Zeta Reticuli

1970-1980

In 1977, Director Steven Spielberg chose Greys as the alien protagonist for his film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The Greys have since become the archetypal image of an alien for many UFO believers and science fiction fans.

1980-1990

During the early 1980s Greys were linked to the alleged crash landing of a flying saucer in Roswell New Mexico, in 1947, by a number of publications which contained statements from witnesses who claimed to have seen the US military handling a number of unusually proportioned, bald, child-sized corpses. The witnesses claimed that the corpses had over-sized heads and slanted eyes - but scant other facial features - during and after the incident.

In 1987 popular novelist Whitley Strieber published the book Communion, in which he describes a number of close encounters he purports to have experienced with Greys and other extraterrestrial beings. The book became a New York Times bestseller and inspired a number of sequels.

1990-Present Day

During the 1990s, popular culture began to increasingly link Greys to a number of Military-industrial complex/New World Order conspiracies.

Arguably, the most well known of these was The X-Files, which first screened in 1993. It combined the quest to find proof of the existence of Grey-like extraterrestrials with a number of UFO conspiracy theory subplots, in order to form its primary story arc. Other notable examples include Dark Skies; first broadcast in 1996, which expanded upon the MJ-12 conspiracy, and Stargate SG-1 which in the 1998 episode "Thor's Chariot" introduced the Asgard, a race of Greys who visited ancient Earth masquerading as characters from Norse Mythology.

The portrayal of Greys in the media took a slightly different turn in 1995 when film maker Ray Santilli claimed to have obtained 22 reels of 16mm film that depicted the autopsy of a real life Grey that was said to have been recovered from the site of the 1947 incident in Roswell, New Mexico.

However, in 2006 Santilli announced that the film was not original, but was instead a Reconstruction created after the original film was found to have degraded. He maintained that a real Grey had been found and autopsied on camera in 1947, and that the footage released to the public contained a percentage of that original footage, but he was not able to say what that percentage was.