Why is the Stereotypical Image of Aliens Green or Grey Bald Humanoids?

this video is brought to you by Dollar Shave Club go-to dollarshaveclub.com forward slash brain food to get your first starter set for just 5 dollars in the video today we're answering a viewer question because join he asks us who first came up with the little green men stereotype for aliens flying saucers little green men and anal probes have been a staple of our perception of aliens for as long as most of us have been alive the reasoning behind the latter is obvious human scientists also can and do learn a lot about an animal by their theses but where did the idea of short gray or green aliens actually come from in the first place as the little green men the concept of green beings has been around for centuries from goblins to perhaps one of the most famous cases the green children of Woolpit for those not familiar these were two children that seemed to have lived during the 12th century in England when they were discovered in the fields the little boy and the girl had green tinge skin they wore strange clothes spoke an unfamiliar language and both refused to eat regular food for some time apparently being unfamiliar with us if you are interested in who they were why their skin was green and where they came from do check out our video on the subject which is linked to below fast-forwarding to the 19th century we have the first known instance of the term little green men being used to describe aliens found in the green boy from Jara published in the Atlanta Constitution in 1899 in the story it describes a short green skinned alien from you guessed it the planet hurrah much more famously Edgar Rice Burroughs early 20th century Barsoom series featured green aliens from Mars though in this case they weren't little at all being about twice the height of humans yes another mentioned from the early 20th century comes from the 1908 edition of The Daily Kennebec journal where the term little green man is used referring to a Martian by the time of Orson Welles is famed War of the Worlds broadcast in October of 1938 it would appear this idea was firmly established in pop culture after these supposed mass panic that happened during their broadcast which in truth didn't actually happen contrary to popular belief more on this in an upcoming video on our highlight History Channel subscribe to that by the way this nevertheless saw many colonists reporting on it's the next day using the term little green men synonymously with alien as is often the case today these accounts seem to mostly use the term in jest to poke fun at the whole thing rather than literally describing aliens this trope has pretty much survived ever since and pop culture with short green aliens appearing in countless fictional productions including Doctor Who Star Trek Toy Story and perhaps the most famous of all little green aliens Jedi Master Yoda interestingly despite widespread reference to little green men in many a news account describing potential abductions among the alien abductions posited by ufologists as being somewhat credible there is not yet been anywhere someone has claims to have been abducted by little green men toy aliens though lizard people are a thing which we'll be getting to in an upcoming video assuming the lizard people don't silence us first in contrast to the lack of little green men abductions little grey humanoids is a popular description given by those who claim to have been abducted accounting for a whopping 43% of all alien abduction reports in the United States 50% in Australia and 90% in the United States his hat as to why grey aliens prefer Canadians we just think that's probably because they're really nice just as interesting is that only 12% of abduction reports in the UK and 20% in the rest of Europe describes some variants of gray skinned aliens doing the abducting so where did the common idea of hairless large headed black-eyed grey skinned aliens actually come from in the first place the first documented instances of a description of such beings though in this case with them being are evolved cells comes from HG Wells's 1893 Man of the Year million in it he describes humanity having evolved into large headed black oval eyed short gray skinned beings similar to what is commonly depicted when most people today think of grey aliens wells later repeated similar descriptions in other works including sometimes representing aliens clearly wells must have been in the lizard people's inner circle to know announced the grey aliens long before anyone would ever be abducted by them from there Gustav Sangren doubled down on this description of aliens in his 1933 book titles of the unknown danger where he states the creatures did not resemble any race of humans they were short shorter than the average Japanese and there heads were big and bold with strong square foreheads and very small noses and mouths and weak chins what was it most extraordinary about them were the eyes large dark gleaming with sharp gaze they were clothes made of soft gray fabric ins denims seemed to be similar to those of humans fast forward in June 1947 the Roswell UFO incident reports to a featured little gray aliens which has since further caps the trope alive that said perhaps no other event solidified the idea of gray aliens in pop culture more than one of the first ever instances of a supposed real-life alien abduction the people abducted we're a husband and wife couple named Barney and Betty Hill in 1961 in a nutshell the couple were driving home from a trip late at night on September the 19th 1961 in New Hampshire when at approximately 10:30 p.m. Betty claims to have seen a mysterious lights off in the distance eventually the couple decided to stop the car and investigate as well as allow their dog to water some trees in the meantime Barney used a pair of binoculars to get a closer look at the mysterious light and observed a flying saucer of some sort off in the distance from here there is a gap in their memories until they were about 35 miles down the road perplexed with about two hours of missing time the missing memories of part of their road trip - scrapes and some damage to their clothing and back of their car the otherwise shrugged it off and went to bed when they got home shortly thereafter Betty read a book about UFOs and then began to have some strange dreams with her speculating to Barney that maybe they had been abducted by aliens as she vividly experienced in her dreams husbands however was having none of it at first that is until two years later when he and Betty underwent hypnosis to try and draw out repressed memories and then he started remembering the event himself in short Betty gave two accounts one from her dreams and one from her supposedly recovered repressed memories which differed considerably on several points what she ended up supposedly remembering was some reasonably friendly grey hairless aliens initially claiming with huge bulbous noses though she changed her story on that one later the aliens then took them aboard their ship and gave them a thorough and violating examination at one point while chatting with Betty in English that seemingly telepathically one of the examiners showed her a star chart map of where they came from her husband also had similar memories though less detailed as apparently he kept his eyes closed much of the time because of the alien eyes feeling like they were boring into his brain he did report being probed anally as well as having some of his sperm extracted among other things more or less similar to Betty's experience however among various discrepancies between their stories he described the aliens as having hair and wearing nazi-like uniforms however as we noted in our video about whether repressed memories are actually a thing the methods used in hypnosis to try and recover suppressed memories are quite literally textbook ways to get people to create false memories sometimes even quite fantastical ones the supported memories recovered in this way tend to be treated with a bit of skepticism in modern times and in facts even then the psychiatrist who hypnotized them dr. Benjamin Simon concluded this very thing that while he fully believed Betty and then Barney were completely sincere that they had been abducted the good doctor believed their memories were not real and simply inspired by Betty's dreams and research show various alien related concepts dr. Simon was apparently well ahead of his time on that note a lot of the elements the couple described about the aliens resembled those already depicted in various works of fiction further the technologies the aliens used were amazingly antiquated mirroring the types of things you're to expect of someone living in 1961 on top of that say beacon light on Canyon Mountain existed that was fully visible on the road approximately where Betty and Barney claimed to have seen the mysterious light Betty's later accounts of additional experiences with aliens which further erode her credibility in the eyes of most ufologists as noted by the paranormal investigator Robert Schaeffer I was present at the National UFO conference in New York City in 1980 at which Betty presented some of the UFO photos she had taken she showed what must have been well over 200 slides mostly of lips blurs and blobs against the dark backgrounds these were supposed to be UFOs coming in close chasing her car landing etc after her talk had exceeded about twice its allocated time Betty it was literally geared off the stage by what had been at first a very sympathetic audience this incident witnessed by many apology leaders and top activists removed any lingering doubts about Betty's credibility she had none in 1995 Betty L wrote a self-published book a common-sense approach to UF it is filled with obviously delusional stories such as seeing entire squadrons of UFOs in flight and attract levitating above the freeway nevertheless the original incidents made the news rounds and even inspired some predictions based on the events helping to popularize and reinforce the notion of grey aliens even if not exactly as is otherwise commonly depicted in fact because of Betty and Barney gray aliens are sometimes called Zeta Reticulans this comes from the fact that Betty's drawing of the starmap sheet supposedly saw while on the ship was determined to line up with a binary system about 39.2 light-years away from Earth called Zeta Reticuli that said the idea that her depiction matched Zeta Reticuli was later debunked for various reasons nevertheless the name has stuck on top of helping to popularize the greys the Betty and Barney abduction ended up kicking off a slew of others claiming that they were likewise abducted with relatively similar stories the stereotypical view of grey aliens that had been around for over half a century up to that point was subsequently continually reinforced in cinema and TVs such as in the 1977 Close Encounters of the Third Kind as well as the 1989 communion starring Christopher Walken based off the New York Times best-selling book of the same name released two years before after that came the x-files Stargate sg-1 South Parkins many more productions featuring some variants of the greys ensuring the stereotype lives on long past HG Wells who seemingly originally came up with it also the blizzard people would want to have us believe and speaking of super advanced bald 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a beard I'm sure it's gonna work even better just focus on there so you get a nice look at all this stuff this is this is why they don't pay me to make like do product photography for your first month you can get all of this stuff it's just five dollars after that you get supplied with these at a regular price it's fantastic just go to dollarshaveclub.com forward slash brain food and get started for just $5 and let's jump back to the studio so a thanks to Dollar Shave gun for sponsoring go to dollarshaveclub.com for slash brain food to get your first starter set for just $5 and let's get into those bonus facts while today pretty much everyone pronounces UFO is UFO it turns out that's not the way the person who suggested the phrase unidentified flying object one Edward J ruppelt pronounced it you see when repelled suggested the name do you describe these types of sightings rather than flying sorceress was previously popular among the general public he helpfully included a description of how to pronounce it so how did he says while that was UFO and while UFO did catch on you fo certainly didn't and now for another bonus fact ever wonder why people think area 51 houses aliens while ones are no more it turns out it's all because of one random man in 1989 yes that recently a guy by the name of Robert Lazar appeared on a Las Vegas TV station saying he was a government scientist and stated that area 51 was just chock-full of alien technology after that interest in area 51 aliens really started to gain momentum now we should probably mention that almost as soon as Lazar appeared on TV every single one of his credentials was pulled to pieces no school he claimed to attend had ever heard of him and the science behind his presented hypotheses was soundly debunked and he has to really just drive the point home here Roswell UFOs aliens little green men and area 51 were in no way linked as far as popular public opinion was concerned until exactly one random dude went on TV and claims that they were science on that note it's important to realize what area 51 actually is for all intents and purposes and according to every government document ever released area 51 is a secret but not so secret military base where they test experimental pieces of military hardware for example experimental Jets such as the sr-71 blackbird and the Lockheed u2 dragon lady were tested at the area 51 base the latter of which was actually the first piece of hardware publicly known to have been constructed and tested that the site area 51 was bill song was first chosen due to the incredibly smooth lands found on nearby lake beds coupled with the area's natural inaccessibility both of these features made it perfect for testing aircraft like the Lockheed u2 which required a large area of flat lands from which it could take off and land while at the same time being in an area enemies of the US couldn't at the time easily lay their peepers on as for what it's like to work at area 51 unlike pop culture would have you believed the people who work there aren't forbidden from ever speaking to their family or a held in some sort of giant underground bunker just ask James knows who worked in the secret facility for decades though James has been sworn to secrecy about certain things as expected when you work on highly experimental classified government projects he's free to talk about many of his experiences there for example James noted that he was always paid in cash whereas others were paid in checks from companies they do not work even more interesting when a plane from area 51 crashed once James was tasked with confiscating the cameras of a nearby family who were quickly rewarded with a fat stack of cash for their silence not what they saw so what about Roswell and area 51 surely there must have been some popular connection before the late 1980s right well not so much though today some conspiracy theorists believe that the craft that crashed at Roswell was of alien origin and that it was or is now being stored at area 51 when the incident in question first took place area 51 wasn't mentioned in any documentation from that time this should come as zero surprise to anyone who knows their geography as area 51 is almost a thousand miles from Roswell so why they'd have transported its and the aliens inside all that way instead of to some other secret installation is a bit of a mystery and certainly not something anyone in the public at the time would connect even if it were true and now for another bonus fact everyone know what aliens might look like if we did encounter them while you might think that this is unknowable man to some extent that is correct there is a notion called convergent evolution that at least gives us some indications the general idea here comes from the fact that various life-forms have independently evolved a lot of the same basic features on earth completely separate from each other and given that many other planets would have relatively similar conditions as Earth in terms of some level of light gravitational force and living creatures needing to intake sustenance for energy etc it is likely there's an intelligence in advanced species would have certain broad features we can make assumptions about as Professor Harry e Keller of Northeastern University notes eyes of course I'd have to see to be able to build a civilization the squid has better eyes than we do and the eye seems to have evolved separately a few times policed our alien will have eyes that may only resemble our superficially a lens and iris are almost an absolute requirement the whites do not have to be white neither does the iris have to be colored in anything like the way ours are how many eyes one just will not do inability to perceive distance will lead to rapid extinction and as you can find a good reason for it extra eyes create evolutionary baggage and will not persist spiders notwithstanding eyes being important they will be recessed and capable of being covered as necessary our aliens are not likely to be bug-eyed though not totally rule that out mouth must have means for ingestion of food or large animals have some means to capture and swallow food some masticated others do not teeth are rather common on earth but other systems of eating are possible the problem is the plants and animals have been in an evolutionary war for millennia we inherit the outcome of that war teeth worked necessary to eat plants that became more fibrous and evolutionary reaction to being eaten there are other ways to share off plant food such as what birds do they chew in their gizzards a similar line of thinking is that a technologically advanced species is likely to have a good way to manipulate objects in complex ways as this is a huge boon to an advancement of a species in the first place thus something like hands and opposable thumbs would also seem to be more likely to be present in a spacefaring life-form that we might encounter some sort of hard protective structure to store the central processing units or units ie the brain or brain centers are also speculated to be likely for similar reasons to so many creatures on earth evolving this feature evolutionary biologist dr. Simon Conway Morris adds certainly it's not the case that every earth-like planets will have life let alone humanoids but if you want a sophisticated plant it will look awfully like a flower if you want to fly there's only a few ways you can do that if you want to swim like a shark there's only a few ways you can do that if you want to invent warm-bloodedness like birds and mammals there's only a few ways to do that there is a growing interest in convergent evolution but I'm always willing to push it as far as I can I'll always say show me anything which has only evolved once and I'll try and jump up and say no I can give you another example convergence is ubiquitous and if you think complex things are difficult to make well with great respect think again the sum of all this is to point out that while Hollywood often depicts humanoid like intelligent beings for convenience in casting actors and reducing special-effects budgets it's not outside the realm of possibility that aliens really would be at least slightly humanoid with some form of eyes ears hands limbs for moving about and grabbing things etc of course having all these features doesn't necessarily mean looking that close to a human after all an octopus is not that far from the basic recipe for a species with the potential to be technologically advanced if they evolved the right means the communication and things of this nature but it at least according to this hypothesis makes it not unlikely that we might encounter aliens at some points that look not too dissimilar to ourselves or something that we're familiar with that said Seth Shostak and Susan Schneider of the SETI Institute posit that it is far more likely that any other beings we encounter would be of the Machine variety their reasoning is that to begin with as any species advances to the point of space travel or sending communications across vast distances in space thus ones we are more likely to encounter they will likely have come up with something like the computers we have today to offload various brainpower tasks to machinery ultimately they will then advance those systems do the point where they are superior to the biological brains potential at some point beyond that they will likely figure out how to transfer their own sentience and memories to the machines or create machines that are themselves independently sentient because such machine beings would be superior to biological beings and countless ways including ability to rapidly self improve and replicate in much more advanced ways they would ultimately come to dominate even in societies that took active steps to avoid this these groups would have much more trouble with interstellar space travel than their machine alternates and thus it would ultimately be unlikely for us to encounter those biologicals compared to our chances of encountering the machines on that note gray aliens are often described by supposed abductees as having seemingly artificially smooth skin like it's made of some sort of polymer rather than being biological this combined with the fact that many abductees states that even when the greys were staring them straight in the eyes inches away from their faces they could not detect any breathing all the like has led some to speculate the greys are not actually biological beings but rather robots clearly created by the lizard people to do their bidding so I really hope you enjoyed that video if you did please do hit that thumbs up button below don't forget to subscribe and also support this channel by getting Dollar Shave Club just 5 dollars to get started there is a link below and I'll see you next time

Channel: Today I Found Out

Views: 437,813

Rating: 4.8573866 out of 5

Keywords: today i found out, tifovidz12, tifo, awesome, facts, didn't know, aliens, sci-fi, science fiction, science fiction history, alien history

Id: wdZkXWo_ydU

Length: 21min 56sec (1316 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 28 2019