I've tried looking for proto-Greys on American pulp SF magazine covers (and some later magazines) online.
While many of these magazines (roughly from the 30's to 50's) would have had relatively small circulations, they must have been eye-catching additions to newsstands and stores across the country.
Elsewhere on Metabunk we've seen examples of disc- and spherical- shaped spacecraft on pulp covers that pre-date the first "acknowledged" sightings of flying saucers (e.g. Kenneth Arnold in 1947) by many years.
The pulp artwork also often featured archetypal rockets, fat cigar shapes with tailfins and narrowing to a point at the front, years before large rockets were actually built;
External Quote:
...but the rockets on the covers of the Gernsback pulps had fallen on London in the dead of night, screaming
-in one of William Gibson's more chilling lines, from
The Gernsback Continuum, 1981 short story.
The first American space rockets took flight in 1958, but between 1947 and then maybe rockets had too grim (or maybe martial) an image to be the preferred transports for the extraterrestrials (the first true space rocket was of course for Sputnik 1 in 1957, essentially a huge ICBM- a fact not lost on many in the West). Anyway; we had saucers and rockets on magazine covers long before saucers were reported or large rockets were built; for whatever reason the aliens- or,
just maybe, the people who reported them- preferred saucers.
(I'm blathering, forgive my folk psychology). Cut a long story short, I was hoping to find proto-Greys featured on pre-UFO era magazine covers. I was surprised I couldn't find many- maybe not any- credible Grey antecedents. A few shaky contenders,
Above left,
Astounding Science Fiction, 1956. The face is perhaps similar to our conception of a Grey (if not the colour).
Right, in fairness not very "Grey" at all apart from the large head,
Adventures Fiction, don't know the date, France (I think).
Hmm- shame about the ears.
Galaxy Science Fiction, July 1968
(I've edited the image of the cover to reduce large amounts of white dead space).
So some Grey characteristics in different illustrations, but no obvious match. And they're not particularly well-known covers even within the genre, as far as I know.
On another thread,
I came across a few alien pictures that many hold to be of real aliens
ParanoidSkeptik2 explains that both the above were April Fool's stunts by West German publications,
on the left newspaper
Wiesbadener Tagblatt in 1950, at right, from
Neue Illustrierte, a popular illustrated current events/ general interest magazine, 1950; reproduced in Donald Keyhoe's
Flying Saucers from Outer Space, 1953, as real.
I've seen both pictures in several books/ articles about UFOs, sometimes heavily (and dishonestly) edited, e.g. I've seen the US MP's at left clumsily altered to represent WW2 German troops.
People with an active interest in UFOs (such as people who, before the internet, might have borrowed library books about them) may well have seen these pictures, even if they weren't generally well-known outside of the original German readership.
The picture at left was reproduced in Charles Berlitz and William Moore's
The Roswell Incident (1980), generally taken to be the first time that claims of alien bodies at Roswell were made beyond tiny "fringe" circles.
Wikipedia,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roswell_Incident_(1980_book)
Reference for photo being in
The Roswell Incident -possible unsafe "antivirus" links on webpage,
http://hoaxes.org/af_database/permalink/a_martian_in_the_usa -Visit at own risk.
The French / Czechoslovakian film
La Planète Sauvage, 1973 (Fantastic Planet in USA/ other English-speaking countries)
is
quite well known among movie-buffs. But the aliens are blue, not grey, and have delicate ears. Oh, and they're giants.
If you've ever wondered if sophisticated intelligences radically different to our own could exist, this film
proves they do-
- and they worked in French / Czechoslovakian animation in the early '70s. It is a bit "trippy".
Again, unlikely to have penetrated American culture enough to have influenced descriptions of Greys;
incidentally, reports of Greys vary by nation, this from Wikipedia,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_alien:
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Among reports of alien encounters, Greys make up about 50% in Australia, 73% in the United States, 48% in
continental Europe, and around 12% in the United Kingdom.
The same Wikipedia article has some examples of early possible influences on the popular image of Greys,
including
Den okända faran ("The Unknown Danger"), 1933 by Swedish author Gustav Sandgren, who describes
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...extraterrestrials who wore clothes made of soft grey fabric and were short, with big bald heads, and large, dark, gleaming eyes
I found this book cover online, but I'm guessing it's from the 50s or later; the alien looks like he's been inspired by
Dan Dare's Treen enemies, maybe The Mekon himself
Wikipedia continues
External Quote:
This description would become the template upon which the popular image of grey aliens is based
...but I suspect this might be more coincidence than causation.
"The First Men in the Moon" by HG Wells. NOT modern gray aliens, but they look pretty clearly to be in the ancestry of the modern consensus alien.
The earliest sci fi writing describes anything that I think is grey alien like, is The Man of the Year Million in 1893 by HG wells.
Whatever 1930's Swedish SF has to offer us, JMartJr and tobigtofool are of course right, descriptions of aliens or "evolved" humans with Grey characteristics go back to the late 19th century (
long before anyone claimed they were real beings).
Mr Wells wondered if our heads and eyes would expand, our noses, ears, teeth and hair disappear and our bodies atrophy as we become more "cerebral" and sedentary. This is a Lamarckian take on evolution- features that are used are more strongly expressed in the next generation, those not used will fade- and is wrong.
Wells (obviously a man of great intelligence) didn't know that; but modern authors should know better, including
Michael P. Masters, who
argues that if humans were to continue to evolve over thousands or millions of years, they would likely develop physical features that resemble the classic "grey alien" archetype commonly associated with UFO sightings.
(From thread:
Claim: Time-Travelling Humans are Causing Close Encounter Experiences).
Even in 1893, some were having a bit of fun with this conjecture; this from
Punch magazine (UK) 25 November 1893:
Certainly the
heads are Grey-ish...
It's been remarked on elsewhere that Greys arguably have some neotenic features- the rounded heads and large eyes, small or modest stature. In the past I've wondered if there might be some underlying psychological mechanism that is common to us all (or at least to many of us) that accounts for this. After all, human-like entities from folklore have sometimes (not always) been described or depicted in this way (fairies, pixies, elves etc.)
I don't think it's likely though; proposed neotenic traits in humans, more evident in adult women than adult men, is hypothesized to have arisen because it evokes caring, or at least non-combative, responses in males to females.
Whatever the truth of this, I don't think the Grey's appearance makes
me feel well-disposed towards
them.
Going off at a bit of a tangent to this,
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) famously ends with its "Star child".
When I first saw the film I was quite young, but I remember I found the model foetus unsettling.
Whether it was because I was young and didn't want to think about human reproduction, or whether it was an early example of the "uncanny valley" effect I don't know. This was a good few years before it was common for expectant parents to coo over ultrasound images of their child.
Maybe
2001, at some level, succeeded in associating this impassive, large-headed, big-eyed (and powerful?) most unnatural of foetuses with the mysteries of the Universe in the minds of some of its many viewers.
)
