Little Gray Men: Roswell and the Rise of a Popular Culture

By Toby Smith

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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0826321216
• ISBN13: 9780826321213
• Release Date: January 2000
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Length: 211 Pages
• Weight: 0.84 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Rushton is Wrong

I'm afraid Teddy Rushton is a little misleading with his review. He either doesn't read much, saying this was one of the most disappointing books he's read, or the author ran over his dog. I don't get it. To say that this book was pasted from internet information is absurd. This book is original from beginning to end. Little Gray Men isn't a history lesson about the Roswell incident, it is a look at the Alien culture that came after the supposed landing. I don't think Rushton got it. I'm not sure what Rushton has against New Mexico either. I've been there as well and think it is a very pretty state. I wasn't robbled or held up. Did he get a hangnail, a nosebleed? We don't know, but his personal attact on this author is not justified nor is the grade he gives this book. I found Little Gray Men comical and highly entertaining. Smith's look at the pop culture that has been created from the alien invasion of America is observant. I'd like to know when Rushton will be back in New Mexico, so I can meet him there and show him to a bookstore.

Ros-well Done

Believe, baby. Believe that the key event in all history happened on July 4 (or maybe July 5; sources disagree), 1947, and that most homo sapiens still don't know about it. Screaming from night skies outside of Roswell fell ... something. A UFO, stated an early radio report, man's first contact with extra-terrestrials. And our own government has stashed the bodies, deduced Those Who Believe. So began Roswell's auspicious ascent to synonymy with a UFO obsession that would color conspiracies and entertainment for the remainder of the century. From the so-called Roswell Incident, too, Toby Smith's Little Gray Men takes off (hee hee) on a frequently funny pastiche of New Mexico's oddest socio-phenomenon. Smith displays a Roswell known and unknown -- how many of the attendees at 50th Anniversary bash Encounter '97 had ever heard of formerly neighboring town Blackdom? -- on his tour through a pop culture mecca's half-century. Personalities haunt these pages with rocketeer Robert Goddard, sci-fi scribe Jack Williamson and golfer Nancy Lopez rubbing shoulders with nonplussed, bumper sticker-hawking locals. And even Governor "Toke" Johnson makes a cameo to state he knows what happened, but ain't tellin'. Mr. Smith amuses throughout, admirably tracing public consciousness of Roswell from New Yorker cartoons to incessant "X-Files" subplots (subtract a few points, though, for omitting mention of a certain Chevy Malibu in the classic flick Repo Man). Over-embellishment is sometimes problematic, but wackiness definitely predominates. And the Incident? That's easy: experimental military technology; nothing more, nothing less. Obviously.