Origins In literature, descriptions of beings similar to Grey aliens predate claims of supposed encounters with them. In 1893,
H. G. Wells presented a description of humanity's future appearance in the article "The Man of the Year Million", describing humans as having no mouths, noses, or hair, and with large heads. In 1895, Wells also depicted the
Eloi, a successor species to humanity, in similar terms in the novel
The Time Machine. Both share many characteristics with future perceptions of Greys. In 1933, the
Swedish novelist
Gustav Sandgren, using the pen name Gabriel Linde, published a science fiction novel called
Den okända faran (
The Unknown Danger), in which he describes a race of extraterrestrials who wore clothes made of soft grey fabric and were short, with big bald heads, and large, dark, gleaming eyes. The novel, aimed at young readers, included illustrations of the imagined aliens. This description would become the template upon which the popular image of grey aliens is based.
Barney and Betty Hill abduction The conception remained a niche one until 1965, when newspaper reports of the Betty and Barney Hill abduction made the archetype famous. The alleged abductees, Betty and Barney Hill, claimed that in 1961, humanoid alien beings with greyish skin had abducted them and taken them to a
flying saucer. In his 1990 article "Entirely Unpredisposed", Martin Kottmeyer suggested that Barney's memories revealed under hypnosis might have been influenced by an episode of the science-fiction television show
The Outer Limits titled "
The Bellero Shield", which was broadcast 12 days before Barney's first hypnotic session. The episode featured an extraterrestrial with large eyes, who says, "In all the universes, in all the unities beyond the universes, all who have eyes have eyes that speak." The report from the regression featured a scenario that was in some respects similar to the television show. In part, Kottmeyer wrote: Carl Sagan echoed Kottmeyer's suspicions in his 1997 book,
The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, where
Invaders from Mars was cited as another potential inspiration. , Roswell In 1987, novelist
Whitley Strieber published the book
Communion, which, unlike his previous works, was categorized as non-fiction, and in which he describes a number of close encounters he alleges to have experienced with Greys and other extraterrestrial beings. The book became a
New York Times bestseller, and
New Line Cinema released a 1989 film adaption that starred
Christopher Walken as Strieber. In 1988,
Christophe Dechavanne interviewed the
French science-fiction writer and
ufologist Jimmy Guieu on
TF1's
Ciel, mon mardi !. Besides mentioning
Majestic 12, Guieu described the existence of what he called "the little greys", which later on became better known in French under the name:
les Petits-Gris. Guieu later wrote two
docudramas, using as a plot the Grey aliens / Majestic-12 conspiracy theory as described by
John Lear and
Milton William Cooper: the series "E.B.E." (for "Extraterrestrial Biological Entity"):
E.B.E.: Alerte rouge (first part) (1990) and ''E.B.E.: L'entité noire d'Andamooka'' (second part) (1991). Greys have since become the subject of many
conspiracy theories. Many conspiracy theorists believe that Greys represent part of a government-led
disinformation or
plausible deniability campaign, or that they are a product of government
mind-control experiments. During the 1990s, popular culture also began to increasingly link Greys to a number of
military-industrial complex and
New World Order conspiracy theories. In 1995, filmmaker
Ray Santilli claimed to have obtained 22 reels of 16 mm film that depicted the
autopsy of a "real" Grey supposedly recovered from the site of the 1947 incident in Roswell. In 2006, though, Santilli announced that the film was not original, but was instead a "reconstruction" created after the original film was found to have degraded. He maintained that a real Grey had been found and autopsied on camera in 1947, and that the footage released to the public contained a percentage of that original footage. ==Analysis==