The Little Grey Aliens Have Features We Associate With Being Brainy. Yet Article On This Offers Few Brainy Details

An MIT conference speaker on UFO subjects declared "43%" of those reporting actual contact with off-Earth human-like beings described the "things" as grey or greyish in skin tone.  There you go.  I like gunmetal grey in fast cars.  I like grey-blackish colors for stucco on houses, stuccco being the most common house exterior in "my Southwest."


Typical additional features include: smaller than humans in size, big head (hence big brain), reeeeeally big eyes, limbs about like ours, definitely bipedal.  In 2000 MD Steven Novella, writing in the journal of the New England Skeptical Society, put out an intriguing idea:  these "little greys" are a collection of the features humans associate with high intelligence.  I think this could tell us something, so I start reading.  Spoiler alert:  I don't think Novella did much of a job of developing his idea.

Novella writes:  The little gray aliens look incredibly human. As one writer put it, “aliens have no business looking so human.” The probability that an alien race, the product of a completely separate evolutionary history, would look even vaguely humanoid is vanishingly small."   As a semi-serious student of evolutionary biology, I agree. 

I will add that we only have one case of evolution (Earth's) to tell us about the subject.  Further, it is an assumption that an alien race would be produced by a completely separate evolution.  With current evidence, nothing else is logical, but nothing on this subject is provable.  I recall how startled I was to first learn that we had discovered Amino Acids, of all things, originating in meteors or other nonEarthly places.  What could seem, even to a casual student of Earth biochemistry, more human than the very building blocks of our proteins?

Novella:  "The aliens, however, do not just appear as humans, they appear like humans with those traits we psychologically associate with intelligence exaggerated. If, for example, we compare humans to apes we can observe that humans have larger relative craniums, smaller faces with more [gracefully slender] features, and less hair. If we take a human and then increase the cranium size, make the face smaller and all features more gracile, and take away the hair, you end up with a typical gray alien. . . . "   Fair enough.  Point taken. Except for the face size--grey alien depictions I've seen had large faces to fit their heads.

"The contactees of the 1950’s described contacts with glowing humans from Venus, Moonmen, and Martians (isn’t that where aliens were from in the ‘50s?). Such stories seem ridiculous by today’s standards, but they were the beginning of the UFO story. The aliens then changed over time, taking many different forms from hairy dwarves to giant insects. Eventually the little grey alien makes his appearance with the Betty and Barney Hill alleged abduction in 1966. For reasons described above, the image of the little greys resonated with the human psyche. They become increasingly reported until the 1970s, when they emerge as the 'victors' and become solidified as the standard alien icon."

My reaction is:  is that all ya got?  I expected him to say small geniuses like Stephen Hawking were somehow what we expected in brainy people.  I expected him to explain how big "bug-eyes" were associated with high IQs and Stanford professors.  Did he spell out how we think "less hair" is smarter?  No.  Given Einstein in the first half of the 20th century, why do we think hair is dumb?    Some describe the Greys as sexless.  Do we have a stereotype that being sexless makes you smarter?  I don't think so.  Clearly you will have more time for good thinking if you're not distracted by sex.  All the fooling around induced by sexual interest just has to feel anti-intellectual when one sits in the ivory tower.   I thought Novella was going to give us a full essay on body type and expected intelligence, but it's two paragraphs in a many-page essay that "the aliens are just too predictable, too explainable by human thought."  I agree; they are, at least if you assume that no Off-Earth, unproven Wise One(s) is/are helping manage the laws of nature and biology.

I decided to post on Novella for another reason.  His review of Roswell snagged my attention on these points.
"Rancher Mac Brazel found some strange-looking debris [and] called the local Army Air Force base to report that he had found “one of them flying saucers,” a report that was dutifully forwarded to the press by the base’s PR officer. . . After further investigation, however, General Ramey, the investigating officer, reported that the recovered debris was actually from a weather balloon (it was actually from a spy balloon called Project Mogul, but this fact would not become public until the 1980’s)."

I'm probably trying too hard on Roswell.  The hint here that I am is I can't read five lines of some guy summarizing it, so he can make a fairly unrelated point [that aliens look how we expect smart people to look] without tripping all over his summary.  I'm assuming he's a careful writer who has a strong desire to only write accurate things.  Beyond calling Ramey the "investigating officer," that is.  Colonel Blanchard was the on-site investigating officer, directing an investigation led by his intelligence officer.  I've never heard any claim that Ramey even came to Roswell.  Here are my bigger "trips."
1)  "Until the 1980s" refers to a report issued in the mid-1990s by Lt. McAndrew.  This MD is a stickler for detail.
2) Brazel said he found a saucer?  I haven't found a credible source claiming that Brazel himself said it wasn't an Earth-origin crash.  There's more to read--what a sweet thought, as if I hadn't had enough of this for now.  If (first if) there is such a source and (second if) if it's correct that Mack said that, that's big.  If the first guy in the field said he found something too different to be "us," that's significant.
3) Brazel's report wasn't dutifully sent to the press.  Novella is at least 99% wrong here, and the devil is in the details.  PR officer Haut's press report of "a flying disk in our unit's possession" came from Colonel Blanchard's order to make that report, and it came about two days after the Army first heard from Brazel.  Blanchard had time to send men out, bring debris back, and do an initial evaluation of Brazel's report, as an investigating officer would.  Then he chose his own words.  The difference isn't trivial; it's massive.  And it's the sort of gap I feel like I keep finding in the work of the scientific skeptics who don't believe Roswell was alien.  See my post about what the NY Times science reporter chose to focus on when Lt. McAndrew released his report. 
4) "It was actually a spy balloon . . . but this fact" [only later came out].
Here we have a careful skeptical writer being careless in a way that again reminds me of the NY Times science reporter W. Braun's article I discussed in an earlier post.  First Lt James McAndrew, USAF reserve, in his 1994 report said there was no Roswell debris left to examine.  Let's stop there.  With no debris left to examine, we're not going to establish anything that can be called a fact.  Didn't anybody take any photos that were squirreled away in a report?  No?  Then we need debris to know.

Lt. McAndrew goes on to report that the most reasonable explanation was that it had been a Project Mogul item.   His reasoning is detailed, sensible, and inferential, but he doesn't say "I have clear proof it was Mogul."  He says we can be sure because this is the most plausible conclusion.  Many of those who agree with his conclusion render "most plausible conclusion" into "fact becoming public." The official Air Force report (Weaver & McAndrew) had concluded (p. 9) "[…] the material recovered near Roswell was consistent with a balloon device and most likely from one of the MOGUL balloons that had not been previously recovered." Yet skeptic Novella manages to extract a "fact" from a report using language that is more tentative--"consistent with" and "most likely from."  Also, McAndrew called an Army surgeon whose dad had brought pieces of debris to show his family the night of the discovery by the military, but days after numerous civilians nearby had come to see for themselves.  The surgeon says all of his family were always of the opinion the stuff did not come from Earth, but this conclusion was disregarded by McAndrew.    

Two more thoughts.  The record of Project Mogul flights seems to show that the launching timed about a day right before Brazel found the debris, didn't actually make it into the sky.  It didn't get up; it was scrubbed.  There may be the problem of explaining the Corona Crash with a spy balloon that never flew. 

2nd thought:  The fundamental Roswell problem--Firm Disregard of Many Dozens of First-hand Witnesses who believe crash material was Unearthly.    And at least some of these witnesses are really solid citizens.  These five words, Firm Disregard of First-hand Testimony, are probably The Major Issue I find in reading about Roswell and being satisfied that the government and the sensible people like Carl Sagan are right.  Since my last post I've watched a speech by a very reliable person, Colonel Jesse Marcel, Jr, in which he says that Lt.McAndrew called him while doing the 1994 Air Force investigation.  The Colonel was 11 when his dad woke the family up in the middle of the night to show them material, both father and dad agree, not like any other Earth-made material.  Col. Marcel said:  The Lt. said to me on the phone, 'I don't know what you saw, Colonel.  Sounds to me like you saw pieces of a balloon, maybe not a regular weather balloon, but a balloon.'  Marcel goes on:  I knew what I saw, and I told him that, and all of my family knew what it was, too, and it wasn't made on Earth.  

Here's my bias:  Colonel Marcel by himself, at the site, living in Roswell, backed up by his father's public account given years later, is more believable than the evidence marshalled against an ET crash.  To summarize:  he says:  My dad brought home nonEarth material after his first look at the crash site.  I saw it.  We agreed about it.  So did our mom.  Then he came home two days later and said we couldn't talk about it again.  I went on to become an MD and Air Force Colonel.  I know what I saw and I know what it was.  I know my dad knew it was not from Earth, either.  Our family always agreed on that.
Yet even he can't produce physical evidence. 

Marcel senior was excited enough to wake up a family at 1 a.m. but didn't take any pictures and stash the film away to use years later?  He may have been obliged to turn all the film in or maybe he didn't carry a camera.  I'd think, no matter what the stuff was, you would take 150 pictures of it if you're making enough of it to be investigating in the middle of the night. 

Here's a new one I never thought of:  Intelligence officer Marcel didn't go to bed.  He went on through the night, so compelling was what he found.  They found an atypical spy balloon that nobody but a rancher or two knew about.  The rancher couldn't tell what it was, so he's no threat to know we were spying on the Russians.  And his commander wouldn't wait until morning to see what he had gathered? 

As I say 100 other times with the true scientific Roswell explanation, give me a break.  Whatever else it explains well, it fails to explain dozens of cases of human behavior reacting to the event.  Example:  politician Montoya and his Anaya assistants.  Urgently calls his aides to get him off the base before the Army does something drastic with him, tells them he saw something that was not from Earth and they didn't like that he saw it, and then drinks himself into oblivion in the next hour or two.  No way a few pieces of a spy balloon account for this.

So writing this was better than going to church on a cool Sunday in April, or bothering to take time to eat breakfast?  Guess so.  1:26 p.m. Sunday