Pop Culture’s Most Common “Alien” Imagery & Where It Comes From

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We have no concrete way of knowing just what an alien would look like, so humanity has had only our imaginations and understandings of our world to go off of when contemplating the idea of extraterrestrial life. Without having a visual association to connect with the idea of space invaders, the human mind filled in the blanks.

Any of the images that we associate with aliens are conceptual, though they may be inspired by real logic in our world. The reason that there is one image that is most commonly what people picture when imagining aliens is because of its use in films, television, and books.

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Because the popularity of aliens in pop culture correlated with human knowledge of space, which really picked up with human space exploration, creative visualizations of aliens reflected humans in many ways. People usually picture them with large eyes, large heads with sharp features, and long lanky limbs because these are familiar exaggerations of very human features.

Especially when the formats in which people explore the ideas of aliens are meant to tell a story, they resemble humans. This allows viewers' minds to associate the messages within these works with humanity’s issues. In other words, media and literature tend to use characters that look similar to people in order to make what they endure in the story relevant to a human audience. Kid's cartoons commonly take this approach by humanizing animal characters so that they’re cute and appealing, but also relatable to an audience of children.

Perhaps what really made the image of green-skinned or gray-skinned aliens so popular were the common alien sightings of the 1940s-1960s. During this time, many people called in claiming to have seen