"Little Green Men": Early Representations of Aliens

Astronomers have pondered the possible existence of intelligent life on Mars since the nineteenth century—a debate which kindles both scientific minds and popular imagination. One such discussion erupted in 1877, when Giovanni Schiaparelli noticed linear structures on the Red Planet’s surface and called them canali (channels). Due to mistranslation, these natural structures gained fame as canals, which suggested their artificial nature.¹ Later scientists proved that Schiaparelli’s observation remained an optical illusion. Nonetheless, the mysterious canals contributed to a thesis about a Martian civilization which had constructed an irrigation system on Mars. Picked up by writers and journalists, the debate soon spread beyond the academia,² reaching far and wide and arousing common interest. On December 18, 1913, the clay industry’s L’viv-based monthly “Robotnik Kaflarski” (The Tile Maker) published an article titled “The Martians.” The text contains various persons’ ideas regarding the appearance of Mars’s alleged inhabitants. One quotation comes from Herbert George Wells’s War of the Worlds, where a Martian has a “big greyish rounded bulk, the size, perhaps, of a bear,”³ dark eyes, lipless mouth, and tentacular appendages. The article contrasts this image with a vision of Camille Flammarion—a French astronomer and science popularizer:

The Martians remain smaller because of the planet’s weaker gravity, and they have blond hair due to softer light. They speak in high and thin voices, and their skulls perhaps developed better than ours. Their blue eyes are bigger and their auricles also more advanced than human ears. Big heads, broad chests, long and thin limbs, and waistless bodies make their silhouettes significantly different than human bodies. Finally, their enormous noses with moving nostrils, huge eyes, and protruding ears contribute to an appearance which would certainly fail to gain approval among the Earth’s inhabitants.⁴

The article also cites an astronomer named Climius, who believes that the Martians look like “walking trees, with knobby trunks and branch-like arms.” In turn, his colleague Humphrey Davis allegedly states that a Red Plant’s inhabitant resembles a human, only with “extraordinarily developed limbs.”⁵ Finally, Ms. Smead, who works as a medium, claims that the Martians’ “bodies closely resemble the North American Indians.”

Naturally, we may doubt the existence of Climius, Davis, or Ms. Smead.⁶ However, this overview of ideas regarding the appearance of extraterrestrials accurately represents the main thinking currents in the visual xenology of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. As shown above, the ideas in question view extraterrestrials in several distinct ways: as new forms of the natural world—for example plants, animals, or crystals; as hybrid creatures combining humanoid and animal traits; as beings whose bodies undergo evolutionary modifications; and finally as creatures alien to earthly life, identifiable only with groups perceived as “savage.”

As in the case of other science fiction (SF) notions, the imagined appearance of planetary inhabitants in SF literature, silent movies, and press articles obviously reflects the authors’ state of knowledge, fears, prejudices, and curiosity. By analyzing the depictions of extraterrestrials created in the nineteenth century and until the 1950s, we can trace the formation of ideas regarding life beyond the Earth. Echoes of these visions appear in contemporary popular culture, whose dominant image of aliens as little green men emerged in the 1960s. This iconographic representation frames extraterrestrials as green—or gray—beings with dolichocephalic heads, huge eyes, and excessively long fingers. In their introduction to the classic collection of essays, Aliens: The Anthropology of Science Fiction, George E. Slusser and Eric Rabkin write: “The alien is the creation of a need — man’s need to designate something that is genuinely outside himself, something that is truly nonman.”⁷ In early xenological iconography, representations of the “nonman” as extraterrestrials draw inspiration from numerous cultural depictions: religious, evolutionist, colonial, and finally technological.

“Especially Beautiful”⁸

Naturally, the abovementioned debate about life on Mars followed many previous discussions on the possible existence of aliens or their appearance. Literature rather thoroughly describes the influence of ancient notions, Copernican heliocentrism, and pre-Enlightenment new astronomy on people’s visions of extraterrestrial life.⁹ Here, let me mention one of the first utopian-travel novels: The Man in the Moone (1638) by Anglican bishop Francis Godwin. The novel’s protagonists, Domingo Gonsales and his black servant Diego, fly to the Moon by geese power. While on the Moon, they encounter an advanced lunar civilization: “Their stature was most divers but for the most part, twice the height of ours: their colour and countenance most pleasing, and their habit such, as I know not how to expresse.”¹⁰ Surprisingly, the Moon’s inhabitants have green skin, adhere to Christianity, and live in a utopia achieved by exchanging individuals which transgress social norms for children from the Earth. Their civilization remains free from lie and deceit, enjoys an eternal spring, and rewards good deeds with extended life—and height. Although Gonsales quickly learns their tonal language and customs, he returns to the Earth six months later. According to Ricardo Capoferro, this lunar civilization embodies a utopian vision of European society and Christian paradise all in one. Species-related or cultural relativism remains absent from this world, with appearance and language serving as the only alien elements.¹¹ The Lunarians pose no threat, and Gonsales never views them as “savage” or “different” in line with the Eurocentric perspective of otherness. The fundamental connection, namely the faith, proves sufficient, and the Moon’s Christian society serves as an ideal which humans should pursue.

Visual difference constitutes the Other’s main distinctive feature, although an unfamiliar appearance does not necessarily indicate extraterrestrial provenance. From geographical discoveries to the twentieth century, utopian novels, travel literature, colonizers’ and missionaries’ reports and memoirs, as well as scientific works abound with representations of dehumanized, savage, or animal-like otherness. Examples include the discourse surrounding the Hottentot Venus (Saartjie Baartman), the popularity of human zoos, the narratives at mission exhibitions, or instances of evolutionism-driven search for “missing links” between apes and humans. Therefore, the basic difference consists in viewing extraterrestrials as a higher stage of human development shaped by space. Present already in Goodwin’s book, this pattern actively evolved especially from the mid-nineteenth century, fueled by Charles Darwin’s theory. Consequently, popular culture represents aliens from the Moon, Mars, or other planets as advanced civilizations—in accordance with Darwin’s teachings, albeit developed by nineteenth-century proponents of space life. This group included Flammarion, who presented his views in a popular science book titled Urania (1889). Its main protagonist, a young astronomer, travels through the universe, accompanied by the Muse Urania. When observing the blue landscape on a planet beyond the Solar System, the young man spots

a group of winged beings who were hovering above the blue waters. … They were beings who had evidently been created to live in air. They seemed woven out of light. At a distance I thought they were dragon-flies; they had their slender, graceful shape, the same wide wings, quickness, and lightness. But on examining them more closely I noticed their height, which was not inferior to our own, and realized from the expression of their eyes that they were not animals. Their heads were very like that of the dragon-fly, and like those aerial creatures they had no legs.¹²

Urania explains that these androgynous beings have advanced senses and a finer nervous system, and that they “care very little for anything but scientific research.”¹³

During his journey, the protagonist of Urania visits numerous planets, where he focuses on describing the aliens’ appearance: phosphorescent eyes which can kill, an organ on the forehead which displays thoughts, or bodily transformations into insects. But, as Urania states, this extraterrestrial life is nothing extraordinary: “Life is earthly on the Earth, Martial on Mars, Saturnian on Saturn, Neptunian on Neptune, — that is to say, appropriate to each habitation; or, to express it better, more strictly speaking, produced and developed by each world according to its organic condition, and following a primordial law which all Nature obeys, — the law of progress.”¹⁴ In this evolutionary approach, the Lunarians, the Martians, and other aliens—differing in terms of appearance, culture, and social organization—serve to represent the future of humanity.

“Their Build Seemed Identical to Our Bodies”¹⁵

Actually, dragonfly aliens do not represent Flammarion’s own invention. Instead, these beings echo several other aspects: the earlier attempts at identifying the “heavenly people” with the religious image of angels;¹⁶ the then mysterious origins of flying species; and the cultural dreams of humans becoming airborne. Later in history, astronomers’ news of reduced gravity on the Moon or Mars and related scientific speculations fueled social imagination. The image of flying aliens as human-animal hybrids ranked among the most widespread visions in the popular culture of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. We can trace its origin to Richard Adams Locke, a journalist at “New York Sun.” In 1835, Locke published a series of articles in which he claims that astronomer John Herschel saw sheep, bison, unicorns, and humans with bat wings on the Moon through a telescope. Locke describes those humans as follows:

they averaged four feet in height, were covered, except on the face, with short and flossy copper-colored hair, and had wings composed of a thin membrane, without hair, lying snugly upon their backs, from the top of their shoulders to the calves of their legs. The face, which was of a yellowish flesh color, was a slight improvement upon that of the large orangutan.¹⁷

Locke soon admitted that he had invented the whole story to improve the newspaper’s sales. Today, we refer to this affair as the Great Moon Hoax. Still, international press reprinted Locke’s stunning “news,” frequently adding pictures to attract attention. This way, the Lunarians as flying human-animal hybrids managed to inhabit nineteenth-century popular imagination. In Polish literature, one reflection of their influence appears in Teodor Tripplin’s Podróż po Księżycu odbyta przez Serafina Bolińskiego (Serafin Boliński’s Journey to the Moon; 1858). Upon his first encounter with the Selenites, Boliński sees

soldiers in celadon uniforms with pink facings, wearing glazed helmets, and carrying shiny rifles and broadswords. I saw a military police patrol, but not one from infantry or cavalry—a winged patrol, such as we have never seen on the Earth. They noticed me and uttered a call, presumably asking “Who’s there?” “It’s me,” I responded at random.¹⁸

Doctor Gerdwid, a Selenite who brought Boliński to the Moon, reveals that all of the Moon’s inhabitants have wings. Nonetheless, they can walk too, “using wings when running, much like the ostrich.”¹⁹ This civilization of the future has devised numerous inventions, including flying mechanical horses and flying balloon-fish for those with weaker wings:

Some were as big as a sturgeon, mounted individually by elderly people or plump, stately women, whose wings apparently proved insufficient. Others reached the size of a whale, each carrying several dozen passengers of both sexes and varying age, and from different social classes; those included individuals without wings, wearing poor long dress, mostly with beards.²⁰

The Selenites have also developed an elixir which allows Boliński to grow his own wings. The Moon’s inhabitants prove to be incarnations of former Earthlings’ souls; for instance, Gerdwid used to teach Boliński in his youth. In turn, the Moon serves as a stop on the way to paradise. The aliens’ hybrid appearance in Tripplin’s book conceals a religious context, and the flying extraterrestrials themselves represent the Earth’s transcendent future.

In the evolutionist approach, the hybrid nature of aliens’ bodies—especially the combination of insect and human features—does not equal deformation. The latter highlights a degradation of the Other, so typical of the colonial racial discourse. In contrast, hybrid extraterrestrial bodies appear as superior to the Earth-bound humans. In these depictions, dehumanization—or, better said, the acquisition of a cosmic nature—conveys a positive message of development and progress. Science fiction literature abounds with examples of this phenomenon. The novel Aleriel, or a Voyage to Other Worlds (1883) by Wladislaw Somerville Lach-Szyrma describes majestic flying Venusians surrounded by fluorescent glow. To their own surprise, the aliens discover that the Earthlings rank lower in the evolutionary hierarchy because they cannot fly.²¹ In Wells’s “Crystal Egg” (1897), we encounter silver, insect-like, flying creatures. Finally, in Kurt Lasswitz’s Two Planets (Auf zwei Planeten; 1897), large-eyed Martians colonize the Earth.

Although partially nonhuman, the appearance of advanced aliens seemed familiar owing to the combination of human bodies with animal or plant traits. Moreover, it evoked the representations of earthly gods—a common fantasy regarding aliens already in the 1920s and the 1930s, before the idea of paleocontact spread in popular culture. Press articles often suggested that the Martians had initiated—or at least influenced—the development of human civilization. Admittedly, rather than scientific hypotheses, these texts typically provide fictional accounts from séances—as in the case of Ms. Smead’s vision which I mentioned above. For example, on January 5, 1929, “Express Kaliski” (The Kalisz Express) printed an article entitled “Flirt profesora angielskiego z panną Hocho-Ma-Ruru” (An English Professor Flirts with Miss Hocho-Ma-Ruru). The text reports on séances which allegedly managed to contact a “Martian beauty,” who told Professor Robinson basic facts about the Red Planet’s inhabitants, including their culture and technological advancement. According to Miss Hocho-Ma-Ruru, “the Martians are much bigger than humans, resemble the earthly turtles,” and travel by trains at the speed of 2000 kilometers per hour. Moreover, their church services have “the form of electric rockets,”²² whatever this might mean. In fact, the earthly civilization owes its entire development to the Martians, because the souls of deceased humans reach the Red Planet, where they acquire the necessary knowledge to implement on the Earth after reincarnation. The notions regarding the aliens’ influence on humanity also appear in Stanley G. Weinbaum’s short story “A Martian Odyssey” (1934), first published in the magazine “Wonder Stories.” Its protagonist, Dick Jarvis, encounters a “freak ostrich” which calls itself Tweel:

The Martian wasn’t a bird, really. It wasn’t even bird-like, except just at first glance. It had a beak all right, and a few feathery appendages, but the beak wasn’t really a beak. It was somewhat flexible; I could see the tip bend slowly from side to side; it was almost like a cross between a beak and a trunk. It had four-toed feet, and four fingered things—hands, you’d have to call them, and a little roundish body, and a long neck ending in a tiny head—and that beak.²³

In the past, Tweel’s race visited ancient Egypt, whose inhabitants recorded the aliens’ appearance as the god Thoth. Therefore, hybrid bodies also serve to combine familiarity with otherness—a liminal form between the human and a cosmic Other. In such representations, a completely alien sphere becomes partially familiar through an analogy with earthly nature or culture.

“New and Revolting Creatures”²⁴

With the increasing popularity of invasion literature in SF, with Wells’s War of the Worlds as the main representative, civilizationally advanced aliens gradually lost their anthropomorphic features. Their newly acquired nonhuman appearance served to cause fright proportional to the threat they posed to the less technologically advanced humanity. In other words, aliens ceased to be friendly. In Wells’s First Men in the Moon (1901), businessman Bedford and physicist Cavor meet the Selenites, who resemble insects due to their shells and helmets. The narrator initially anthropomorphizes their real bodies, with thin legs, cylindrical trunks, and heads hidden between the shoulders. Only upon the first close contact with a Selenite does he realize that “the human features I had attributed to him were not there at all!”²⁵

Of course I ought to have expected that, only I didn’t. It came to me as an absolute, for a moment an overwhelming, shock. It seemed as though it wasn’t a face, as though it must needs be a mask, a horror, a deformity, that would presently be disavowed or explained. There was no nose, and the thing had dull bulging eyes at the side—in the silhouette I had supposed they were ears. There were no ears… I have tried to draw one of these heads, but I cannot. There was a mouth, downwardly curved, like a human mouth in a face that stares ferociously…

The neck on which the head was poised was jointed in three places, almost like the short joints in the leg of a crab. ²⁶

Moreover, in invasion literature, aliens frequently resemble frightening machines; the callous aura of railway engines or motors forms a common motif in nineteenth-century prose. In the short story “The Shapes” (“Les Xipéhuz”; 1887) by J. H. Rosny—the pen name of Joseph Henri Honoré Boex—the events unfold on the prehistoric Earth. When traversing the forest of Kzur, the tribe of Piehu faces an attack by

a great circle of translucent bluish cones, point uppermost, each nearly half the bulk of a man. A few clear streaks, a few dark convolutions were scattered across their surfaces; each one had a dazzling star near its base. … Other Shapes, here and there, were almost cylindrical — some tall and thin, others low and squat, all of a bronzed color, tipped with green; and all, like the slabs, having the characteristic point of light.²⁷

The presumably extraterrestrial shapes can communicate among themselves and express emotions. As such, they represent advanced beings which may threaten humans. However, the latter ultimately defeat the aliens in the year 22649. These intelligent crystals devoid of human or animal traits rank among the most intriguing representations of nonhuman otherness in SF at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In contrast, Gustave Le Rouge’s Prisoner of the Vampires of Mars (Le prisonnier de la planète Mars; 1909) describes as many as two Martian civilizations. The first displays animal features, including vampirism:

Imagine a bat, about the size of a man. Nothing could hope to give an idea of its appearance, except perhaps the giant Chiropterae of Brazil or the vampire bats of Java. But its wings were much smaller and its finger-joints, grouped at the extremity of the forearm, formed a true hand armed with sharp claws. In addition, its lower extremities terminated in similar hands, and it was by these claws that the vampire, when Robert caught sight of it in the brief light of his flaming projectile, held itself fast to the sturdy branch of a beech tree.²⁸

The Martian vampires can also become invisible, and in Volume 2, The War of the Vampires (La Guerre des vampires; 1909), they attack the Earth. The second Martian civilization remains less advanced and resembles humans, albeit with a modified appearance. Its descriptions evoke the period’s characterizations of persons with mental impairments, especially Down syndrome:

[They were as short as] ten-year-old children and exceptionally plump; their bellies, in particular, were especially well developed. Their round faces were fresh and pink; their long hair and beards were and unpleasant reddish hue; and, above all, a rather childish smile beamed perpetually on their innocent countenances. Their cheeks were so fat as to almost hide their noses, and their small, slightly dull blue eyes angled toward their temples, like those of the Chinese. The little children looked like veritable balls of fat, fowls fattened for some solemn feast.²⁹

While Robert fears the vampires, the childlike Martians awaken his colonial feelings: “He was deeply moved. He conceived a thousand humanitarian projects. In a few days, in a few months, he would shepherd these mild, unsophisticated brutes through several thousand years of progress. He saw himself as a king, almost a God, and he no longer felt the slightest fear.”³⁰ Thus, the savage aliens become Robert’s subjects, hardly differing from the “primitive” peoples of the colonial discourse.

Regarding savage aliens in the colonial context, I must obviously mention Jerzy Żuławski’s The Lunar Trilogy (Trylogia księżycowa; 1901–1911). In Volume 2, The Conqueror (Zwycięzca), black-winged Szerns conquer the descendants of the Moon expedition’s participants. The Szerns look “tribal” and nonhuman, have bodies covered with black hairs, and inhabit the dark side of the Moon. Their image employs the traditional combination of otherness with darkness, animality, silence—due to a different language—and violence.³¹ The Szerns kill the men and kidnap the women, which results in hybrids—the Deathlings, more similar to people. However, we can view the savage nature of the Szerns and the Deathlings from a different angle. In Volume 3, The Old Earth (Stara Ziemia), Roda and Mataret descend from the Moon to the Earth, where people perceive—and treat—them precisely as savages: short and weak members of the Moon’s degenerated human tribe.³²

As we have seen, the texts analyzed in this section divide aliens into two types: enemies deserving of destruction, whose non-anthropomorphic looks highlight their hostility; and human-like savages, whom the Earthlings both humanize and—through colonial treatment—dehumanize. Regardless of their exact appearance, both alien types prove key to the earthly/white supremacy narrative. In the earlier representations, the cosmic Other actually signifies a posthuman; by contrast, in the works of Wells, Le Rouge, or Żuławski, we encounter an archetypal alien—an unknown and hostile creature, which the earthly superhuman must subdue. These narratives leave no room for understanding or making acquaintance; instead, they offer the classic story of violence and conquest.

“A Fair Captive from the Sky”³³

The superhuman’s view of the cosmic Other in SF literature until the 1950s remains predominantly masculine. Naturally, this perspective includes the male fantasy of sexual conquest targeting an (only partially) exotic alien female. Examples include the Danish movie Himmelskibet (1917; dir. Forest Holger-Madsen), also known as A Trip to Mars and Excelsior. In the movie, Captain Avanti Planetaros and his crew fly to Mars, whose civilization members seem rather ordinary. However, they have telepathic skills, maintain a pacifist religion of the hearts, exclude any evil and violence, and adhere to fruitarianism. Their leader’s daughter, Marya, becomes Avanti’s guide to the alien world and its customs. When Avanti confesses his love, Marya agrees to accompany him to the Earth to spread peace among humans. This way, the cosmic journey ends in a classic reward: a princess’s hand.

A similar thread appears in Alexei Tolstoy’s novel Aelita (1923), later filmed by Yakov Protazanov under the same title. In the story, Engineer Mstislav Sergeyevich Los and his colleague Alexei Gusev fly to Mars, where they meet descendants of the Atlanteans. The eponymous Aelita is the daughter of Tuscoob, head of the Martians’ Supreme Council. Aelita has ashen hear and eyes and a white-blue face. During the first meeting, Los deems her wonderful yet odd,³⁴ and he quickly falls in love with her. In turn, Gusev meets Ikha, “the steward’s niece—a bouncing smoky-blue mischievous girl,”³⁵ whom he kisses without her consent during the first encounter. Actually, he “wanted to give her a playful spank, but restrained himself.”³⁶ Neither Aelita nor Ikha resist the Earthlings’ affection. In fact, when a proletarian revolution breaks out on Mars, the two women help the Russians escape—although they themselves remain on the Red Planet. Afterward, Aelita only manages to send a radio message to Los: “Where are you, where are you, my love?”³⁷ Both Marya and Aelita provide liaison between two worlds; however, as submissive beautiful women conquered by earthly men, they also symbolize human domination over cosmic communities. Naturally, the novels lack any reflection on the possible results of gender-related and xenological differences; on the biological level, an extraterrestrial woman remains identical to her earthly counterpart.

We can observe this phenomenon most clearly in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s novel cycle featuring John Carter—a Confederate veteran of the American Civil War, fighting against the Apache. In the first book, A Princess of Mars (1912), Carter mysteriously moves to the Red Planet, where he encounters the people of Thark. Taller than humans, and with olive green skin, the Thark have an additional pair of limbs. Their eyes rest on the opposite sides of the heads, their ears resemble cups, and their noses are merely slits in the faces. “The iris of the eyes is blood red, as in Albinos, while the pupil is dark. The eyeball itself is very white, as are the teeth. These latter add a most ferocious appearance to an otherwise fearsome and terrible countenance, as the lower tusks curve upward to sharp points which end about where the eyes of earthly human beings are located.”³⁸ Owing to his gravity-related advantage, agility, and weapon wielding skills, Carter quickly wins the Thark’s approval. In turn, their captive, Princess Dejah Thoris, looks “similar in every detail to the earthly women,” except her “light reddish copper” skin color:

Her face was oval and beautiful in the extreme, her every feature was finely chiseled and exquisite, her eyes large and lustrous and her head surmounted by a mass of coal black, waving hair, caught loosely into a strange yet becoming coiffure. … She was as destitute of clothes as the green Martians who accompanied her; indeed, save for her highly wrought ornaments she was entirely naked, nor could any apparel have enhanced the beauty of her perfect and symmetrical figure.³⁹

Dejah is a scientist and pacifist. When the Thark appoint Carter her guard, the enchanted man promises her liberation. After many twists and turns, Carter finally defeats the enemies, wins Dejah’s hand, and obtains the title of a prince. Still, the pair soon experiences separation. Burroughs’s novels assign Dejah the role of Carter’s love and a lady in trouble. This way, Mars becomes a literary camouflage for the Wild West mythology—a recreation of the past in a vision of the future.⁴⁰ Dejah’s cosmic origin, her skills, or her personality carry no special significance in the plot; she serves merely as an exoticized trophy for the male protagonist—once again, without any gender-related reflection. In this case, an extraterrestrial woman proves alien only by name.

Little Green Men?

Burroughs’s novel seems important for the transformations of aliens’ depictions for another reason: his descriptions rank among the first to have contributed to the “little green men” stereotype.⁴¹ In the late 1930s, SF literature introduced aliens as human-machine hybrids. Let me recall here the novel Rakietą na Merkury (A Rocket to Mercury; 1934) by Feliks Burdecki—a journalist and writer presently forgotten due to his collaboration past. In the novel, three Polish men travel to Mercury, where they meet a friendly civilization of dynamo-machines, to which they refer as “radio beings.” Unsurprisingly, these creatures’ snake-like legs serve as communication aerials.⁴² Areanthropos from Stanisław Lem’s debut novel The Man from Mars (Człowiek z Marsa; 1946) resembles a self-propelled machine with three snake-shaped limbs and a brain hidden inside. But already before the Second World War, American popular culture began to represent extraterrestrials as green individuals with large eyes and aerial-like ears. Some researchers trace this image to the English vernacular culture, citing legends about the green children of Woolpit, goblins, or gnomes. In the 1960s, gray aliens began to compete with their green counterparts for popular imagination, especially after the Zeta Reticuli incident. The case concerned an American couple, Betty and Barney Hill, who claimed that gray, humanoid individuals with large eyes but without ears or distinct noses had abducted them to an unidentified flying object (UFO). This version of the aliens’ image, whether gray or green, quickly gained popularity. Reproduced in countless movies, TV series, novels, and articles, and on various gadgets, the vision has become one of the stereotypical alien representations.

In this analysis of selected depictions of extraterrestrials from the nineteenth century to the 1950s, I intended to show the origins of their diversity in literature, public discourse, and movies before the dawn of stereotypical xenological iconography. The possible appearance of an alien remains a serious question in contemporary xenobiology. However, this issue also challenges popular imagination, confronting the human mind with the aporetic nature of otherness and with its apparent cognitive impermeability. The image of aliens serves as a cultural mirror for authors and recipients alike, persuading us to ponder the difference between aliens and humans—in other words, the symbolic boundary between the earthly, familiar, and present on the one hand, and alien, transcendent, and future on the other hand.

Xenological iconography stems from various cultural contexts and undergoes modifications and transformations, although certain popular culture motifs seem more durable than others. Ideas of otherness still rely on the evolutionist conviction regarding technological advantage, although aliens currently use UFOs instead of wings. And most importantly, the possible appearance of extraterrestrials provokes fantasy and speculation jointly with the fundamental question: will we ever contact civilizations from other planets, and if so, how will this proceed?