Mexico's "alien corpse", why do you feel unreliable at first glance?

This week's "UFO" hearings in the Mexican Congress attracted a lot of attention.

At the meeting, Jaime Maussan, who studies UFOs, showed two "alien corpses" claimed to have been found in Peru, with DNA that did not belong to humans and were 1800 and 700 years old, respectively.

▲ Jaime Maussan's "alien corpse", pictured from Reuters

It didn't take long for Mexican astrobiologists to come out and point out that Maussan's conclusions were unreliable and that his other similar scams had been debunked several years earlier.

Jaime Maussan, photo by Reuters

Most voices on the Internet also distrust the matter. Because, this so-called "alien corpse" really looks too much like the typical alien that everyone sees in various film and television works.

▲ Jaime Maussan's "alien corpse", pictured from Reuters

It also made me wonder: where did this image come from, and how did it become the symbol we most often use to represent "aliens"?

After some self-archaeology, the earliest memories I can trace back to seeing the image actually came from Stephen Chow.

In the 1996 movie "The Great Inner Spy Zero Hair", there is a plot of dissecting the "flying fairy outside the sky".

The shape of this "flying fairy" is the classic form - big head and eyes, gray skin.

At that time, I was still young, and I didn't know that Stephen Chow echoed the sensational "alien anatomy video" in the previous year.

In 1995, filmmaker Ray Santilli claimed to have obtained 22 reels of video film documenting alien anatomy in 1947 and made a documentary, "The Alien Autopsy," which was broadcast in many countries around the world.

▲ "Anatomy of Aliens"

Unlike the rapid debunking in "The Great Inner Secret Agent Zero Hair", it was only in 2006 that Santilli officially came out to clarify that the film was shot by them separately.

For a long time, Anatomy of Aliens was seen as "evidence" by people who wanted to believe in aliens.

However, before that event, this alien image, often referred to as "Grey", had been popular for 30 years.

The image of "Little Gray" can be traced back to the 1891 novel "Meda: A Tale of the Future", and has appeared in many science fiction novels, but what really goes to the mainstream and the public is the "alien kidnapping" of the 60s.

In 1965, it was reported in the news that a couple in the United States, Betty Hill and Barney Hill, had been abducted by aliens.

▲Betty Hill 和 Barney Hill

Betty said that one night in 1961, the two were taken to the spaceship by aliens with gray skin.

Since then, the image of "Little Grey" has officially entered mainstream culture and has become the "protagonist" of many alien legends.

According to American author C. D. B. Bryan, 73% of the contact with aliens received in the United States are "little grays", which is much higher than that of other countries. It can be seen that this image is really deeply imprinted in the minds of Americans who "want to believe".

Next, the "Little Grey" image enters the wider culture through Hollywood stories: Spielberg's "Contact of the Third Kind", the sci-fi drama "Babylon 5" and the classic "X-Files", among others.

Some biologists pointed out that the "little gray man" who theoretically comes from an alien world completely different from Earth is too similar in physiological structure to human beings, which is basically impossible.

As an alien symbol that has been successfully left behind, many people believe that there are elements behind it that can hit the human heart - they have a human-like image, but also bring together enhanced human intelligence characteristics.

In a way, they also represent a kind of imagination of a "higher civilization."

But for Betty Hill and Barney Hill, who thought they had been kidnapped by "Little Grey" at the time, perhaps more important was the TV they watched the other day.

In 1990, author Martin Kottmeyer suggested that the reason why the two recalled the image of "Little Grey" during hypnotherapy was probably influenced by the science fiction drama "The Foreign Limits".

There is an episode of the show that features gray aliens with big eyes, and this episode airs only twelve days before hypnotherapy.

▲ The alien image in the play and the alien image drawn by Betty under hypnosis

Perhaps a large part of the direct reason why "Little Grey" can become a classic is in popular culture.

Aliens in popular culture, why do they look like this?

▲ "Third Type of Contact"

When we imagine the appearance of aliens, we are more or less subtly influenced by the image of aliens in popular culture.

When film creators imagine that aliens should have a slightly human-like appearance, on the one hand, it may be because we tend to imagine from ourselves, and these similarities may also make the audience more empathetic and understanding; On the other hand, it may also be because, "we still have to find someone to play this role."

Charlie Henley, who worked on the special effects of "Alien", said that the alien humans in early science fiction movies are likely to be considered for the feasibility of shooting:

Well, we always have to find someone to dress up and play aliens.

So they will also have heads and hands and feet just like us.

However, even with the development of special effects technology now, many filmmakers will still fall into the "box" of depictions of aliens.

Because breaking through the "classic" alien form means investing more time and story to build a basic narrative.

After the baptism of a large number of film and television works, as soon as the audience sees aliens who look similar to those in "Alien", they can naturally experience the information that "things are not good".

As soon as the audience sees aliens who are more similar to humans, and even have cute big eyes and curious eyes, we will probably directly imagine that they are "good aliens".

With the increasing number of "traditional" alien-themed films, audiences are no longer satisfied with these clichéd narratives.

This is also why, when we see the "alien corpse" displayed in the Mexican Congress, we think that this is too child's play, because we are so familiar with this fictional image, and we just want to shout "why are you so lazy".

In recent years, we've started to see filmmakers start challenging the category.

In 2016's "Arrival", the alien image can clearly be seen to draw inspiration from octopus creatures, but they are not "monsters".

In the film, we do not see the special effects and action scenes of the main character, but follow the protagonist in the hazy slowly try to understand the "alien", explore a different "view of time", and see another possibility of win-win in the future.

And in 2022's "Nope", we see that aliens can still be a cloud, and in the end they have become a very classic "flying saucer".

Jordan Peele said in an interview that the choice of the "flying saucer" shape was intentional, to "inherit" the tradition and break it.

The notion that Americans have sucked humans into flying saucers and made contact and experimentation is ingrained — as is the narrative of Betty Hill and Barney Hill.

But in Jordan Peele's description, this flying saucer is not a flying saucer, more like an alien himself, and after it sucks humans up, it is directly sucked into the digestive system to eat and spit out unwanted things, so it is not an invitation to humans into the "flying saucer room".

However, no matter how the alien forms in film and television works change, they ultimately serve the meaning that the creators want to express.

That could be the fear of more advanced alien civilizations; It may also be to inject hope for the future in an era when the masses are in a time of loss; There may also be an indictment of cruelty and racial discrimination in the Hollywood industry.

We still don't know what real aliens will look like.

Also this week, NASA released a study of "unidentified anomalies."

NASA said that after analyzing sightings over the past year, it concluded that there is no evidence that the source of existing "unidentified anomalies" sightings is extraterrestrial life.

What NASA wants to do now is to shift the public's mentality of such events from curiosity to speculation to scientific research and rational analysis.

But I believe that neither the public nor the creators will stop imagining aliens – it's more like a thought experiment in which we cross the galaxy and go to our own hearts.