Hello and welcome to the Anthropocene Reviewed, a podcast where we reviewed different facets

of the human-centered planet on a five-star scale.

I'm John Green, and today I'll be reviewing rock paper scissors and the little gray aliens

that humans began imagining, or possibly seeing, in the early 20th century.

The 1980s were full of aliens.

There was the Steven Spielberg movie ET, of course, but also endless accounts of alien

abduction, including the wildly popular book Communion, which featured an alien on its cover.

Alien eggs, in which baby aliens were in sconce in green goo, became a popular toy, and

purported eyewitnesses to alien visitation began popping up all around the world.

By the 80s, maybe in part because in a post-Nixon America people had lost trust in the government,

it suddenly seemed plausible that decades earlier the US military had captured child-sized

alien creatures from a flying saucer in Roswell, New Mexico.

I mean other conspiracy theories were true.

The thing about all these aliens is they had a lot in common with each other.

They were small and hairless, with gray or tan skin, large black eyes, four limbs, and

disproportionately large heads.

Today they are known as gray aliens, or just grays, and they've become one of the central

ways we picture intelligent life on other planets.

Versions of them appear in all sorts of science fiction movies, but also very commonly in stories

of alien abduction, going back much further than the 1980s.

In an 1893 essay called Man of the Year Million, the science fiction author H.G. Wells imagined

what humans of the distant future might look like, and Wells wrote,

...