Sightings - S3E07 - Halloween Special - “It Came From Outer Space” - October 23rd, 1994
“If creatures from an alien civilization are here on Earth, what do they look like? How do they get here? These questions are now being answered by two distinct groups - first the artists and writers who create the pop culture version of our cosmic cousins, and the people who believe they have actual first hand knowledge, the eyewitnesses and abductees. Strangely both groups have similar visions - so who’s influencing whom?”
An initial montage of past "abductee" interviews from earlier episodes we have the most skeptical segment yet. Probably the first one, outside the explicitly science-based "look at this cool space phenomenon" ones, to be biased towards the skeptics, who point out one of the most dominant criticisms of alien sightings.
Sci-fi illustrator Ron Miller says: “The more people know about what aliens are expected to look like, the more they’re likely to describe an alien as looking like that pre-concieved idea. It’s a self-feeding kind of a thing. In ten years there won’t be any kind of alien except a grey.”
This is a criticism best summed up by this art from skeptic Joe Nickell, which I believe I've shared a few times before:
Alien sightings came in many wild forms in the 1950s through 1970s - from blobs to goblins to robots to mantids. But in the 1980s, after the release of Close Encounters and (especially) the release of Whitley Strieber's Communion, people began reporting near-exclusively greys.
If you look at UFO mythology now, there are effectively four types of aliens: greys, mantids (but they're now just greys with weird arms instead of insectoids), "Nordics" (the blonde-haired blue-eyed white people of 1950s contactee sightings) and reptilians, a type of alien David Icke made up to launder his antisemitism after his publisher balked at publishing the literal Protocols in one of his earlier books. The diversity is gone, in favor of the most human-looking and "respectable" aliens and two that are problematic
Ron Miller traces the history of the Greys to "fairy tales, science fiction, film".
But the grey entered UFOlogy with the Betty and Barney Hill case of the 1960s, and here we talk to...
BETTY HILL? She was alive in 1994? Huh. Died in 2004. She insists, of course, that she did see what's depicted in her model...
But NASA engineer James Oberg has a different explanation.
“Lots of Betty’s memories are directly traceable back to a film called Invaders from Mars. Many of the themes, many of the imageries from that film appear in almost recognizable form in Betty’s story. There was kidnapping, being taken onto a flying saucer, there were needles being inserted into people’s brains...”
But Barney Hill's description differed from Betty's, claiming the greys had large eyes...something seen in an episode of The Outer Limits shortly before the "abduction".
“The unique feature here is the wrap-around eyes, the eyeballs that move off to the forehead off to the side of the head. It was very original, yet less than two weeks after this face appeared on television Barney Hill under hypnosis suddenly remembered that his aliens had eyes like that...was it cause and effect? Did he see the show? Was his memory polluted by this Hollywood version? Can’t prove it. But the sequence is highly suggestive.”
Steve Neill is a special effects makeup artist who has worked on Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Puppet Master, The Stuff, Fright Night, and Lasterblast. He claims both are true - pop culture and aliens influence one another.
Tim White says the "cult of the greys" was catapulted into mass acceptance by Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters (Communion was the finishing blow but goes unmentioned here). Ron Miller says we would still have more variety in aliens now if it weren't for that movie...
...while Close Encounters production designer Joe Alves shows up to show off his original concept art for the aliens and say they're based on the work of J. Allen Hynek.
Illustrator and dean of science fiction artists Kelly Freas shows up to say: “An alien that does not look like a human being is quite likely to scare the bejesus out of us. There has been a very definite evolution from the bug eyed monster of the 30s. Gradually you came into less monstrous aliens, but still aliens. But I think the biggest shock was around the late 50s when we began to get these reports of direct alien contact."
"I’d hate to think that the universe is so dull, that that’s the best it could come up with. Are we supposed to assume that only one race managed to accomplish space flight? Or are there more races out there? If so, what do the other aliens look like?”
That's the note to end on: how dull it would be if we lived in a world where aliens exist, but they're just like us, only gray and with big eyes. Unamaze unamaze unamaze.
But we actually end on Tim White saying this: “Abductees believe that they have seen the face of an alien civilization, and this is it. But Doctor Alvin Lawson, who has studied the abduction phenomenon for more than ten years, suggests another possibility. Perhaps abductees are actually remembering their own birth experiences. With a surgical mask covering the nose and mouth and bright operating room lights behind, could a human face look like this to a newborn?”
