Little green men
In one classic case, the Kelly-Hopkinsville sighting in 1955, two rural Kentucky men described a supposed encounter with metallic-silver, somewhat humanoid-looking aliens no more than 4 feet (1.2 m) in height.
In his historical satire A History of New York (1809), American author Washington Irving described Lunatics (or men from the Moon) as "pea green", in contrast to the "white" inhabitants of Earth.
[3] Folklore researcher Chris Aubeck has used electronic searches of old newspapers and found a number of instances dating from around the turn of the 20th century referring to green aliens.
However, the first use of the specific phrase "little green man" in reference to extraterrestrials that Aubeck found dates to 1908 in the Daily Kennebec Journal (Augusta, Maine), in this case the aliens again being Martians.
The first documented print example specifically linking "little green men" to extraterrestrial spaceships is in a newspaper column satirizing the public panic following Orson Welles' famous "War of the Worlds" Halloween broadcast of October 31, 1938.
[citation needed] The 1951 science fiction book The Case of the Little Green Men, by Mack Reynolds, tells of a private detective hired to investigate disguised aliens living among the human population.
Though largely considered to be hoaxes, some of the stories from the sources about little aliens eventually made it into the popular 1950 book Behind the Flying Saucers by Variety magazine columnist Frank Scully.
[10] A witness reporting a flying saucer sighting to a Wichita, Kansas newspaper in June 1950 stated that he saw "absolutely no little green men with egg on their whiskers".
All over this land again are flying saucers ... No little green men have climbed out of these celestial vehicles so far, but in another couple of days I wouldn't be surprised ..."[13]The term also shows up much earlier in other contexts.
Before its more modern application to aliens, little green men was commonly used to describe various supernatural beings in old legends and folklore and in later fairy tales and children's books such as goblins.
Syndicated columnist Sydney J. Harris used "little green man" in 1948 as a child's imaginary friend while condemning the age-old tradition of frightening children with stories of "boogeymen".
These examples illustrate that use of little green men was already deeply engrained in English vernacular long before the flying saucer era, used for a variety of supernatural, imaginary, or mythical beings.
Similarly, Aubeck and others suspect that when flying saucers came along in 1947, with subsequent speculation about alien origins, the term naturally and quickly attached itself to the modern age equivalent.
A derisive usage can be seen in the original Star Trek episode "Tomorrow Is Yesterday", set in 1969, as Captain Kirk, captured by the US Air Force while attempting to steal film showing the Enterprise in Earth's atmosphere, calls himself a "little green man from Alpha Centauri" when interrogated by the base security officer.
Earlier in the same episode, a rescued Air Force captain brought aboard the Enterprise tells Kirk he's never believed in little green men, immediately before meeting the obviously alien Mr. Spock (who replies, "Neither have I").
[18][19][20][21] In 1967, Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Antony Hewish of the University of Cambridge, UK dubbed the first discovered pulsar LGM-1 for "little green men" because the regular oscillations of its signal suggested a possible intelligent origin.
