Greys in Fiction: From the Communion Cover to The X-Files and Paul

The Grey did not arrive whole. The beings Betty and Barney Hill described after their September 1961 drive through New Hampshire were, in Betty's dream diary, human-sized men with dark hair and Jimmy Durante noses; it was Barney, under hypnosis with Dr. Benjamin Simon in February 1964, who described short figures with greyish skin and large eyes that wrapped around the sides of the head. John Fuller's 1966 book The Interrupted Journey carried that description to a wide readership, and NBC's The UFO Incident, broadcast on October 20, 1975 with James Earl Jones as Barney, gave it a face on screen: bald, small, large-eyed, unsmiling. Travis Walton's account of his November 1975 disappearance, given sixteen days after the broadcast, described beings of the same kind with large brown eyes and tiny mouths.

Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) settled the proportions for a mass audience. The tall, translucent figure that steps from the mothership was a puppet by Carlo Rambaldi; the small beings around it were children in suits; and the final alien, nicknamed "Puck" by the crew, had the domed head, thin limbs and oversized eyes the reports had been converging on. Spielberg had consulted J. Allen Hynek, whose classification gave the film its title, and Hynek appears in the final scene; the film's aliens were friendly, musical and silent, and that gentleness would not survive the next decade.

One painting did more than any film. Whitley Strieber, a horror novelist, published Communion: A True Story in February 1987, an account of visitations at his upstate New York cabin by beings he called "the visitors." The cover, by the painter Ted Seth Jacobs working from Strieber's description, showed a being with a narrow tapered chin, smooth grey skin, a slit mouth and two enormous black almond-shaped eyes gazing straight out. The book reached number one on the New York Times nonfiction list and stayed on it for months; the face was in every airport bookshop in the country for a year. Budd Hopkins's Intruders, published the same spring, described beings of the same design conducting medical and reproductive procedures on abductees, and the two books together fixed the modern abduction narrative: the examination table, the implant, the hybrid child.

The effect on the reports was immediate and measurable. Abduction researchers who had been collecting varied descriptions through the early 1980s, from insectoids to robots to hairy dwarfs, found that accounts after 1987 converged on the cover. Skeptics took this as proof that the image was driving the testimony; Hopkins and David Jacobs took it as proof that the image was accurate. Either way, the 1989 film of Communion, with Christopher Walken as Strieber, put the face in motion, and from then on any production that wanted an abductor used it.

The X-Files premiered on Fox on September 10, 1993 and ran nine seasons, two films and two revival seasons, and its mythology arc assumed the Grey rather than explaining it. The "colonists" were Greys; the black oil was their vector; the alien bounty hunter and the hybrids extended the Hopkins narrative; and the 1947 Roswell crash, revived by books in 1980 and 1991, became the series' founding event. At its peak the show drew more than twenty million viewers a week, and "The truth is out there" and "I want to believe" entered the language. In August 1995 Fox also aired the Ray Santilli "alien autopsy" film, purportedly 1947 footage of a small, six-fingered grey body on a table; it drew huge audiences, was widely doubted at once, and in 2006 Santilli said the footage was a "reconstruction." Its corpse nonetheless became the reference for the dead Grey on a slab, reproduced in Independence Day's Area 51 sequence in 1996 and in countless documentaries since.

The decade's other productions kept to the design. Roswell (1999–2002) made its aliens human-looking teenagers but opened on the crash; Men in Black (1997) filled its New York with every other kind of alien while its title took the Grey's escort from ufology; Dark Skies (1996) rewrote postwar history around the Greys; and Fire in the Sky (1993) staged Travis Walton's examination with beings that were the Communion face made cruel. By 2000 the Grey was less a creature than a piece of shared furniture, and productions had begun to treat it as a joke.

Parody is what happens to a design everyone recognizes. American Dad! introduced Roger, a sardonic Grey living in a suburban attic, in 2005; South Park had already made the Grey a running gag. Paul (2011), written by Simon Pegg and Nick Frost with Seth Rogen voicing the title character, made the joke explicit: its Grey has been in government custody since 1947 and has spent the decades advising Hollywood, so that every screen alien since, Spielberg's included, was modelled on him. The Unicode Consortium added the 👽 emoji in 2010 with the same face. Meanwhile the "Skinny Bob" clips of 2011, presented as leaked KGB footage of a live Grey, circulated as evidence and were identified as computer animation; that they were taken seriously at all shows how completely the design had become the expected appearance of a real alien.

The Grey now works as a symbol more than a monster: the default extraterrestrial on a T-shirt, a road sign in Nevada, a festival poster. The UAP era that began with the 2017 New York Times story produced sensor videos, pilots and hearings, but no faces, and the popular imagination filled the gap with the one it had. The real-lore side of this story is covered in the Grey aliens article and the guide to reported alien types; the case that started the description is the Hill abduction, the hybrid narrative the books attached to the face is the hybrid program, the 2011 hoax is Skinny Bob, and the glossary has the short version.