Posthuman Blues

Jim Keith, in "Saucers of the Illuminati," makes an interesting point about the simplicity of the quintessential alien face. Could it be, he wonders, that abductees' brains manufacture the same predictable alien visage because the encounter experience is devastatingly weird, crammed with unfamiliar visual cues? Conversely, the minimalist alien head may be be due to a scarcity of visual information; the abductee's mind may "fill in the blanks" to give a face to something essentially faceless.





Some ufologists have noted that the eyes of the commonly depicted "Gray" alien would be anatomically impossible, if spherical like human eyes; there simply wouldn't be enough room in the skull, no matter how outsized. It's worth recalling that an ostrich's eye is actually larger than its brain.

Then again, the familiar ink-black "eyes" may not be eyes in the familiar sense. They could be convex lenses -- a sort of alien "heads-up" display, maybe. In any case, the excessively stylized alien face so common in the media is almost certainly an exaggeration, a caricature. Our brains seem wired to embellish the unfamiliar.