So, does this debunk the concept of grays?

5 Ridiculous Origins of Famous Urban Legends

I was just reading an article on cracked.com. Yeah yeah, I know... I understand that it's a satirical humour site for the most part, but when they write debunking articles they actually do hardcore research. Apparently the concept of gray aliens actually came from a TV show, that just happened to be on television twelve days before Barney & Betty Hill reported their "abduction"...

Almost all of the tropes of the modern alien abduction story come from one place: The Barney and Betty Hill abduction of 1961. The Hills were driving along when they got chased by mysterious lights, had a bout of "missing time" and were later hypnotized into remembering all the usual alien abduction stuff we already went over.

The Hills had totally undermined the typical alien with something no one expected. No one was thinking about gray aliens with large eyes and no noses. No one except for the costume designers working on a popular sci-fi anthology series called The Outer Limits, anyway.

Twelve days before the Hills described their alien encounter under hypnosis, an episode of the show titled "The Bellero Shield" aired, and it featured a peaceful gray alien with large eyes and no nose.

Thoughts?

My thought is that Budd Hopkins totally proved that to be wrong.

Or, the concept of the greys came from the H.G. Wells book "Man of the Year Million" from 1893. Where he got the idea from is unknown to me, although he may have been inspired by ancient cave drawings from the American continents.

en.wikipedia.org...

Nah, looks like a stooge in a pie fight.


Alien from the Bellero Shield (looks nothing like the handsome dude in my avatar)

Also from cracked.com:

reply to post by Xaphan


LL
haven't really been into AA since the early 80's
but im afraid cracked got it wrong and didn't do much research here
or they'd know how old the concept of grays are

from part 3 of a 6 part series at The Secret Sun:

In other words, the classic Grey prototype, which has been reported for several thousand years. Echoes of the Greys have appeared in art and pop culture over the past hundred years or so, but they've been largely absent since ancient times. It was with the Betty and Barney Hill episode that the archetype burst back into the collective consciousness in a major way.

Of course, they did so with Aleister Crowley's Lam contact in a minor way 43 years earlier. And as we'll see in future installments Jack Kirby seemed rather obsessed with the archetype in the 50s as did Outer Limits mask maker Wah Chang in the early 60s.

Skeptics seized on the Grey archetypes on that landmark show to discredit Barney Hill's testimony, only because they were too lazy and smug to research how far back in history that Greys have been reported and depicted in art.www.disclose.tv...
They're not quite so smug now.

***
Let me repeat that: the Hills woke up from their missing time episode in the very same town that Aleister Crowley had lived just months before his own contact experience.

secretsun.blogspot.com...



example of jack kirbys art

reply to post by Xaphan

Twelve days before the Hills described their alien encounter under hypnosis, an episode of the show titled "The Bellero Shield" aired, and it featured a peaceful gray alien with large eyes and no nose.

Of course it was grey in 1961. All televisions were black and white.

Or maybe Outer Limits got the idea from the caricatures drawn and painted on rock hundreds and thousands of years ago. The idea for the features we think of Greys having is certainly not new with the Outer Limits.

reply to post by Xaphan

I looked up the original airing date and it turned out to be 2/10/64. So If that is correct that means that they didn't see that episode. Besides the being does not look nothing like the greys.
Thanks

The Hills didn't describe classic "grays," anyway. Betty Hill always said that the critters on the UFO that took them away were just small people, with the biggest difference being that they had "wrap around" eyes.

Besides, the old Martin Kottmeyer argument that abductees are only hallucinating what they've seen in the media is logically invalid, because there's no way to connect the dots. There's no way to prove exactly how Point A (seeing an alien on TV) results in Point B (seeing an alien in an abduction). Even if it was the case, it makes sense that most aliens would look like the most seen or popular aliens, right? So you'd get a huge number of reports describing aliens that looked like E.T. from the Spielberg movie of the same name -- with glowing fingers and big Einstein eyes, etc. Or scary, bony aliens like those in the movie Alien. But that didn't happen.

No, the biggest thing debunking the notion of grays is the complete and utter lack of any solid evidence of such creatures. Not a single shred of evidence. No need to look any farther than that.

P.S. -- Besides, everybody knows grays originated with the characters of Gidney & Cloyd, the moon men, on Rocky and Bullwinkle (1959/1960). Also on black-and-white TV.

Alien concepts have been supported since Roswell.
Green was a bad choice so perhaps a quick gray application was developed.
At best only Walton might have seen this newly developed makeup but there
is the possibility he saw nothing on either trip to the lake and saucer base
as after lurking around the base he saw only people who sedated him and
sent him back to the lake. The Hills saw what the analyst thought they
saw and perhaps in collusion with expert UFO analysis ready from the
Roswell days to cover the gray story. The only two grey scenarios I heard
that might not even contain any grey but are hyped up by payed anti Tesla
cartel agents to hide the Tesla UFO free energy flyer inventions as their own.

reply to post by Xaphan


There's also this rather interesting article describing the "mother hypothesis" regarding proto-face recognition.

Close Encounters of the Facial Kind

Human facial recognition is a highly specialized ability, and it seems to be pre-wired before birth in specific visual processing areas of the brain. However, the human newborn ability to distinguish between familiar and unfamiliar faces does not develop in infants until about two months of age.4 Up to that time, an infant will respond favorably to nearly any face, familiar or unfamiliar, normal or bizarre, mother or Halloween mask. Of course, all these human-type faces seem to share two quite generalized and nonspecific features, namely a pair of eyes and a nose.

I rather like this particular hypothesis where it's coupled with a subject's susceptibility to social influence in the collective unconscious.

reply to post by Druscilla

Interesting. It just occurred to me how badly parents could mess up a child's psyche if they were to raise their children wearing masks like this without ever letting them see their real face.

That would be an interesting experiment, albeit extremely cruel.

And the ideas for the TV show came from ancient caves in the Bradshaws in Australia



Or perhaps from the Sumerians

reply to post by coyotepoet

Interesting post! Thanks. And thanks to everyone else who replied.

Just for the record I wasn't trying to debunk grays. I was just asking for other opinions on this. It seems as though Cracked didn't really do as much research as they should have. Or maybe they purposely slant facts a little bit to suit the humour.

No, nothing does. We've experienced them, not grey colored either, some are pinky's.

Originally posted by Blue Shift
The Hills didn't describe classic "grays," anyway.

You don't know the case very well, Friedman presented the case with Kathleen Marden (the niece of Betty and Barney Hill) which showed the entities. There was one grey, and he was in a corner the whole time supvervising. The rest I think were hybrids, and one had command over the group. Notice in grey abductions, there is also a supvervisor, except the supvervisor is not a grey but a 7 foot tall insectiod or reptilian.

Originally posted by greyer

Originally posted by Blue Shift
The Hills didn't describe classic "grays," anyway.

You don't know the case very well, Friedman presented the case with Kathleen Marden (the niece of Betty and Barney Hill) which showed the entities. There was one grey, and he was in a corner the whole time supvervising. The rest I think were hybrids, and one had command over the group. Notice in grey abductions, there is also a supvervisor, except the supvervisor is not a grey but a 7 foot tall insectiod or reptilian.

Well they definitely didn't describe them as grays from the TV shows mentioned.

Barney described the figures in the craft and the one who he saw through his binoculars. He never said that it was an alien, it reminded him more a disfigured or misshapen human. By the way he wasn't scared by the look but more by the feel. The "gray" probably had some telepathic abilities and seemed to be very emotionless.

Betty saw more of them but also didn't mention they were word "gray". She compared them to small people with mongoloid features. Later, she saw images of native Americans living high in the mountains at the southern tip of Chile. And she was shocked by the similarities.

This can be somehow related to the experience of Peter Khoury.
You may be right about the supervisor and hybrids thing... The grays seem to appear later as some sort of evolution or development.

Originally posted by marcus33cz
Well they definitely didn't describe them as grays from the TV shows mentioned.

Barney described the figures in the craft and the one who he saw through his binoculars. He never said that it was an alien, it reminded him more a disfigured or misshapen human. By the way he wasn't scared by the look but more by the feel. The "gray" probably had some telepathic abilities and seemed to be very emotionless.

Betty saw more of them but also didn't mention they were word "gray". She compared them to small people with mongoloid features. Later, she saw images of native Americans living high in the mountains at the southern tip of Chile. And she was shocked by the similarities.

This can be somehow related to the experience of Peter Khoury.
You may be right about the supervisor and hybrids thing... The grays seem to appear later as some sort of evolution or development.

Hey marcus33cz thanks for the reply,

Remember in this subject we cannot trust the media because of the national coverup that has been going on for over 60 years now. My opinion is that the reason why they could not tell us about the 'craft' which the honored men claimed was from outer space was because the 'people' from outer space look like insects and it scared them so much to see that an insectlike species has dominance over man. Did you know that every single man of Colonel William "Butch" Blanchard's crew later in life admitted that the ship was from outer space except for one?

I don't think one person wants to believe that an ET race is so much more powerful than us and looks more like an insect - we would associate that to be a predatoristic trait.

I do believe in aliens because I believe in magic, and I was shown magic, it was like I just started the belief without seeing anything.

One other thing I do believe that others may not believe - people. Not all people are liars, and I believe the ones who are not. It brings us to a topic of events happening in the 70s. People witnessed large balls of orange glowing light, then they had an hour of missing time. Like Betty and Barney Hill they went to psychologists who specialized in regressing the memories of war veterans to help them deal with the unconscious trauma it is creating for them. We do not know (because the media didn't tell us) how much Benjamin Simon believed in the possibility of aliens after he saw Betty and Barney, those in the know mention he was completely bewildered.