Alien Image PATCHED

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 a obvious- human scientists also can and do learn a lot about an animal by their feces- but where did the idea of short grey or green aliens actually come from in the first place?

Alien image

The trope has pretty much survived ever since in 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.

That said, perhaps no other event solidified the idea of grey aliens in pop-culture more than one of the first ever instances of a supposed real life alien abduction. The people abducted were a husband and wife couple called Barney and Betty Hill in 1961.

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. Her husband, however, was having none of it at first. That is, until two years later when he and Betty underwent hypnosis to try to draw out repressed memories and 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 took the couple aboard their ship and then gave them a thorough and a bit violating examination. At one point, while chatting with Betty in English, but seemingly telepathically, one of the examiners showed her a star chart map of where they came from. 041b061a72