• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Little Green Men: The Concept / The Meme / The Cliché

rynner2

Gone But Not Forgotten
(ACCOUNT RETIRED)
Joined
Aug 7, 2001
Messages
54,631
Little green men were silver

An independent production company in Glendale, Calif., plans a trip to Hopkinsville this month to research the 1955 invasion of "little green men" in the community of Kelly for a documentary.

The local legend took root when residents of the small town reported the landing of a space near the home of Cecil "Lucky" Sutton home on the Old Madisonville Road at the edge of Kelly on Aug. 21, 1955. Sutton and other family members said 12 little men landed in a spaceship and then battled them at the house for hours.

Although the invaders are now known as the "little green men of Kelly," the original stories did not paint them green. Sutton and others actually said the creatures were silver.

For more about the Kelly / Hopkinsville incident see:

Kelly / Hopkinsville (Kentucky) 'Goblins' Incident (1955)
https://forums.forteana.org/index.p...nsville-kentucky-goblins-incident-1955.17926/
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Murder defendant describes 'little green man'

By Ihosvani Rodriguez
San Antonio Express-News

Web Posted : 12/11/2003 12:00 AM

The little green man leaped from behind the ice cream in the freezer and taunted Raymond Rodriguez to chase him.
The next thing Rodriguez remembers, after blacking out, was waking up the following morning lying on top of his mother's lover and drinking partner, Daniel San Miguel, 77, whom he discovered was dead with a knife in his chest.

Rodriguez said as much Tuesday as he took the stand on his own behalf and handed a jury what arguably is one of the most bizarre testimonies in recent capital murder trials.

Prosecutors believe Rodriguez killed San Miguel in February 2001 to steal his pickup. Authorities are not seeking the death penalty against Rodriguez, but the 25-year-old will be sentenced to life in prison if found guilty.

Rodriguez testified Wednesday that he was forced to consume a letter-size sheet of LSD earlier on the evening San Miguel died and was having hallucinations by the time he got to his house, where his mother's lover was sleeping.

Rodriguez described watching the walls and floors moving violently and going to eat something to calm his hallucinations. When he opened the refrigerator, he noticed the bologna and cheese were dancing around. Then he opened the freezer door.

"I saw a green man when I moved the ice cream," Rodriguez testified, nodding affirmatively and looking sternly at the jury. "He looked cute. I wanted him. He had hands and feet and looked like a little man. He jumped out and said, 'Catch me if you can ... !'

"So I tried to catch him."

Moments later, Rodriguez claims, he blacked out as he stared into a mirror.

The next morning, Rodriguez said he was shocked to discover San Miguel's body beneath him. He said he used San Miguel's pickup to dispose of the body in a ditch near the San Antonio Police Academy to make it easier for authorities to find the body.

After days went by, Rodriguez moved the decomposing corpse again and tossed it on the side of the road near Poteet, where a motorist eventually found it.

Rodriguez denied earlier testimony that he admitted to several people that he killed San Miguel. Witnesses who have testified to an admission include friends and relatives, including his sister, who ultimately turned him in to police.

Rodriguez described San Miguel as a loving grandfather figure who would've given him the truck if he had asked for it.

Defense attorneys have suggested someone else in the house killed San Miguel and that Rodriguez was manipulated into believing he did it.

Testimony resumes today.

http://news.mysanantonio.com/story.cfm?xla=saen&xlb=180&xlc=1097250
 
"When he opened the refrigerator, he noticed the bologna and cheese were dancing around."

If I was on the jury, I wouldn't be able to take things seriously after hearing that. :p
 
GiantRobot said:
What I find REALLY interesting is the hallucinations that are brought on by DMT. Terrence McKenna was always on about this and how it made you visit a place, like an underground cavern, full of 'interdimensional machine elves'. Nearly everyone who takes it sees a variation on the exact same thing. Very interesting indeed.


Let's not forget Robert Anton Wilson reporting that he saw a little green man while tripping on mescaline (?) (peyote ?). He also said that he later started seeing him around when he wasn't tripping. And that he claimed that this was a common vision with many people.
 
The Case Against Little Green Men

By Margaret Turnbull
University of Arizona
And Seth Shostak
SETI Institute
posted: 06:28 am ET
20 May 2004



Not so long ago, putative extraterrestrials were the color of moss. Generic space aliens were inevitably described as ‘Little Green Men,’ probably because an avocado complexion is dramatically unlike any human skin tint.

Green was alien, in other words.

But that idea is more than passing strange, because any glance out the window will convince you that green is one of life’s most popular colors on our planet. Chlorophyll, the foundation of the terrestrial food chain, is green. Most biology on Earth runs on green power, including (indirectly) you.

However, virtually all the solar-powered life on our planet is plant life. Animals don’t seem to be interested in direct food production from sunlight. Are they missing a bet? Is there any reason why an alien with a green epidermis couldn’t produce its food by just hanging around in the sun?

There is. And the reason can be traced to energy efficiency. At the Earth’s surface, sunlight provides about 100 watts of power per square meter. If you were conscious during high school biology class, you’ll recall that when this light strikes a leaf, it encourages the combination of water and carbon dioxide into sugars. These sugars then allow the plant to produce pollen (for reproduction), blossoms and nectar (for pollinators), leaves (for intercepting more light), and roots (for sucking up more water).

What most people don’t know is that out of the original 100 watts striking a square meter of leaf, only about 35% is actually absorbed. (If the absorption were fully efficient, plants would be black.) Worse, the photosynthetic reactions that subsequently occur with the remaining 35 watts are so inefficient that only about one-fourth of that energy results in usable sugars. Hence for every 100 watts of perfectly good sunlight, only about 8 watts ends up as plant food.

That means that your typical backyard bush runs on only as much power as a bicycle headlamp, even during the day. If you’re a bush, that’s good enough: you can’t, and don’t, scour the countryside for food, water, or breeding partners.

But a human-sized animal can’t be happy with a bush-sized energy budget. As a typical adult, you need at least 2,000 Calories a day. Making the conversion to less arcane units, that works out to about 100 watts of power, 24 hours a day. But remember that if you got your energy through photosynthesis, you would absorb only 8 watts for each square meter of skin. Most of us have about 3 square meters of epidermis, roughly half of which is in shade at any given time (more, if you insist on wearing clothes). So that’s just over a dozen watts of daytime power, nearly 10 times less than our burn rate. To provide the energy for one day’s worth of your gusto-grabbing lifestyle, you’d need to bake on the back patio for three weeks.

Okay, so maybe it’s not reasonable for big, mobile animals to get food straight from the Sun. But what about smaller critters? A hummingbird, admittedly not necessarily a good model for ET, but still an active animal, uses about 8 Calories per day, or about a half watt. To get this energy from 5 hours of daily photosynthesizing, this little guy would need a collecting area of 0.3 square meters. For a creature that’s only 10 cm long, the required wingspan would be three meters. That would make for a hummer the length of a Hummer, and one unwieldy bird.

Bottom line? Animals are clever enough to let plants sit around in the Sun all day, building up stores of energy. The wily critters then spend a few minutes harvesting this slow work as a salad – or chowing down on other animals that have already dined on salads. It’s all a matter of energetics, and you can bet that many extraterrestrials will have the same strategy.

Frankly, if you’re an animal, it isn’t easy being green.

space.com/searchforlife/seti_green_040520.html
Link is dead. The MIA webpage (quoted in full above) can be accessed using the Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20080801020357/http://www.space.com/searchforlife/seti_green_040520.html
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Or the Jolly Green Giant?

(He's real, he must be, I've seen him on telly....;) )
 
Or perhaps they have an unsightly parasitic fungal growth on their skins.
 
An odd little story from a letter to a newspaper:

A week ago, I was walking my dog in Gypsy Hill Park. Nothing unusual about that. Except for what I saw.

When I was circling Lake Tams, I noticed something hanging from a tall Seckel pear tree. Was I mistaken? No. It was a Little Green Man.

He hung suspended just beyond reach on a thin line. He was about two inches long and shaped like the letter H. What looked like two arms or claws were the tops of the H and the bottoms were peg-like feet. In the thick middle was an opening the size of a quarter and a head peering out wearing a helmet.

The thing was the color of split pea soup.

I stared at it a long time, trying to figure out exactly what it was and speculated on why it was there. Nobody else was around that afternoon. It was just me and the Little Green Man. My dog grew impatient so I reluctantly walked on. It was only later, when I'd gotten home, that I realized I just might have had a Close Encounter of the Third Kind. A lot of stranger things have gone down in that park.

Like that saying, if you see one deer on the side of the road you can bet there are more, I wondered it my Little Green Man was just one of many who'd landed their flying saucer in Staunton in hopes of making contact. Why hadn't I done something about it?

I didn't get back to the park until the next day for it had started to rain, and when I finally retraced my steps and stood under the pear tree, the Little Green Man was gone. I looked on the ground, hoping to fine a Little Green UFO or something. I called out: E.T. Come home! Nothing. Only the quacking of ducks splashing around the lake.

Had I imagined the whole incident? Or had I missed out on the encounter of a lifetime? Had that Little Green Man been sent to make contact with an earthling and I had been chosen? What a story that would make in the National Enquirer: Dog Walker Encounters Little Green Man! Alien Found Hanging in Tree! Offers Greeting to All Mankind!

I'll never know. But you can bet your life if I ever encounter a Little Green Man again, I'm taking him home with me.

http://www.newsleader.com/news/stories/20040703/opinion/770545.html
 
When I was circling Lake Tams, I noticed something hanging from a tall Seckel pear tree. Was I mistaken? No. It was a Little Green Man.

He hung suspended just beyond reach on a thin line. He was about two inches long and shaped like the letter H. What looked like two arms or claws were the tops of the H and the bottoms were peg-like feet. In the thick middle was an opening the size of a quarter and a head peering out wearing a helmet.


Seckel Pear
Two Inches long
peg-like feet

Hmmm... anyone heard of this before?
 
My dog grew impatient so I reluctantly walked on.


Holy Crap!!! The Dog made him/her move on, during one of the most curious and unique experiences of their lives???


There's just no accounting for some people!!!
 
Alien to leader:

"Yes, clearly the dog is in control of the human, not the other way round."

Alien leader:

"Hmmm... Looks like we were wrong about humans being the dominant species. Off to the next galaxy, then - nothing to see here."
 
Mythopoeika said:
Alien 1:

"Yes, clearly the dog is in control of the human, not the other way round."

Alien 2:

"Hmmm... Looks like we were wrong about humans being the dominant species. Off to the next galaxy, then - nothing to see here."
 
Aaargh. That was supposed to be an edit, not a reply!

:rolleyes:
 
I think they might have been silvery....

the Mekon was green....he must have been the archetype for green men...
 
Easy! Just one of those kids plastic parachute man things stuck in a tree. I dunno, some people.
 
If of interest, just a related tangent I was curious about.

Only from the newspaper.com archives and not therefore necessarily the earliest occurrence in existence , the first mention therein of an association between "little green men" and Mars, appears to originate from 'The Evening News (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania)', on 7 July, 1947.

Quoting the 'Daily Chatter' column:

"...From now on, we're going to listen sharply when folks start mentioning home towns - especially little green men with big heads and turned-up toes. We'd like to sponsor the first Martian for honorary citizenship of Harrisburg".

It's not quite clear what has prompted the comment!

The first reference of an association between a "flying saucer" and "little green men from Mars", appears to originate from 'The Charlotte News', on 18 July, 1947, in a brief article:

It's A Joke, Listeners

"The other night a Raleigh radio commentator took off on a flight of fantasy about the flying saucers. He had, he said, been in communication with one of the saucers, which were really space ships, and had discovered that they were flown by little green men from Mars, who were trying to locate Hollywood".

If that is the case and of historical interest, the full article can be read here:

www.forteanmedia.com/Charlotte_01.pdf
 
Back
Top