FROM SCIENCE TO SCIENCE FICTION
Within this series I will glean from Martin Kottmeyer’s articles “Varicose Brains, Part 1: Entering a Grey Area,” “Varicose Brains, Part 2: Heading Towards the Future” and “Varicose Brains, Part 3: Headhunt,” Magonia. I will attempt to keep things chronologically. Following I will relate some of the details specifically relevant to the large headed small bodies grey alien archetype in general. These will be from early scientific speculation which lead to early and ongoing science fiction.
Of course, this is not a comprehensive list as, for example, comic books (and many others from fiction to non-fiction) have been saturated with aliens for decades. In that regard, many of the images I collected and posted as the original Fifty Shades of Grey article (see slide show of images at the end of this article).
The Egyptian image known as “Mortuary House 21,” kept at Tuna-Gebel, includes a large headed, diminutive bodied figure. Martin Kottmeyer notes, “the being is the shadow of the deceased represented symbolically as a black emaciated corpse.” In fact, the head is not disproportionally large but appears as such in relation to the body.
This may be somewhat akin to the images I post within the article Announcing series on UFOs, aliens, demons, secret government experiments, Whitley Strieber, Barbara Marciniak & Aleister Crowley which depict other Egyptian antiquities mistaken for depicting grey aliens.
Kottmeyer relates that in Grand Illusion (White Buffalo, 1994 AD, p. 243) Gregory Little relates:
the watchman at the gates of Sheol in the Hebrew Book of Enoch as gray in colour, short like children, and taking on a somewhat human appearance…
Well, Kottmeyer does not provide a citation to the Hebrew book of Enoch aka 3 Enoch which was written by Rabbi Ishmael Ben Elisha the High Priest.
The relevant portion is found in chap XLIV:5 and states:
And I behold the appearance of their face (and, lo, it was) as the appearance of the children of men, and their bodies like eagles. And not only that but (furthermore) the colour of the countenance of the intermediate was like pale grey on account of their deeds, for there are stains upon them until they have become cleaned from their iniquity in the fire.
Those being described are the spirits of the intermediate as opposed to the spirits of the wicked.
They are grey or like pale grey but not “short like children” since according to the historical, cultural and grammatical context “the appearance of the children of men” does not mean little kids but that they looked human as in “somewhat human appearance” even with “bodies like eagles.”
In “Ishtar Descendant,” (The Skeptic, 9, #3, 1995 AD, pp. 12-15) Martin Kottmeyer described, “items from ancient Denmark and the Congo whose facial features mimic the exotic facets of Strieber’s Visitor.”
You can read up on Whitley Strieber’s claim here.
1800s AD
1838 AD, Pierre Boitard employs the imagery of large craniums in his book Musee des familles. The beings in question are otherwise fully human and represent Sun dwelling aliens. The large heads can be seen to be imagery for increased brain size and the supposedly resulting increase intelligence which some authors also take to result in psychic abilities.
1890 AD, Camille Flammarion wrote the following in “Urania” (Estes and Lauriat, 1890 AD, p. 37):
In short, the head had grown, the body had diminished in size. Giants were no longer to be seen…Four permanent causes had modified insensibly the human form; the intellectual faculties and of the brain, the decrease in manual labour and bodily exercise, the transformation of food, and the marriage system.
The first had increased the size of the cranium as compared with the rest of the body; the second had decreased the strength of the limbs; the third had diminished the size of the abdomen and made the teeth finer and smaller; the tendency of the fourth had been rather to perpetuate the classic forms of human beauty: masculine beauty, the nobility of an uplifted countenance, and the graceful outlines of womanhood.
Martin Kottmeyer notes that within the story:
By the 200th century, a single race existed. It was small in stature, light-coloured, and suggested Anglo-Saxon and Chinese descent. Differences converged towards one race, one language, one general government, and one religion.
1875 AD, Herbert Spencer speculates of our “Larger-brained descendents” in his “The Principles of Biology” (D. Appleton, 1875 AD, pp. 494-508). The speculation was that of, as Kottmeyer puts it, “higher cerebral development…Of strength and agility.”
1895 AD, a student of Thomas Henry Huxley at the Royal College of Science named H.G. Wells sent him a book of fiction titled “The Time Machine” wherein is described “a slight creature – perhaps 4 feet high.” Martin Kottmeyer adds that “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.” In fact, the surface dwelling race, the Eloi, were, essentially, androgynous as they had “little to distinguish the sexes” as Kottmeyer terms it.
In the 1898 AD book “War of the Worlds,” H.G. Wells envisages aliens thusly, as per Kottmeyer paraphrase:
The Martians were 4-foot diameter round heads. They had very large dark-coloured 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.
In the 1898 AD book “Ten Thousand Years in a Block of Ice,” Louis Boussenard wrote that “a polar adventurer freezes to death in an iceberg and awakens to a group of small men with large globular heads who float about in the air.”
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