“Alien” Faces

The late conspiracy theorist Jim Keith, in his colorfully titled “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 close encounter experience is so devastatingly weird, crammed with unfamiliar visual cues? Conversely, the minimalist alien head may be due to a scarcity of visual information; the abductee’s mind may “fill in the blanks” to encompass 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. If the Grays are physical beings, perhaps the eyes (with their now-famous black coverings) could be convex lenses — a sort of alien “heads-up” display. In any case, I’m virtually certain the excessively stylized alien face so common in the media is an exaggeration, an easily communicable caricature.

Whatever the nature of the archetypal alien encounter, I’m convinced there’s an hallucinatory component at play, an idea I plan to revisit in future posts.

Mac Tonnies

(photo credit: cttc)

April 12th, 2009 by admin | Posted in Aliens | (0)