Alien Lore No. 207 - The Greys, Betty and Barney Hill, and Zeta Reticuli

By Jack Brummet

Paranormal and Unexplained Phenomena Editor

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Paranormal aficionados,  UFOlogists and even, once in a blue moon, a scholar or professor, make wild and fairly contradictory assertions about just exactly what The Greys are--machines?, Extraterrestrial Biological Entities/ETs?, extradimensionals?, monsters?, or maybe even the mind-effing ability of a far greater intelligence to project virtual Greys into our world?   The focus of Alien Lore took a sharp turn with stories of the Betty and Barney Hill abduction claim and the role of The Greys in that.

Greys are usually depicted as short, grey-skinned beings with only a suggestion of, or completely missing, noses, ears, breasts, or sexual organs.  The are small chested, and have no  muscular definition or visible skeletal structure. Their legs are shorter and jointed differently those of homo sapiens. Their humerus and thigh bones are the same lengths as their forearms and shins, respectively.

According to Wikipedia, "Among reports of supposed alien encounters, Greys make up approximately 50 percent in Australia, 43 percent in the United States, 90 percent in Canada, 67 percent in Brazil, 20 percent in Continental Europe, and around 12 percent in Great Britain."

H.G. Wells wrote in Man of the Year Million in the 19th century about tiny Greys with big heads. His 1901 novel, The First Men in the Moon describes moon natives as grey skinned, big headed, with large black eyes and wasp wings (very similar to our contemporary Greys without the wings). Wells also describes aliens resembling Greys brought down to Earth as food by the antagonists of his novel, and most enduring work, The War of the Worlds.

Betty and Barney Hill, claimed to have been abducted by alien beings and taken to a saucer-shaped spaceship in 1961. And this is where Zeta Reticuli enters alien lore.  The term "Greys" did not come into usage until many years later, but the beings described by the Hills fit many of the common traits of what we now call Greys.  An elementary school teacher and amateur astronomer, Marjorie Fish, concluded that the home planet of these beings as shown in a star map drawn by Betty Hill, was located in the Zeta Reticuli star system (their home planet is thought to be the fourth planet of the second star of Reticulum). The Greys became known in alien lore as Zeta Reticulans.  During the 1990s, popular culture began to increasingly link the ZR Greys to a dizzying number of military-industrial complex/New World Order conspiracy theories.

A well known example of this was the TV series The X-Files, that combined the quest to find proof of the existence of The Greys with UFO conspiracy theory subplots, to form its story arc. Other notable examples include the great and short-lived series, Dark Skies, first broadcast in 1996, which expanded upon the Majestic 12 conspiracy.

Betty and Barney Hill

Dr. Steven Greer, founder of the Disclosure Project, head of CSETI, and a prominent UFO conspiracy theorist, has publicly presented over 400 "government, military, and intelligence community witnesses" that have offered testimony to the existence of aliens and UFO and/or efforts to cover up their existence and who have stated that they would be willing to defend their claims under oath.

Alas, the odds are stacked against anyone even being able to study whether all this is true or not... Stanton Friedman considers the general attitude of mainstream academics as arrogant and dismissive, and bound to a world view that disallows any evidence contrary to previously held notions. 

Ridicule and a loss of status prevents scientists from pursuing the study UFOs.  J. Allen Hynek 
commented, "Ridicule is not part of the scientific method and people should not be taught that it is." Hynek said of the frequent dismissal of UFO reports by astronomers that the critics know nothing about the sightings, and should thus not be taken seriously. Peter A. Sturrock suggests that a lack of funding is a major factor in the institutional disinterest in UFOs.

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