
director by the name of Steven Spielberg is working on a movie called Close Encounters
of the Third Kind and they designed an alien which shows up in the film that looks strikingly
similar to these grays that we're discussing.
This really the first time you're gonna see the grays as we talk about them come up.
And Chelsea, I am just gonna show you really quickly.
This was the original design for what the aliens and close encounters of the third kind
were gonna look like.
I was just googling it.
They had to change the eyes because apparently it was kids who had to wear them and it creeped
them out too much so they changed the eyes.
But that's basically the gray alien that people picture.
That's him.
It should be noted then, well how did Steven Spielberg come up with this?
There's a book called Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Ultimate Visual History
by Michael Klastoren and he notes on pages 105 through 107 that the close encounters
alien designs came from the film's scientific advisor Dr. J. Allen Heineck who's actually
in the movie near the end.
Who famously worked on the US Air Force's Project Blue Book.
Here's a direct quote from this book.
When designing the aliens, Spielberg and John Alves didn't set out to create wildly imaginative
otherworldly beings and Stem Spielberg was determined to keep the film as factual as
possible.
Turning to the work of few phologists J. Allen Heineck as a starting point.
In the majority of the credible reports Heineck had received regarding close encounters of
the third kind, the description of the ETs were remarkably similar and the beings often
known as grays were nearly always described as being pale and diminutive with large volbous
heads and two huge almond shaped eyes.
That species was being reported all over the world Spielberg said and that made me think
that there was some validity to the sightings.
That's the story behind why the aliens are that way in close encounters of the third
kind and this really pushes it into absolutely everybody's psyche.
This was a huge movie at the time and specifically J. Allen Heineck used inspiration from cases
that he worked on in Blue Book.
Betty and Barney Hill were a project Blue Book case as was Lonnie Zamora.
I can't remember if we've talked about the Zamora case but it's from 1964 also involves
gray aliens and these are kind of the two that he drew the most inspiration from for
helping create this alien.
The next thing that really brings gray aliens into the zeitgeist is a Whitley Streber's
book Communion specifically the cover of that book.
Now Communion was huge it was a big book in the 80s it should be importantly mentioned
that although is it fiction it's fiction right?
He tells the story through fiction but he says it's based on real events but Whitley
Streber tells the story of gray aliens and contact with them.
There's a cover of the book that is very famous and basically it is what people picture when
they picture gray aliens.
This cover was done by a man by the name Tedsep Jacobs and he kind of said this about it.
It was painted in my small apartment on East Street and 3rd Street in New York City.
Whitley sat with me first for a drawing of the aliens as I sketched he would indicate
how to change the portrait so that it would more match what he saw.
It was I believe the process used by the police sketch artist and every last detail was corrected
according to his instructions.
At one point he said the image corresponded exactly to what he had seen.
As Whitley decided me for the subsequent session I began to paint the image on a wooden prepared
panel going through the same process as for the drawing until Whitley finally said the
image was exact.
As to the gender of the alien image to tell the truth the subject didn't come up.
I don't even know if the grays have genders as we understand it.
Whitley corrected the developing image to have a certain fragility of vulnerability and
I suppose we earthlings usually associate these qualities with femininity.
So that's really where the two biggest things here of how we picture grays.
This comes from close encounters of the third kind and then the cover of communion.
These are literally where most things draw back.
Well I know the thing with the cover of communion was it caused a big stir because it caused
so many people to recognize that they had to encounter this type of being and so people
recognized it that way.
But playing devil's advocate here if you're seeing this in popular culture that could
cause some sort of subconscious recognizing of it as well.
That's a fair point yeah or just spinning the back of your mind for a long time yeah.
And especially here it's kind of like the satanic panic of its time which is right around
this time as well where people spontaneously created memories of like satanic rituals happening
in their childhood which never happened at all.
So right around this time too is when Bill Moore hits the scene with his Roswell book
in 1980.
And this is where Bill Moore gets involved in this basically he wrote this book and brought
back the idea of grays to the Roswell story.
That's his addition to the grey mythos.
He might have coined the term grays I couldn't find any conclusive evidence one way or the
other but that's an important comment.
That he did that it was grays.
That he came up with the term grays no idea if you ask me.
Oh yeah so as a reminder we've talked about this so many times.
Maybe Bill Moore went in and wrote that story what was it like 20 years after Roswell actually
happened.
Over 30 yeah.
Yeah and that's where they said they recovered an alien body.
And specifically grays.
Yeah specifically like many many many years later.
And the 80s is really where most of this comes from this idea of the grey and where it hits
cultural phenomenon because 77s when the close encounters of the third kind comes out.
Bill Moore writes his book in 1980.
I believe communion is the early 80s I didn't put the specific date down but the movie comes
out with Christopher Walken in it playing Whitley Streever in 89.
We get this redone story of Roswell where the grays are there and it just explodes.
I could see it happening like that.
Actually it all dammit it makes so much sense.
And yeah because of this story I saw a poll and it's like a weird stat.
Grays are often involved in alien abduction claims among reports of alien encounters.
Grays make up 50% in Australia 73% in the US 48% in continental Europe and 12% in the
UK.
And these reports also include two distinct groups of grays at different height like we
talked about the beginning.
It should be noted I couldn't find the original paper for this where these numbers came from
but these statistics were collected at UFO conventions.
So I don't think it's going to be the best evidence to put it that way.
I find this crazy that everything kind of stems from the early 60s here.
And the first kind of inspired thing I could find from the stories of grays is a 1966 a
Japanese superhero named Ultraman comes out who is explicitly based on the recounts of
gray aliens that were coming out.
That's really the first thing that comes out.
From there it's in everything they're in Babylon 5, Gargate, South Park Hazard, X-Files
they definitely come up several times and in many video games they show up too and basically
they're every day.
They have to be the most common extraterrestrial.
Oh yeah for sure.
Not the only one and we could definitely do the history of different niche aliens that
are out there but these were the main ones.
This is the one I wanted to talk about.
This is the main one yeah and it kept coming up so I was so excited to hear you're doing
this episode.
That's kind of where it ends off is it's everywhere in the zeitgeist and that's where
it all just kind of comes from.
We do episodes on here and I go into it being like yeah this is going to be so amazing.
I love this topic and then we get to the end of it and I'm like damn it.
As I've said it a million times like I want to believe in this stuff.
I love the paranormal and then we do an episode and I'm just convinced the other way.
However I'll say that with an asterisk on this one I do think that it can be a real
thing but you can really through everything that you.
You can see the trajectory of this.
You can see the trajectory and you can see it start to be in the back of people's minds
starting with which I think is really cool that HG Wells had that such a creative idea
in the future humans.
It is interesting though because he definitely also did space space things in aliens so it's
interesting that it only comes up as future humans and not the aliens like more of the
worlds had aliens in it and they go to Mars to fight back against the world of the world.
That's true but.
It didn't come up in there.
HG Wells is most well known for War of the Worlds and causing the huge panic with War
of the Worlds on the radio and so being popular at the time if people read any other of his
works sometimes things get mashed up into one the more time goes on and then it just
starts kind of just seems to start to snowball with everything in pop culture and then with
Betty and Barney Hill that's where it really it's a point of coming into contact with
the UFO people and then it takes off from there.
It could just be the fact that they were the first external forces that we ended up seeing
that end up associating with this HG Wells idea.
Yeah well outer limits is also science fiction so if you take one of those and perhaps see
it also read HG Wells or something anyhow it's in like the psyche of culture and it
just kind of goes and goes and then you get the fucking Whitley Streepers in there and
Bill Moore who just starts fucking making shit up.
And the Richard Doty's who are really bad at making shit up so they just take the things
that are already there.
Yeah and which you get the Ebens who are probably also Greeks.
Yeah I looked them up they were quite in the same parameters as the Greys they are close
though.
He had a little bit of creativity on that one.
Yeah they had more facial features that's like the only difference.
That was so interesting I didn't expect it was gonna go there.
Yeah I had a lot of fun actually looking this one up.
Yeah I found that super interesting.
And thankfully it wasn't one of those ones that I felt like there was nothing to the
story where it just kind of seems to appear one day there seems to be a nice linear trail
Oh yes you can see it happening.
And with that I have been Taylor here with Chelsea we are Journey to the Fringe thank
you all for listening and we'll see you next week.
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