It's hard to pinpoint when the so-called "grays" first made their appearance. Several reports from the 1954 UFO wave described little creatures with large black eyes, but researchers have not found any substantial reports of the grays until the early 1970's.

Travis Walton claimed he saw small beings with large heads and big, dark eyes when he was abducted in 1975. Walton also said he saw three normal looking "humans" aboard the UFO, indicating that there were still some good old-fashioned aliens around.

The mid to late 70's saw an increase in UFO abduction reports. A majority of cases involved beings that appeared to be what we now refer to as the grays.

The movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, portrayed its aliens as big eyed, large headed, gray creatures. So even by 1977 this shape was already starting to become the cultural ideal of a typical extraterrestrial.

THE HOMOGENIZATION OF THE ALIEN

Today, unless someone has been living in a cave, anyone seeing a picture of a gray would identify it as a space alien. The grays have wormed their way into almost every part of our society. Television commercials portray grays frolicking at night over beers. Magazine ads show us grays coveting the newest line of sports sneakers. They are on tee shirts, bumper stickers, key chains, and anything else that could be used to sell a product. If these creatures do exist, they could conquer us simply by demanding royalty payments on all the merchandise sold using their image.

The grays seem to be more a western hemisphere phenomenon. UFO occupant reports from other parts of the world still show a high diversity of entities. Many UFO groups will no longer accept UFO occupant reports unless it involves a gray, so at least in the U.S. reports of beings other than grays have dwindled.

Like most other things in our society the extraterrestrial has been homogenized down to the basic creature we all know and love. All differences have been eliminated to produce a simple, cuddly, big-eyed alien, fit for mom and dad and all the kids back home. But not me! I'll always remember the time when there were all kinds of different spacemen. I will tell my grandchildren that when I was their age I could pick from a dozen or more of the silly flying saucer folk.

We didn't have fancy schmancy grays, and we had to walk fifteen miles a day through waist-deep snow to see the flying saucers and their many different pilots. My grand kids will smile understandingly at me, hoping I'll soon fall back to sleep so they can continue to watch their gray alien cartoons and play their gray alien video games. I will go back to my happy dreams of space brothers, little hairy dwarfs, and weird glowing giants, wondering: where have all the spacemen gone?