Where Did the Gray Aliens (GREYS) Come From? Are They Real?

The image of an alien in the form of a small gray man with gray skin, an excessively large head and huge eyes became a common name and firmly entered popular culture. Then I portrayed aliens in hundreds of films, comics, computer games. Furthermore, this is exactly what ufologists describe in most cases with aliens. Where did the image of Gray Alien come from?

The exact origin of the Gray image is pretty easy to trace. The first similar description was made by the English science fiction writer Herbert Wells. In his article, “The Man of the Million of the Year”, he suggested that in a million years humans would evolve into a new race of gray-skinned humanoids about four feet tall with large heads and black oval eyes.

Then in his book “The First Men on the Moon” (1901), Wells described the inhabitants of the Moon as short creatures with gray skin, large heads and large black eyes. Wells also described similar creatures in the novel “War of the Worlds” (1898).

After that, stories with aliens with big heads and big eyes spread among fiction authors in the early 20th century.

The Gray archetype really took hold in mass consciousness after the Betty and Barney Hill kidnapping story in 1965. They claimed they were abducted by aliens from a third planet in the Zeta Reticuli system.

This story became a huge sensation in the USA and did not leave the pages of newspapers for a long time. Although neither Betty nor Barney Hill provided detailed descriptions of the appearances of the creatures that allegedly abducted them, they generally used drawings of humanoid creatures with large heads and huge eyes to illustrate newspaper publications about these abductions.

Steven Spielberg who also used the image of Gray in his movie, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” also helped shape the image. In the same year creatures very similar to Gray appeared in Star Wars.

After that, the image of Gray finally became a stereotype and firmly entered popular culture. The Gray has appeared in nearly every alien-related television series.

So, Gray appeared in the series “The X-Files”, “Black Sky”, “SG-1 Stargate”, “Babylon 5”, as well as in many films and computer games.