Frustrated
Mar. 21st, 2007 11:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphiloI remember when Whitley Strieber's book on alien abduction came out and the town was plastered with posters of what we've now come to think of as a "grey". You know, one of those silver-skinned dudes with the huge, black, almond-shaped eyes. That's when the archetype got a grip. Before then the popular idea of an alien was a funny little goblin with a fishbowl on his head or an aerial growing out of it.
Where do these images come from? Is it down to Strieber? Or Stephen Spielberg? Or is it just possibly because aliens really do look like that?
Whenever I'm at a loose end and Googling seems like a fun idea I wind up looking at the paranormal sites. They're my porn- ghosts, cryptoids, aliens, lost civilisations- all that kind of thing.
I learned some interesting stuff yesterday. Did you know that...
There's a huge alien base on the dark side of the moon?
That Armstrong and Aldrin were watched by alien craft from a nearby crater rim?
That Nasa routinely airbrushes alien artefacts out of its pix of the lunar surface?
There are no fewer than 17 alien races with representatives on Earth?
A lot of the people turning out this- er- information have doctorates or professorships in relevant subjects or they're retired military officers or former civil servants and you think, "Wow, impressive" but then you read them and you find that they don't do grammar or footnotes or any of those other things that induce trust in the reader and that they'll cite a faker like Billy Meiers as if no question had ever been raised about his probity. It's disheartening. Where's the clever stuff? You've got the true believers on the one hand and the hardline sceptics on the other and there's nothing at all in the middle.
Because UFOs do exist, right? Not all that footage is faked and not all of it can be explained as weather balloons and it would be really nice to know what's going on.
Where do these images come from? Is it down to Strieber? Or Stephen Spielberg? Or is it just possibly because aliens really do look like that?
Whenever I'm at a loose end and Googling seems like a fun idea I wind up looking at the paranormal sites. They're my porn- ghosts, cryptoids, aliens, lost civilisations- all that kind of thing.
I learned some interesting stuff yesterday. Did you know that...
There's a huge alien base on the dark side of the moon?
That Armstrong and Aldrin were watched by alien craft from a nearby crater rim?
That Nasa routinely airbrushes alien artefacts out of its pix of the lunar surface?
There are no fewer than 17 alien races with representatives on Earth?
A lot of the people turning out this- er- information have doctorates or professorships in relevant subjects or they're retired military officers or former civil servants and you think, "Wow, impressive" but then you read them and you find that they don't do grammar or footnotes or any of those other things that induce trust in the reader and that they'll cite a faker like Billy Meiers as if no question had ever been raised about his probity. It's disheartening. Where's the clever stuff? You've got the true believers on the one hand and the hardline sceptics on the other and there's nothing at all in the middle.
Because UFOs do exist, right? Not all that footage is faked and not all of it can be explained as weather balloons and it would be really nice to know what's going on.
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no subject
Date: 2007-03-21 04:14 pm (UTC)I read Strieber's earlier books with anxiety--it was he who said those aliens "smelled like iodine and wet cardboard." God. That's the stuff I think about at three in the morning.
How did they enter our collective unconscious, anyway? Did he start it?
Did I tell you about the cartoon I saw that showed four of those aliens carrying out a man in his pajamas, and his wife was sitting up in their bed; the caption read, "Do you want me to tape the Tonight Show or what?"
I once went to the county fair, and you could buy Slurpee cherry drinks in green plastic glasses shaped like aliens with their slot mouths and big eyes on the heads.
no subject
Date: 2007-03-21 04:59 pm (UTC)The first time I saw the funny face on the Streiber poster I didn't know what it was- though I guessed. So he must have been the first- or one of the first- to picture aliens that way.
I read an article once that pointed out that Greys look very much like foetuses. This is true, but I'm not sure what, if anything, it's meant to prove.