But why are aliens so popular today, even though solid evidence of their supposed existence remains elusive (at best)? It is quite clear that, regardless of whether you believe in visitors from distant worlds or not, the way we have described them has changed drastically and, usually, in tandem with wider depictions in popular culture. A good way to appreciate this comes by examining the term “little green men”, which is often used as a shorthand for all things “alien encounter”.  

Media coverage over the last year alone has made solid use of the term as reporters attempted to make sense of, and often mock, what was going on in the US and Mexico. Even now, at the time of writing, a casual Google search of the same term brings up multiple unrelated news stories concerning alien encounters, the surprising number of scientists who believe in them, or even a discussion on how aliens are likely purple, rather than green.

And yet, if we think about representations of such creatures today, both those in the cinema and those people believe they have encountered, they are often a far cry from anything resembling the old stereotype (small, verdant, bulging heads with large eyes and sometimes antenna). It might be tempting to dismiss this term as just a historical leftover, but could it highlight something more significant at play?  

 1955: They’re here 

There is one bizarre and popular alien encounter story that is often thought to be the reason the term “little green men” became embedded in our culture.  

On Sunday, August 21, 1955, something strange occurred at a farmhouse in Kelly, Kentucky. It was around 7:00 pm when one of the occupants, a man named Billy Ray Taylor, burst into the Sutton family’s home claiming to have seen a silvery object in the sky.  

According to Billy, whatever he had seen had apparently traveled over the house and then stopped in the air before dropping to the ground. However, the family didn’t believe him. After all, Billy, who was visiting the Suttons with his wife, was known for his overactive imagination and habit of telling tall tales.  

But then the dog started to act strangely. It started barking an hour after Billy’s excited claims and wouldn’t stop. Then the dog scampered under the house, with its tail between its legs. So, Billy and Lucky Sutton, a man he had worked with at a local carnival, went to the back door where they saw a glow from outside.  

Within this light, they reportedly spotted a small humanoid creature that was about 1 meter (3.5 feet) tall and had an “oversized” round head. The thing also had long arms that nearly touched the floor, each of which was armed with talons. The small entity also had large glowing eyes while its body was said to be metallic-looking, like it was covered in “silver”.  

What would you do if faced with this strange appearance? Well, Billy and Lucky grabbed a 20-gauge shotgun and a rifle and then opened fire on the diminutive visitor. Despite their efforts, the little creature seemed to avoid harm. It apparently did a flip, and then hurried away into the darkness.   

Soon after, another creature was seen at a side window, which the men also shot at (presumably to the window’s detriment). This one also seemed bulletproof and, after another flip, disappeared into the night. Mrs Glennie Lankford, the farmhouse matriarch, reportedly saw one of the beings approaching the house. 

She later described what she saw to Isabel Davis, a famous Ufologist who, regardless of your opinions on the possibility of aliens, produced a meticulously researched book on this case and others. According to Mrs Lankford, the creatures looked “like a 5-gallon gasoline can with a head on top and small legs. It was a shimmering bright metal like on my refrigerator.”  

Over the next hours, the Suttons continued to shoot at the creatures as they approached the house. One apparently tried to grab at Billy’s hair as he stepped outside to see what was going on. Eventually, everyone fled the scene and raced to Hopkinsville police station where the terrified farmers explained their terror.  

Despite a large investigation by the local state police, military police, and a local photographer, nothing of the “aliens” could be found, though they did recover the shell casing from the guns. But once the police left, the otherworldly visitors supposedly returned and continued to assail the family until sunrise.  

They may be here – but when did they arrive? 

But how did the chrome men become little green men? In the days following the incident, the Sutton farmhouse was visited by more “terrestrial” figures: the local press, as well as curious members of the public. It seems the Sutton’s story stirred up a lot of national interest and, as the story spread and was told and retold, pieces of it started to mutate.  

The most important change, so History claims, occurred a few years later when the story of the little silver men was accidentally conflated with that of an “Eastern Kentucky woman” who had reported witnessing a flying saucer and a 1.8-meter (6-foot) tall green man.  

This, so the story goes, was the genesis of the little green men. But is that really the case? Certainly, the Kelly-Hopkinsville encounter, the common name for the Sutton family’s night of terror, went a long way to popularize the term, but it is not its birth. Not by a long shot.  

In science fiction, the explicit reference to “little green men” was common in the 1940s. It is even possible that the term was used as early as 1908, if the now-defunct website of an internet sleuth is right. But even before this, alien entities were being described as small, green-skinned things in literature from the late 19^th century onwards. In fact, there are some who believe the 12^th century description of the green children of Woolpit is the earliest reference to this type of being.  

By the 1920s, the trope was well established and so sci-fi stories and comic books often showed tiny aliens with green skin doing what those little critters will do. But this also raises another interesting development. Within these earlier narratives, the entities were typically mischievous tricksters, rather than the more ambiguous creatures that allegedly harassed the Sutton farmhouse in 1955. They are certainly unrecognizable when compared to the various overtly dangerous and often genocidal creatures that have invaded our cinema screens over the last few decades.  

Somehow, the belief in aliens has shifted from something puckish to things to be terrified of, and there are some researchers who think they know why.  

For instance, it has been argued that our ideas about aliens, what they look like, what they do, and what this means for the human race, are not only shaped by popular culture narratives and depictions but shapes them in turn. In this sense, aliens are less visitors who can tell us about other worlds and are more like mirrors through which we can see our own societal anxieties, distresses, and, occasionally, dreams, looking back at us.    

Under this thesis, it is no wonder the idea of malevolent, invading aliens proliferated in the same years that the world was captivated by the Cold War and all its haunting implications of nuclear annihilation and communist invasion.  

The story of the “flying saucer”, the iconic representation of alien technology, is itself tightly bound to the secretive and paranoid history of that era when suspicion about government knowledge and coverups was on the rise. Even today, the excitement surrounding the US Congressional hearing and the supposed mummified bodies on display in Mexico taps into contemporary distrust of government institutions and beliefs in the Deep State (which are themselves partly a legacy of the Cold War alien scare).   

Ultimately, the nature of the modern “alien encounters”, UFOs, and related unusual phenomena may just be a continuation of something much older: folklore. This may be why the term “little green men” remains a common reference, even today when there are few reports of beings matching that description. Instead, the term may be a bridge that ties the heritage of folk stories concerning fairies and goblin-like creatures to the modern technology-heavy alternatives. 

And it makes sense. Traditional folklore from across the world is filled with small otherworldly humanoid beings that either plague or, occasionally, assist people. Irish and British stories, which have found their way into American culture too, are filled with situations where people see floating orbs of light or other aerial phenomena (ghost lights, will-o-whips, and so on), are abducted by strange entities, or find themselves trespassing in uncanny spaces – like “other dimensions” – inhabited by supernatural entities. The old Irish changeling stories, about individuals who are replaced by a fairy alternative, are extremely reminiscent of themes associated with alien clones and body doubles.  

This interpretation is not new. Scholars have been pointing out the similarities between modern alien and UFO stories for decades. It seems the stories people tell about their own experiences are part of an emerging folk culture that draws heavily from older narratives. Folklore is a way of keeping the world enchanted and can be a window into changing values and ideas of the communities who create it.  

This is why belief in extraterrestrial visitations will not likely disappear even when high profile events like the recent congressional hearings fail to confirm their existence. That is because, at the end of the day, the little green men are our monsters. They are not visiting from far away; they were always here.