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Little Gray Men: Roswell and the Rise of a Popular Culture
More than half of all Americans believe UFOs and aliens exist. How did extraterrestrials come to be so real for so many? Toby Smith tracks down our fascination with extraterrestrials, showing how Roswell became the fiber out of which all flying saucer and alien stories were woven in science fiction films and television programs, especially in the late 1940s and the 1950s. It all began outside Roswell on a July night in 1947. A nearby military base's official announcement of the recovery of a crashed flying saucer went out to radio stations and newspapers nationwide--including The New York Times . The military's quick retraction came too late. The government had already said extraterrestrials existed. Today visitors are taken to the crash site in a vehicle with license plates reading Believe . And believe people do. But why? Statements of belief in extraterrestrials from such diverse and noteworthy people as General Douglas MacArthur, Carl Jung, and Elvis Presley firmly fixed the place of aliens in modern American culture. Smith not only examines movies and the media to understand the prominence of aliens in our contemporary culture, he also shows how New Mexico and Wright Field in Ohio, where the bodies of the aliens were reportedly taken, remain particularly fertile spawning grounds for UFO stories. Once extraterrestrial visitors landed (or didn't land) in Roswell, the notion we're not alone in the universe quickly became part of American popular culture.
199 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2000
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April 18, 2022
On July 3, 1947, a UFO crashed on a remote ranch northwest of Roswell, New Mexico. Its three or four occupants were killed, or perhaps one survived. After the discovery of the crash site, troops from the Roswell Army Air base swooped down, collected the debris (and the bodies), and hauled it all back to the base. Soon after the remains were examined, a press officer wrote up a release saying a UFO had been recovered. The local radio station broadcast it, the local newspaper printed it, and soon the news spread across the country--the government had a UFO!
The next day, under orders from a superior officer, the press officer retracted his announcement; the debris was identified as the remains of a weather balloon. Although the story of a UFO continued to circulate, with the additional information that everything had been flown to Wright (later Wright-Patterson) Air Force base in Ohio, the excitement died down and the tale of a crashed UFO in the high desert of New Mexico faded away. Later UFO "flaps," like the 1952 mass of saucers supposedly invading the skies over Washington, DC, took over public imagination about flying saucers.
Then in 1980 Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore published The Roswell Incident, a credulous and conspiratorial account of the incident. They interviewed witnesses and witnesses of witnesses, took the initial press release at face value, and argued that a UFO did indeed crash, was in fact recovered by the Army, and indeed was housed along with the corpses of the little gray men at Wright-Patterson. Their book set off a wave of Roswellianism that has yet to crest today.
Toby Smith's Little Gray Men is a casual history of the fascination Roswell exercises. I write "casual" in part because, although he provides a brief list of "Sources" (pp. 181-187), he has no notes and doesn't tie any of the facts he cites to a source; if you want to track anything down, good luck. The book is also something of a hodgepodge. Only four chapters (1 and 3-5, pp. 17-15 and 49-95) deal directly with the Roswell incident. The others are only tangentially related if at all. Chapter 2 (pp. 31-48) treats Robert Goddard, the great rocket pioneer. He lived in Roswell for many years because he was allowed to use open space near town to test his rockets. But he died in 1945, two years before the crash--he had nothing to do with the Roswell incident.
Two other chapters (7 and 8, pp. 133-169) are a happy trip through 1950s and 1960s SF movies and TV shows. It's fun, but Smith pulls a little sleight-of-hand here: he invites the reader to infer that all these productions were influenced by tropes that began with Roswell, but the links are not only tenuous but also factitious: as he knows very well, Roswell pretty much vanished from general awareness between 1947 and 1980. There were plenty of sightings in those years--and plenty of SF stories--on which the writers and directors of all the B-films could draw.
Finally, one chapter is devoted to an interview with the prolific SF writer Jack Williamson (6, pp. 119-132). Williamson lived in Portales, New Mexico, home to Eastern New Mexico State University, where he taught for many years. Although Portales is located just under 100 miles northeast of Roswell and Williamson was living there in 1947, he has no memory of the crash nor does he believe in UFOs. The interview's entertaining but adds nothing to the Roswell story.
If my review makes Little Gray Men sound padded--well, yeah. It's also written in a flippant, mildly sarcastic tone that grated on me after a while. Smith clearly doesn't want us to think he takes all this saucer stuff too seriously, and he emphasizes his stance with some rather offensive comments about those who do: he quotes a Denny's waitress who asked whether he was visiting Roswell with the "ewe-eff-owers" and added "Wuzza-madder? Wuddent you a believer? (p. 3, repeated at p.9; more at p. 73). The text's leavened with this sort of condescending faux country dialect. It makes Roswell locals sound stupid and uneducated. There are also a fair number of factual mistakes, like situating B-36 and B-52 bombers at Roswell in 1945 (p. 24: the first B-36 flew in 1946, the B-52 went into service in 1954). Smith implies that the military was experimenting with V-2 rockets as the first stage of a 2-stage vehicle in 1943; V-2s did not arrive in the US till after the end of the war (and as far as I know were never used as the first stage of a rocket).
Little Gray Men was published by the University of New Mexico Press, which you'd think would have done some proof-reading and fact-checking.
There are intriguing passages and some useful facts; Smith explains why Wright-Patterson was believed to house the saucer and aliens, something I'd always wondered about. His appreciation of the films The Day the Earth Stood Still and especially Forbidden Planet is greatly welcome, given the widespread critical disdain for these two really excellent movies. And he did a lot of digging in newspaper files from Roswell and other small towns; his research shines in his evocation of the town in 1947, with details about the shops, population, and racism that denied any Blacks even lived there. On balance, it's up to every reader to decide whether the faults outweigh the value, or vice versa. Tiresome though I sometimes found Little Gray Men, I'm still glad I read it.
The next day, under orders from a superior officer, the press officer retracted his announcement; the debris was identified as the remains of a weather balloon. Although the story of a UFO continued to circulate, with the additional information that everything had been flown to Wright (later Wright-Patterson) Air Force base in Ohio, the excitement died down and the tale of a crashed UFO in the high desert of New Mexico faded away. Later UFO "flaps," like the 1952 mass of saucers supposedly invading the skies over Washington, DC, took over public imagination about flying saucers.
Then in 1980 Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore published The Roswell Incident, a credulous and conspiratorial account of the incident. They interviewed witnesses and witnesses of witnesses, took the initial press release at face value, and argued that a UFO did indeed crash, was in fact recovered by the Army, and indeed was housed along with the corpses of the little gray men at Wright-Patterson. Their book set off a wave of Roswellianism that has yet to crest today.
Toby Smith's Little Gray Men is a casual history of the fascination Roswell exercises. I write "casual" in part because, although he provides a brief list of "Sources" (pp. 181-187), he has no notes and doesn't tie any of the facts he cites to a source; if you want to track anything down, good luck. The book is also something of a hodgepodge. Only four chapters (1 and 3-5, pp. 17-15 and 49-95) deal directly with the Roswell incident. The others are only tangentially related if at all. Chapter 2 (pp. 31-48) treats Robert Goddard, the great rocket pioneer. He lived in Roswell for many years because he was allowed to use open space near town to test his rockets. But he died in 1945, two years before the crash--he had nothing to do with the Roswell incident.
Two other chapters (7 and 8, pp. 133-169) are a happy trip through 1950s and 1960s SF movies and TV shows. It's fun, but Smith pulls a little sleight-of-hand here: he invites the reader to infer that all these productions were influenced by tropes that began with Roswell, but the links are not only tenuous but also factitious: as he knows very well, Roswell pretty much vanished from general awareness between 1947 and 1980. There were plenty of sightings in those years--and plenty of SF stories--on which the writers and directors of all the B-films could draw.
Finally, one chapter is devoted to an interview with the prolific SF writer Jack Williamson (6, pp. 119-132). Williamson lived in Portales, New Mexico, home to Eastern New Mexico State University, where he taught for many years. Although Portales is located just under 100 miles northeast of Roswell and Williamson was living there in 1947, he has no memory of the crash nor does he believe in UFOs. The interview's entertaining but adds nothing to the Roswell story.
If my review makes Little Gray Men sound padded--well, yeah. It's also written in a flippant, mildly sarcastic tone that grated on me after a while. Smith clearly doesn't want us to think he takes all this saucer stuff too seriously, and he emphasizes his stance with some rather offensive comments about those who do: he quotes a Denny's waitress who asked whether he was visiting Roswell with the "ewe-eff-owers" and added "Wuzza-madder? Wuddent you a believer? (p. 3, repeated at p.9; more at p. 73). The text's leavened with this sort of condescending faux country dialect. It makes Roswell locals sound stupid and uneducated. There are also a fair number of factual mistakes, like situating B-36 and B-52 bombers at Roswell in 1945 (p. 24: the first B-36 flew in 1946, the B-52 went into service in 1954). Smith implies that the military was experimenting with V-2 rockets as the first stage of a 2-stage vehicle in 1943; V-2s did not arrive in the US till after the end of the war (and as far as I know were never used as the first stage of a rocket).
Little Gray Men was published by the University of New Mexico Press, which you'd think would have done some proof-reading and fact-checking.
There are intriguing passages and some useful facts; Smith explains why Wright-Patterson was believed to house the saucer and aliens, something I'd always wondered about. His appreciation of the films The Day the Earth Stood Still and especially Forbidden Planet is greatly welcome, given the widespread critical disdain for these two really excellent movies. And he did a lot of digging in newspaper files from Roswell and other small towns; his research shines in his evocation of the town in 1947, with details about the shops, population, and racism that denied any Blacks even lived there. On balance, it's up to every reader to decide whether the faults outweigh the value, or vice versa. Tiresome though I sometimes found Little Gray Men, I'm still glad I read it.
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