Grays The image of the alien in UFO
culture has generally been dominated by a fetus-like entity with a
large,
bald head (more pear-shaped than round). Usually the being is small
compared
to humans. Often the limbs are described as thinner or more slender,
but
the more closely universal rule is that such aliens are never fat or
obese.
Current convention labels approximations to this stereotypical UFOnaut
with the term ìGrays.î Ostensibly this is because of
grayish
skin tones usually being associated with this body type. In practice,
absence
of this defining trait does not inhibit use of the label so long as a
big
bald head appears somewhere in the description.
The project of assembling a
history
of this alien stereotype with a view to understanding its origins and
rise
to dominance is a daunting one, because there are special hazards.
There
are no maps to guide us. Therefore, this encyclopedia entry should be
regarded
as a pioneering effort, not as the final word.
We will start this history by
offering
the proposition that the idea underlying the Grays was constructed in
the
19th century.
Copyright © 1997 by Argonaut &
William Louis McDonald
Collection of typical
ìGraysî
drawn by
forensic artist William Louis McDonald
Images that fit loosely the definition
of Grays can be found here and there in art and myths long predating
the
modern era. Finding them is an easy and pleasant diversion. Take the
Greco-Egyptian
painting of mortuary house 21 at Tuna-Gebel. It has an entity with a
large
smooth head and very slender build that includes a pencil-neck. Few
would
quarrel that the look matches that of the Grays. The fact that the
being
is the shadow of the deceased represented symbolically as a black
emaciated
corpse makes it questionable that the look carries the modern idea.
(Baines
and Melek, 1990)
Dr. Gregory Little has found a
description
of the watchman at the gates of Sheol in the Hebrew Book of Enoch as
gray
in color, short like a child, and taking on a somewhat human appearance
that he says left him stunned. (Little, 1994) Iíve described
elsewhere
items from ancient Denmark and the Congo whose facial features mimic
the
exotic facets of Whitley Strieberís ìvisitor.î
(Kottmeyer,
1995)
Such images are quite scattered
and
could be random outcomes of the immense creativity of artists exploring
hundreds of permutations. There is no evidence of deeper linkages
between
them and current UFO beliefs, and no hint of historical connections. As
a parallel example, ponder how some short bald fairies ended up in Star
Trek, Next Generation Starfleet uniforms, even though the painting was
done 1880 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyleís father. (Philpotts, 1978)
One may not be able to rule out some swirly space-time anomaly causing
such things, but coincidence has to be the favored judgement.
The trait of big-headedness can
be
found associated with aliens inhabiting the sun in Pierre
Boitardís
Mussee des familles (1838), but the beings possess hair and otherwise
seem
completely human. This seems a simple way of representing higher
intelligence
in such beings. I consider it slightly outside the definition of a
Gray.
(Pinvidic, 1993)
The idea underlying the Grays did
not and could not exist before the idea of evolution. Christian
theology
held that God created life in the first week of creation. Each species
was designed optimally for its niche in the hierarchy of nature, and,
presumably,
given all the fuss over the Ark, would never be recreated.
Transformation
of form or future improvement on present design held no place in such a
worldview. Evolution was heretical and rarely considered at length
prior
to the 19th century. It is to one of the proponents of an early version
of evolution, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, that we will turn to for an
important
element of out history.
Lamarck was an early opponent of
the ideas of special creation and catastrophism. Nature did everything
little by little and successively. Where earlier thinkers spoke of a
great
chain of being with each species created specifically for its place,
Lamarck
felt that varying environmental pressures created new needs and
increased
the use of certain organs to make them more perfect while adding to the
organismís complexity. Conversely, ìÖthe permanent
disuse
of an organ, arising from a change of habits, causes a gradual
shrinkage
and ultimately the disappearance and even extinction of that
organ.î
(Lamarck, 1809;1963)
Lamarck regarded man as a
probable
product of evolution. The process, he felt, reached the limits of
complexity
and perfection; and, while noting individual instances of the
perfecting
or degradation of reason, will, and morality, was not compelled to
speculate
on the future of the human form. Since manís intelligence and
powers
protect him from the voracity of any animal, man could potentially
multiply
indefinitely, but he believed the Sublime author installed a safety
feature:
ìÖnature has given him numerous passions which
unfortunately
develop with his intelligence, and thus set up a great obstacle to the
extreme multiplication of individuals of his species. It seems that man
is responsible for keeping down the numbers of his kind; for I have
hesitation
in saying the earth will never be covered by the population that it
might
support; several of its habitable regions will always be sparsely
populated
in turns, although the periods of these fluctuations are, so far as we
are concerned, immeasurable.î (Lamarck, 1809; 1963) Man
ìÖassuredly
presents the type of highest perfection that nature will attain
toÖ.î
(Lamarck, 1809; 1963)
Towards 1866, a Lamarckian named
Alpheus Hyatt indicated his studies of fossils were providing a less
optimistic
understanding of the process of evolution. Just as individuals slip
into
senility and decrepitude at the end of life, groups like races and
species
display a senile phase before going extinct. This theory of racial
senescence
later becomes an indispensable feature of the doctrine of orthogenesis.
It held that the organism was not shaped by natural selection, but by
processes
internal to the germ plasm that caused modification along trend-lines
that
ran on until they became over-developed and detrimental to survival.
Examples
of this process could be found in the huge antlers of the Irish elk,
the
demise of the sabre-toothed tiger, and the massiveness of dinosaurs.
Hyatt
himself believed man was already showing senile and regressive
features.
(Bowler, 1983)
The writings of Herbert Spencer,
another Lamarckian, provide us with the next step in the development of
the idea underlying the Grays. In his work The Principles of Biology
(1875),
he speculates at length on the human future. He feels there will be
ìlarger-brained
descendentsî and the brain will have more convolutions, a more
developed
structure. Asserting the existence of ìan apparent connection
between
higher cerebral development and prolonged sexual maturity,î
evidence
that excessive expenditure of mental activity during education causes
complete
or partial infertility, and conversely that ìwhere exceptional
fertility
exists there is a sluggishness of mind;î Spencer concluded
further
evolution may be expected to cause a decline in his power of
reproduction.
(Spencer, 1875)
There most likely would be
greater
delicacy of manipulation, better coordination of complex movements, and
a ìcorresponding development of perceptive and executive
faculties.î
There would also be greater power of self-regulation and higher
emotional
development. He would be more moral. Crimes and cruelties would cease.
Of strength and agility, Spencer doubted there would be further
improvement.
He does not explicitly articulate that a general degeneration of the
rest
of the body would follow, but that is now only a couple of steps away.
(Spencer, 1875)
We should digress to point out
that
Darwin does not belong to this line of development. His theory of
evolution
by natural selection builds in part on Lamarckís arguments
against
special creation and catastrophism while stripping animal evolution of
its central mechanism of use-inheritance. The issue of Darwinís
views on progress is a notoriously thorny subject, and on the future
form
of man he was silent. He seemed to think some ongoing natural selection
existed in the destruction of more primitive peoples. However, he was
also
concerned that natural selection no longer operated to scythe down the
sickly and degenerate. Any slow evolution of mankind, however,
paled
next to his pet-horror, the eventual and inevitable ice-death of the
earth
under the aegis of a cooling sun. ìTo think of the progress of
millions
of years with every continent swarming with good and enlightened men
all
ending in thisÖSic transit gloria mundi with a vengeance.î
(Darwin
quoted by Desmond and Moore, 1991)
Alfred Russell Wallace,
Darwinís
co-discoverer of natural selection, believed the human physique was no
longer subject to natural forces. War killed off the strongest and
bravest,
he thought. Skin color and hair perhaps still evolved, but the body
remained
an upright ape. The human species was still capable of spectacular
advances
with womenís rights giving females free choice in marriage and
allowing
them to reject males who were chronically diseased, intellectually
weak,
idle, or utterly selfish. (Brackman, 1980) These matters, however,
belonged
to the moral and spiritual realms, not the realm of manís
physical
being.
Thomas Henry Huxley, the
eraís
most prominent Darwinian, also lies outside this line of development,
but
bears special attention and caution. Scholars have caricatured him
alternately
as a naÔve advocate of progress and a purveyor of cosmic
pessimism.
These extreme interpretations derive from selective focus on separate
facets
of a carefully balanced view blending the lessons of natural history
and
social history.
Early writings indicate he
ìhad
no confidence in the doctrine of ultimate happiness,î but it was
impossible for him to be blind to the improvements in life that science
was making manifest around him in his personal sphere. (Desmond, 1994)
Huxley often argued with Spencer over the nature of evolutionary and
social
progress. Huxley soon developed the metaphor of society advancing,
insect-like,
from grub to butterfly. There are periods of repressive restraint, dark
ages, that are broken in dramatic moults like the French revolution.
Each
moult moves us closer to a butterfly state of man, albeit that may
prove
to be terribly distant. (Desmond, 1994)
In 1894 he offered his mature
statement
on these matters in Evolution and Ethics and we see the same balancing.
He rejects utopia, ìthe prospect of attaining untroubled
happiness,
or a state which can, even remotely, deserve the title of perfection,
appears
to me as misleading an illusion as ever dangled before the eyes of poor
humanity.î Yet, ìthat which lies before the human race is
a constant struggle to maintain and improve.î (Huxley quoted in
Paradis
and Williams, 1989)
The theory of evolution
encourages
no millennial expectations, he writes: ìThere is no hope that
mere
human beings will ever possess enough intelligence to select the
fittest.î
(Paradis and Williams, 1989) He sees ìno limit to the extent to
which intelligence and will, guided by sound principles of
investigation
and organized in common effort, may modify the conditions for a period
than that now covered by history. And much may be done to change the
nature
of man himselfÖ(we) ought to be able to do something towards
curbing
the instincts of savagery in civilized men [thus permitting] a larger
hope
of abatement of the essential evil of the worldÖî (Paradis
and
Williams, 1989)
Evolution, however, permits both
progressive and retrogressive development. ìThe most daring
imagination
will hardly venture upon the suggestion that the power and the
intelligence
of man can ever arrest the procession of the great year.î
Eventually,
ìthe evolution of our globe shall have entered so far upon its
downward
course that the cosmic process resumes its sway; and, once more, the
State
of Nature prevails over the surface of our planet.î This is an
allusion
to the thermodynamic heat death of the Earth. (Paradis and Williams,
1989)
To point to these latter quotes and
label
it cosmic pessimism has the perverse air of saying that someone who
expects
to achieve some measure of happiness and success and die at 120 is
being
depressing. Huxley dialectically balanced optimism and pessimism in a
manner
he felt most people did. (Paradis and Williams, 1989; Hillegas, 1974)
Huxley
nowhere comments on the future biological shape of man as Spencer did,
nor does he dwell on the implications of the possibility of his
retrogressive
modification.
The final steps in the development of
the
idea underlying the Grays were made by one of Huxleyís students.
The student thought Huxley was the greatest man he ever knew and when
he
published his first book he sent his teacher a note that read:
May 1895
I am sending you a little book that I
fancy
may be of interest to you. The central ideaóof degeneration
following
securityówas the outcome of a certain amount of biological
study.
I daresay your position subjects you to a good many such displays of
the
range of authors but I have this excuseóI was one of your
students
at the Royal College of Science and finally (?): The book is a very
little
one. (Quoted in Smith, 1986)
It was a work of
fiction that describes
a travelerís encounter with a delicate little people of the far
future. The first person is described as ìa slight
creatureóperhaps
4 feet highóclad in a purple tunic, girdled at the waist with a
leather belt. Sandals or huskins were on his feet; his legs were bare
to
the knees and his head was bareÖHe struck me as being a very
beautiful
and graceful creature, but indescribably frail. His flushed face
reminded
me of the more beautiful kind of consumptiveóthat hectic beauty
of which you used to hear so much about.î As he observes more of
them he notes their Dresden china prettiness had peculiarities. They
had
some curly hair that did not go past the neck and cheek. There was no
trace
of beard or other facial hair. The lips were thin. The ears were
singularly
minute. Chins were small and ran to a point. The eyes were large, but
mild
and indifferent.
There is nothing said about the size
of the head, and the intelligence of these people is slight. Their
behavior
is child-like and playful and they show a lack of interest in the
traveler.
There was little to distinguish the sexes. The traveler eventually
learns
the name of this beautiful raceóEloi. He also learns of a second
raceóthe Morlocksówhich are described as a white,
ape-like
human spider. They tend the underworld of machines that make the utopia
of the aristocratic Eloi possible.
The title of the story was The Time
Machine. The student was H.G. Wells. His boast to Huxley that it was
based
on an amount of biological study is easily proven. Four years earlier
he
had written a non-fiction essay titled Zoological Retrogression that
displayed
his familiarity with the biological literature involving degeneration.
In it he describes a popular and poetic formulation of evolution as a
steadily
rising mountain slope that he terms Excelsior biology. Proclaiming it
lacking
any satisfactory confirmation in geological biology or embryology, he
argues
degeneration has entire parity with progressive trends. He points to
ascidians,
cirripeds, copepods, corals, sea-mats, oysters, mussels, and mites as
examples.
Advance has been fitful and uncertain. There is no guarantee in
scientific
knowledge of manís permanence or permanent ascendancy.
Huxleyís
teachings are apparent except for one point of divergence. Wells
concludes
The Coming Beast must certainly be reckoned in any anticipatory
calculations
in the Coming Man. (Philmus and Hughes, 1975)
Though Wells believed he was swimming
against the stream of mass opinion in this essay, some historians would
argue he was being swept along by the currents of his time. The concept
of degeneration was not new and the Victorian eraís concerns
over
the permanent underclass bred in urban areas like London had spawned a
theory of urban degeneration that held powerful appeal to the British
after
1885 no matter what their politics. (Nye, 1985) This degeneration
scare,
as it has been termed, was part of a yet larger trend of cultural
pessimism
spreading among western intellectuals. (Herman, 1997) Peter Bowler, an
expert on evolutionary theories of the era speculates that E. Ray
Lankesterís
book Degeneration is a likely source of the ideas behind ìThe
Time
Machine.î (Bowler, 1989) The unavoidable caveat to this
attribution
is that the concept of degeneration was present in so many forums from
medical journals like The Lancet to much popular fiction. Wells could
have
been influenced by a variety of sources.
The 11th chapter of The Time Machine
takes the reader beyond the time of the Eloi and Morlocks to a farther
future where the Earth approaches its end. Life had grown sparse and
was
in obvious regression. The dominant form was an ungainly monster crab
smeared
in slime. He goes another thirty million years into the future and only
lichen and liverworts remained. That and a black, round, hopping thing
with tentacles trailing from it. It seems like Alpheus Hyatt writ
large;
life as a whole falls into senescence as everything becomes extinct.
(Eisenstein,
1976)
The Eloi come halfway to our image
of the Gray in short and fragile bodies being indicative of a
degenerate
evolutionary history. What is missing is the big bald head. Wells began
playing with that part of the image maybe as early as 1885 for an
address
before a student debating society. It was written out for publication
in
a facetious book review for the Pall Mall Budget, 9 November 1893.
ìOf
a Book Unwritten, The Man of the Year Millionî is a short piece
with
no ambitions of wanting to be taken seriously. Wells imagines a book
titled
The Necessary Characters of Man of the Remote Future deduced from the
Existing
Stream of Tendency. Though easily missed, Wells is telegraphing his
intent
to play upon the ideas of orthogenesis which as its name implies dealt
with straight-line trends in the fossil record. Just as a fish is
molded
to swimming and a bird is molded to flight, manís form will be
determined
by the trait of intelligence. We already see the decay of much of the
animal
part of man: the loss of hair, the loss of teeth, the diminution of
jaw,
slighter mouth and ears. Athleticism yields to a subtle mind in
real-world
competition. The coming man, then, will clearly have a larger brain and
a slighter body than the present. Wells:
Behold the dim strange vision of
the latter day face suggested by loss of unused features: Eyes large,
lustrous,
beautiful soulful; above them, no longer separated by rugged brow
ridges,
is the top of the head, a glistening hairless dome, terete and
beautiful;
no craggy nose rises to disturb by its unmeaning shadows the symmetry
of
that calm face, no vestigial ears project; the mouth is a small
perfectly
round aperture, toothless and gumless, unanimal, no futile emotions
disturbing
its roundness as it lies, like the harvest moon or the evening star, in
the wide firmament of the face. (Quoted by Hughes, 1993)
Potentially, manís knowledge of
organic chemistry will supplant the use of a stomach and alimentary
canal
and the brain will swim in a nutritive bathósome clear, mobile
and
amber liquid. In still deeper time the cooling Earth will force a
retreat
to galleries and laboratories deep inside the bowels of the planet
following
the diminishing supply of heat with boring machinery and glaring
artificial
lighting. Wells takes pleasure in noting the whole of this imaginary
book
may vanish in the smoke of a pipe with no great botheróone of
the
great advantages of unwritten literature.
But of course it did not vanish and
did become a great bother. It ended up in a book that would guarantee a
very enduring life. The book was War of the Worlds (1898). Mars in an
ancient
world and evolution has proceeded farther than on Earth, thus is the
logical
setting for Man of the Year Million. The Martians were 4-foot diameter
round heads. They had very large dark-colored eyes, no nostrils, and no
ears per se. They had a fleshy beak for a mouth. The internal anatomy
was,
in a word, simple. They had no entrails and did not eat. Rather, they
injected
blood from other creatures, most notably a type of biped with flimsy
skeletons
and feeble musculature, and a round head with large eyes set in flinty
sockets.
The Martians were absolutely without
sex and allied tumultuous emotions. They budded off the parent.
Wellsís
fictional narrator explicitly credits the author of the Pall Mall
Budget
book review with forecasting such a creature, albeit in a foolish,
facetious
tone. Noting that many a truth is said in jest, the idea seemed likely
that Martians had once been like us but with a brain evolved at the
expense
of the rest of the body. They turn out to also be
telepathic.
The Martians die off at the end of the war because of their
vulnerability
to earth's microorganisms. There were none on Mars, probably
because
their science eliminated them ages before. We would say nowadays
that their immune systems had degenerated from disuse. (Hughes, 1993)
The mental giantism and diminished
sexuality clearly echo Spencer. It has a Lamarckian sensibility in the
early part of the argument of manís form being molded by the
trait
of intelligence, but Wells does include Darwinian competition in
suggesting
a subtle mind wins over athleticism in the real world. One can fairly
wonder
how many people would accept that premise these days. The basic thrust
that evolution would trend to a grossly overspecialized super-tick,
however,
is decisively orthogenetic. Admittedly, extinction in a foreign
environment
rich in microorganism is not strictly a proof of maladaptation, but
nobody
is meant to think this type of monstrosity is a good thing.
The critical literature on War of
the Worlds generally agrees that the Martians are nightmare extensions
of ourselves and our machine civilization. It is a warning that an
over-reliance
on cold intellect and technology need not lead to better and better.
Basically
it is a moral it shares with The Time Machine. Where the atrophy from
over-reliance
on technology and the brain is played for comic effect in the Pall Mall
Budget, here it is played for horror. That a story with such an
anti-intellectual
moral should come from the pen of a person as intellectual as Wells is
slightly ironic, but not amazing. Science fiction writers are a brainy
bunch, but are perennially worried over the social consequences of
science
and technology.
Wells himself never regarded his
atrophied aliens as a realistic speculation. Though he granted life on
Mars might exist and even speculated on what interesting differences
might
be expected because of the harsh environment, his nonfiction writings
did
not advance the probability that big, bald-headed aliens with
degenerate
bodies existed. (ìThe Things That Live on Marsî reprinted
in Hughes, 1993) The idea that begat the Grays was born as a jest that
never was intended by its author to be taken as a serious scientific
speculation.
óMartin S. Kottmeyer
References
Baines, John, and Malek, Jaromir. The Cultural
Atlas of the World: Ancient Egypt (Andromeda, 1990).
Bowler, Peter. The Eclipse of Darwinism:
Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades Around 1900 (Johns
Hopkins
University Press, 1983).
Bowler, Peter. The Invention of Progress
(Basil Blackwell, 1989).
Brackman, Arnold C. A Delicate Arrangement:
The Strange Case of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace (Times
Books,
1980).
Desmond, Adrian, and Moore, James. DarwinóThe
Life of a Tormented Evolutionist (Warner Books, 1991).
Desmond, Adrian. HuxleyóThe Devilís
Disciple (Michael Joseph, 1994).
Eisenstein, Alex. ìThe Time Machine
and the End of Man,î Science Fiction Studies (July, 1976).
Gentlemanís Magazine, September
1981, reprinted in Philmus, Robert M. and Hughes, David Y. H.G. Wells:
Early Writings in Science and Science Fiction (California University
Press,
1975).
Herman, Arthur. The Idea of Decline in
Human History (Free Press, 1997).
Hughes, David Y. A Critical Edition of
The War of the Worlds (Indiana University Press, 1993).
Hillegas, Mark R. The Future as Nightmare:
H.G. Wells and the Anti-Utopians (Southern Illinois University Press,
1974).
Kottmeyer, Martin. ìIshtar Descendant,î
The Skeptic (1995).
. ìVaricose Brains: Entering a Gray
Areaî Magonia (February 1998).
Lamarck, Jean-Baptist. Zoological Philosophy:
An Exposition With Regard to the Natural History of Animals (Hafner
Publishing,
1963). Originally published in 1809.
Little, Gregory. Grand Illusions
(White Buffalo Books, 1994).
Nye, Robert A. ìSociology: The Irony
of Progressî in Chamberlin, J. Edward, and Gilman, Sander L.
Degeneration:
The Dark Side of Progress (Columbia University Press, 1985).
Paradis, James and Williams, George C.
T.H. Huxleyís Evolution and Ethics with New essays on its
Victorian
and Sociobiological Context (Princeton University Press, 1989).
Philpotts, Beatrice. The Book of Fairies
(Ballantine, 1978).
Pinvidic, Thierry. OVNI vers une Anthopologie
d'un Mythe Contemporain (Editions Heimdal, 1993).
Smith, David C. H.G. Wells: Desperately
Mortal (Yale University Press, 1986).
Spencer, Herbert The Principles of
Biology (D. Appleton, 1875).
POSTSCRIPT: In UFO lore, the Grays are
sometimes good and sometimes evil, but generally they are amoral. In
other
words, they represent multiple aspects of the human
personalityóespecially
the contemporary human (or humanoid)ófor good or ill.
They are usually described as sexually
neuter and perform their hybrid breeding experiments, for the most
part,
through artificial insemination. The gray color symbolizes neutrality
in
morals, sexuality, and emotions. It also symbolizes ìgray
matterî
or intelligence. The eyes are large and black (without pupils) like a
sharkís
eyesóuncaring, one might say. The hairlessness of the Grays is
derived
from the assumption that we are losing our animal
characteristicsóbut
to be replaced by emotionless clones.
The Grays arenít exactly the
good guys or the bad guysótheyíre in a ìgray
area,î
as Martin Kottmeyer has pointed out. They represent human evolution and
its uncertain future. They are analogies of ourselves.
óRonald D. Story