We come in peace

It?s well known that little kids are easily frightened of all manner of things from monsters under their bed to the boogieman hiding in their closet. Those things never scared me as a child, I?m proud to say! But there was something that terrified me throughout my childhood: extraterrestrials.

I remember the exact moment in time I became fearful of aliens. My family and I were visiting friends of ours in Wisconsin. I was probably eight years old. My boyhood friend Ted and I were watching a marathon of Godzilla movies on the Sci-Fi Channel. After witnessing Godzilla?s demise at the hands of Mothra, Ted changed the station to TLC which, if you can believe this, once featured educational programs and documentaries. The documentary that night was on alien abductions.

I was riveted by one abductee?s story after another. Their stories were very similar, which led me to believe at that age that they must be telling the truth and not making it up. From their accounts, I learned that aliens have human-like bodies, except that they are hairless, thin and have bulbous heads with large, oval eyes that are completely black. They have no visible ears or a nose and have only small slits for their mouth and nostrils. These aliens are known as ?the greys? (British spelling) because of their gray color.

Aliens usually abduct people while they are asleep, although they have also been known to abduct them while they are fishing or driving at night. Abductees often do not realize they have been abducted, only that several hours have passed since their last memory. The abductees only ?remember? the events of their abduction through subsequent nightmares or induced hypnosis.

Abductees report that the aliens take them aboard their flying saucer. The aliens examine them, run medical tests on them and sometimes implant probes in their bodies, which some abductees believe to be tracking devices to allow for abductions of the same person in the future.

Even if these abduction stories are all false, numerous psychologists have confirmed that the abductees really believe what they are saying. The mystery is, why are their abduction accounts so similar? I had always believed it was because the abductees had heard the same stories about aliens, or had seen the same movies, and they were somehow confusing these mental images with memories. That doesn?t explain how the stories got started in the first place, nor does it explain why the stories of the ?greys? are so common, given that aliens have been portrayed in many different forms over the years.

A very interesting explanation I heard just a few weeks ago is that the reason the ?grey? stories are ubiquitous is that the greys are actually humans seen through the eyes of an infant. Psychologist Frederick V. Malmstrom published an article in Skeptic magazine titled ?Close Encounters of the Facial Kind: Are UFO Alien Faces an Inborn Facial Recognition Template?? in which he describes the ways in which newborn infants perceive the world.

Malmstrom wrote that infants are hard-wired to pay close attention to two horizontal circles, which attract more attention than one circle or three circles. In other words, humans are born with crude facial recognition software.

However, an infant?s eyes are not the same as an adult?s. Malmstrom wrote that, first of all, newborn infants? ability to distinguish colors is either weak or absent, and that they seem only able to distinguish between shades of gray. Secondly, astigmatism is quite common in infants, which causes images on the periphery of their focus to appear blurred.

Malmstrom photographed a woman and then altered the photograph in such a way as to approximate how the image would appear to an infant.

?The smearing of the periphery and the simulation of an extremely shallow depth of focus yields a rather startling effect,? Malmstrom wrote. ?The eyes seem to slant diagonally upwards and assume prominence. Second, the nostrils begin to lose their roundness and tend to be seen as vertical slits. Third, the mouth becomes less distinguishable.?

Malmstrom noted that alien encounters are often recalled while the abductee is in a dream state. Malmstrom said that the primitive facial recognition software we are born with may be at work in these dream states and thus be responsible for producing the gray faces and large black eyes of the extraterrestrials. If only someone had told me that when I was a kid, I would have gotten so much more sleep.