The Daily Zeitgeist - Icon #13 - The Grays: Big Head. Tiny Mouth. No Junk.

Episode Date: March 9, 2026

In this episode, Jack and Miles are joined by novelist/humorist/TikToker Jason Pargin to talk about one of humanity's favorite royalty-free characters: The Alien Grays! They'll explore their evolution through history, the couple who locked in their character design, and their lasting influence! Extraterrestrial Iconography.pdf Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction? (1995) VHS Trailer See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Instead of looking at, uh, actually I got to do it. your daily zeitgeist. Oh. Through current events, we're looking at it through the lens of the powerful pop cultural

hork cruxes that are our icons. We use these characters to create meaning to build identity to give our sleep paralysis demons a cool new sci-fi look

to create a potential horror movie enemy that in a room with no weapons I'm pretty sure I could beat the shit out of that's right. We're talking about

the great. The default alien face on every, the truth is out there. T-shirt, every trippy dorm room, I want a believe poster, every item sold within the city limits of Roswell, New Mexico. I'm thrilled to be joined by a gray in his own right. Yeah. My co-host, Mr. Miles Gray! No, no.

I'm, again, burning, this has been one of the burning questions I've had about this. Why gray? Why gray? Because their skin? Is that all it is? Their skin is gray. That's it. It's purely just that.

It's not always gray. Like when you do a Google image search of alien face, it is always the same design. But a lot of times it's green. I'd say it's more often green. But I'm saying, but the etymology here is that it's purely a description. Yeah. I thought it was something else. Scientific and racist at the same time.

Like, let's, we go. go by skin color in this world. What color are they? Miles, in our third seat, we're fortunate to be joined by someone who designed scary monsters for a living. Yeah. The bestselling author of John dies at the end, the Zoe Ash series. One of the co-founders of Cracked and one of my co-hosts of the crack podcast back of the day. Yes. It's Jason Parjay! Jason! If you've got people out there that don't know, they're like, well, where did he wind up? I now have the same job

as the Rizler. I'm a short video of TikTok influencer. I mostly make my living. That's where I've landed. It's your main thing. You don't need to tell me that it's shameful. Do you have like a trademark thing to you're like, you know, like, just

like the Rizzler, you know what I mean? I mean. I don't know what I was doing. I would have. You would have a trademark thing. I would have something that sticks in the brain. I would have a big waxed mustache or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We found that stupid hats. Yes, Jason, you need to get a stupid hat because... Like a stupidly tiny one. Yeah, yeah. I really think that Sherlock Holmes and Santa

both punching well above their weight because of hat stuff. And you point out, you kind of did a pass of this doc yourself and point out that Donald Trump also like seems to have designed himself as an icon also with a big stupid hat there's something about a hat you just you just need to get a dumb hat yeah because like if if you can define everything just from your head yeah then all bets are off and anything can happen your money yeah yeah yeah um but yeah i do think just real quick like when designing a scary monster which like the gray is depending on how you feel like i kind i the part of me that wants to believe wants to

believe that they exist because I want them to be like a godlike. And like it's the part of me that used to want to believe in like religion when I was a kid. I think that's where like my wanting to believe in aliens comes from. But they are at their core a scary monster. And I do want like I think I've always found it interesting that zombies for the most part are slow and they're such a popular. They're so easy to defeat, you know. They're just like, you just outrun them.

I wonder if Gray's also benefit from whatever that is, that it's just like, I could, on the one hand, yes, they're very, like, powerful and mysterious and interesting looking. On the other hand, if it was just me versus them, I could pick him up and punt him. You could fold, you could break an alien in half with your bare hands. And I think that's, but isn't that kind of the deal, right? It's like, it's freaky because they sort of represent this, like, other phase where, like, their heads are so big because, They're fucking you up with their brain and their technological know-how. Right. Because they've moved beyond barbarian fisticuffs like on this point.

And yet, I still could toss that little fucker. Oh, yeah, yeah. The shit out of an alien. I'm going to let you, I'm going to let you in on a trade secret. Okay. Tell anybody. Okay. It's between us here.

Monster designer. Hey, listeners, listeners, plug your ears. Okay. All monsters and all horror is just wish fulfillment. Yeah. This is what we wish. people looked like. And a great example of this was from the pandemic. Because I don't know if you remember, but back in 2020, there was a pandemic that went around called the COVID-19 pandemic.

And YouTuber Lindsay Ellis said this. She made a fantastic point. I think it was in one of her videos. She says that in the worlds of like zombie fiction, these days we call zombies the infected. We started, we've decided it was a disease a long ago, right? And she's like, look at how people react to a real pandemic, where the challenge is the people that get sick, you've got to care for them. You've got to pour resources in it. Whereas a zombie pandemic, think about what wish fulfillment that is, where they infected, just got to shoot in the head. Yeah, yeah, like how much, and we act like that would be bad news.

Like, oh, no, I've, not my neighbor who I hate. Yeah, not everyone. Wow, I have to just go out and. do a mass shooting every day just to get to the grocery store, how terrible. The one thing that's missing from like zombie movies is the giddiness. Yes.

Oh shit. You said fuckers head blow off. All right. Every horror villain is some version of that. Like for example, when people talk about AI taking over, they'll have an image and their article of like the T-800 from Terminator.

It's like if it was just a guy, a metal guy with a rifle. It'd be so much easier. It'd be so much easier than it's like, no, it's software that runs everything. Yeah. And it's invisible and you don't even know what it's doing. It's like, no, no, no.

Give me the horror version because that's a thing that is designed to ultimately be defeated by a hero. Yeah. Well, let's talk grays because I think this particular icon gets into kind of one of the reasons I think it's interesting to talk about icons in a show about the zeitgeist. I think we're going to find that our shared consciousness kind of designed these guys and did kind of did a great job. You know, we talked in the last week's Stephen King episode about like how he's good at finding

these fears lurking in our unconscious and like bringing them out. But I feel like the grays are a monster that doesn't even have a skilled writer to pull the character out. It just kind of births itself out of multiple people, multiple places, multiple hypnosis-assisted testimonies. And kind of like we saw with Santa, there's no one author. It just

keeps iterating until it lands on the version that is iconic. And unlike Santa and Sherlock, the grays don't even have a stupid hat and a pipe to add to the costume. But it is just like kind of perfectly designed. It's what we'll talk about. There's a lot of different

iterations of aliens. One of the reasons that we have the grays is because they are just like the perfect alien. Like all these other options just are missteps, you know? They do something where it's just like, well, that's kind of stupid or that one's already been taken by like the Lord of the Rings. A big chunk of especially alien sightings in the UK are these Nordic aliens that just look like the elves from Lord of the Rings.

but like obviously you know you can't that can't be what you get when you Google alien because then it's too confusing you know but yeah these guys it's the Halloween thing that we talk about like if you're going to dress as a Halloween costume that that's one of the things we've said from the first episode of this show Jason that our rubric for like is someone an icon that we can cover on this show is do they make sense as a Halloween costume. Right. Yeah. And you've talked about Donald Trump, but also think about somebody new to Christianity trying to go into the Bible and find the devil in there and find where you find a description of him wearing red and having horns and a cake and a little pitchfork. That's a Halloween costume. That's not from the Bible. That's that's a, that is something that was developed so

you could dress as that for Halloween. But if you, I think all over the world, if you gave kids some crayons, draw me the devil, they're going to pick up the red, right? Right. Yeah. He's got even got the head gear. He got the horns to mark him as something. But he also is a person. And that's the thing about the grades that's very easy to miss is that they're 99% human. There's still two arms, two legs, bipedal. Yeah. And it was just a fine mold that kind of just hissed at you. That would not be iconic. Right. The arrival aliens. Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah. The arrival aliens are super

fun. There's so many fun aliens throughout. Like, you know what's interesting that we're going to get to, I guess, later, or we can just talk about it now, but the grays do appear in close encounters of the third kind, like the Steven Spielberg alien movie, but the one that becomes way more iconic is ET, like a couple years later. But then in terms of being the overall generic alien, it's the grays. Right. Because the ones in the close encounter are sort of more, they're like, they're great. They just. Yeah, they were like thin-bodied, big-headed dudes. They look a lot like the grays, yeah. Every time you say this, I'm like, my grandmother?

So weird to keep hearing this in this context? Okay, yes, the aliens. Yeah, I think that's a good way putting it, though. You ask any eight-year-old to draw you an alien. They're going to sketch. Upside down, tear drop head, big eyes, yeah. Triangle-shaped head, pointy chin, two huge, like, wrap-around to Oakley, black eyes, kind of.

two slits for nostrils and a tiny mouth. There's other things that people talk about being universal, but they really aren't. Like, those are the main things. It's that head shape. It's the, that eye shape. It's the little nostrils and the tiny mouth.

Everything else, I feel like, kind of. And underdeveloped arms and legs. You know what I mean? They don't lift. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Arms and legs, for sure. Because I've never seen.

Are there any ripped? Like, like, like, rolls off. Yeah. Like, oh, shit. Yeah, yeah. I got to hit my macros. You know where I get some fucking spinach. So, Jesus.

But we probably should just say up top, because I have long identified as someone who wants to believe. I do not think we have any strong evidence. If we were, you know, heading into my adult life, I would say if we were ranking the conspiracy theories that are most likely to be true from like ghosts and monsters and, like,

big foot. to like Illuminati-style pedophile cults and aliens, I probably would have like put aliens somewhere like under the eyes wide shut colts, but like over all the rest of them because it just seems mathematically plausible. It's, I mean, we just saw this with Obama when he was asked if aliens were real

and he was like they're real, but they're not under area 51 and assumed we all wouldn't freak out Because what he was saying in his own kind of Vulcan way is like, well, we all understand mathematically. There's probably life out there somewhere in the vastness of the universe. Right. But the more you look at the evidence, the harder it is to, like it's not the most evidence-based community, I would say, UFOology. I mean, what about those people that got abducted? You know, I got to believe the people in the tabloids.

can't really be histriotic and looking for attention. Yeah. As a kid, I was huge into UFO stuff. And I was in my early high school years. I read all of those books because there was a wave of books, one called Communion by Whitley Streber. He was another guy that said he got abducted by Greys. There was read all the books about the ancient aliens.

I read all the books about how the aliens built the pyramids. When I was a kid, I loved that stuff. And it was only, I think by the time I got to college, I was so disillusioned. with how horrible the quality of the evidence was. And how quickly these people would just glom on to any, like any scammer. Even people that acknowledge it was a scam, they would come out later and be like, well, he faked some of those photos. But the other photos are genuine.

Right, right. You want to believe this so bad because your own life is so, you're so dissatisfied with it. you want something else to be out there. And I found that every time somebody claimed, they got to point where everybody who claimed to have gotten abducted had previously were super into UFOs, like prior to getting abducted. Right. Boy, that's weird.

You think aliens are seeking out the- Love aliens. Love aliens. Yeah. They love fans. What luck. They feed off this stuff. What loss.

Yeah. Yeah. They go out and find their fans. And then you just see how they're, once an element of abductions gets into, into the archetype of an abduction, it's now in everybody's. So once they decided, well, you know what they're doing? They're breeding us because they need our semen to create a race of superhuman alien hybrids. Like one, that's your fetish.

Right. But now that's everybody's like, oh, yeah, that's Laura. They put that having me too. They put that having me too on my penis because they said my sperm was the strongest. Yeah, that's great. in the world. No, no, you came after the fact. I was covered in semen in the forest because of the aliens that were there.

That's what it was. Some weird stuff. I got an explanation. Yeah. Aliys, were there, was there something like this too? Like, hasn't there always been like this throughout civilization of people being taken or visit? Like, wasn't it like fairies before aliens? People were like.

So, like, we've always had this like sort of the gravitational pull towards like, And the monsters selected me to take me away to their magical place. And I'm the only one that knows. Yeah, it was just demons or fairies. And there was usually like some sexual element to it. The witches took me out and. Oh, man. I got no blood, man.

What? My will. Yeah. It was, I didn't want this to happen. Yes, right. They just said that I was the ultimate stallion that they were going to use as a stud horse. That's right. breed the ultimate people.

I tell you, man, I would never do that again. Like, why are you fanning yourself? They said they've been looking far and wide for someone with swimmers as strong as mine. Yeah. So I will say coming into my, you know, alien belief, I think the two piece of evidence that I had heard that I was like, damn, that's intriguing. One was that they, there are these like descriptions of aliens. throughout history that match the description of the grays.

And that doesn't seem to be true. And in fact, early, early alien sightings, as we'll get to, look like total shit. Like, it is really a process of design where they, like, slowly kind of alien abductees slowly kind of moved in on this design that we're now familiar with. But there's some from, like, the 50s that it's like, they just look like things.

from the cutting room floor of like Batman villain design. Like there's one that's just a button with legs. Like a giant button with legs underneath it. It's like one of those Italian brain rot characters. Yeah, yeah.

And then the other thing is that so many of the sightings look alike. And I was like, wow. Like how could, how could it be? But I think we'll find out It's just they're kind of open to suggestion.

And there is this enormously, there's a couple enormously influential things. There's the case of Betty and Barney Hill. And there's also a TV show that happened right before they were abducted that kind of influenced how people viewed aliens. But like a lot of the UFO stuff from the early 20th century or, you know, like right before people. started having reporting alien abductions. People were reporting UFOs, but they just automatically assumed it was like, man, the Russians really have some crazy shit going on. You know, it just like changed based on like what the anxiety is and what people wanted to believe. Right. I mean, yeah, is there something to also just like, if because of like the monoculture at the time,

it's like, once someone says the thing, then everyone's like, okay, so that's how it happens. And that's real. Like I feel like the same way when I first heard about fire in the sky, people were like, it's based on a real story. Yeah, man. And as a kid, I was like. Miles, they passed a fucking lie detector, bro. I know. That was the shit. That fucked me up.

Stone, man. Exactly. I was like, and then so that, after seeing that, I really didn't want to see the movie because I'm like, this is a documentary. And I don't know if I can encounter the horrifying shit in there. And I remember seeing me like, this is so fucked up. This is the last fucking thing I ever want to happen to me. but it feels like so much of my idea of it has been fed by someone being like,

this thing's based on a true story. Like I remember reading like behold a pale horse like in fucking junior high and being like, dude, this guy fucking saw football field ship go out. This guy was in the CIA. Not really. We fucking don't know what like that guy's whole background is. But again, it took like these little things that were like just because they were printed or said based on a true story that for me informed someone.

much of how I even perceived any of that because I was like, well, that is the truth. And I'm going to use that as like a foundational way to perceive everything. Yeah. But let's just go through real quick, the uniformity of the, the greys. Because even like our research, I thank you, Dave Ruse did, did a great job on kind of putting the stock together. But like, he was like kind of going with the grain of like the gray is being being a thing. But even like a lot of the things that are like supposedly uniform actually aren't uniform when you when you look at it. Like the only things that really are uniform are the things we already covered. Like I head shape, small nose, tiny mouth, thin limbs.

But according to the lore, grays have an oversized head shaped like an upside down triangle, large rounded top with a pointy chin, big almond shaped wrap around eyes that are jet black, no pupils, which that changes a lot. lot in people's reports. Like a lot of the early reports are like, no, they have gray eyes or they have like different you know, colorful hazel eyes. Yeah. They don't talk.

They use their hypnotic eyes to communicate telepathically with humans. Again, I'm not sure. I think I've seen various versions where like they communicate with music or doing other things. No real nose. Small expressionless mouth. And I think there's other things like some grays have multiple inner eyelids. Like I've seen that in some of them.

but that's not like a key piece of the lore. Right. And then there's like the short grays and the tall grays, but like short grays between three and four feet tall, large heads, slender, fragile looking bodies, thin limbs, smooth gray colored skin, naked and hairless with no visible genitalia, which is a thing that keeps coming up. Oh, so is that consistent?

Nothing downstairs. Can't figure it out for the life of me. Yeah, that is consistent. I do like that they insist on including that. Like I'd say that's true of most animals aren't like walking around upright with like big dick and balls below, you know? That's like that's not a thing that like birds. You need to come down to the equestrian center in Burbank, man. That's right.

But I do just love the idea that there's someone in the UFO community just being like, yes, sorry to interrupt your harrowing, mind blowing encounter with a godlike intelligence. Did you happen to get a look down there? Yeah. Hey, have you noticed that in most fantasy movies and in westerns, when they're riding horses, they have to pick out female horses because otherwise the viewer gets distracted or they're having to have this very dramatic conversation. That's like, wait a second. That works like a three foot.

Yeah. Jesus Christ. It's got sand all over. It's dragging the ground. Frame this shot so I'm not looking at that the whole time. I totally didn't think about that because every time I've been in any kind of other horse back riding thing and there's like a male horse you're like,

immediately doing the immature thing, we're like, yo. Well, this is also why, like, they say that it's a clever thing to keep the dinosaurs from breeding in Jurassic Park,

but that's also why they had to have all female dinosaurs. Oh, yeah. It's because the T-Rex was just hanging dork. It would have been pretty distracting. But I think the take home from this is how important it was to keep the design simple.

If you want something to stick in people's brains, if you want something that a child can draw, if you want something that you can put onto a decoration or a sticker or a little pin, it has to be simple. If somebody comes back from an alien abduction, I'm like, okay, so they were 12 feet tall. They had 37 arms. Yeah. It had a head that was indescribable. Right, right, right. It was just going and reflected your own private fears at you.

Yeah. And then it's torso existed in the fifth dimension. So you saw all of world history spinning around its navel. Like, no, no, no, no, simple. No clothes. Don't have to draw an outfit. Right. Hair's hard to draw.

That's true. It's almost a logo. It's almost like from the Wendy's Sign. Yeah, yeah. And it was for the longest, like, Alien Workshop was such a, like, popular skateboard brand in, like, L.A. and skate culture. That was like the, like, the dopish logo. goal you could have for like a skateboard in like the mid-90s was this like very simple alien head.

And it was always like, yeah, dude, alien workshop. Those alienware computers, that's still a company. See, that's the other thing. Nobody owns that design, right? Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you're free to steal it where you can't do that with a lot of characters. They're still copywriter.

Yeah, yeah. The predator. But yeah, as mentioned, these haven't always been, like, we just started getting alien abductions within, like, started in the 60s about, but this is a long time trend of abduction narratives involving, you know, in the past. So, so these are things that are common to all these abduction narratives. A dark night, another worldly visitor, being spirited away to another realm, sexual encounter, not always consensual, returning home with fragmented memory and a sense of missing time, which is, that's a great little narrative detail. That's like, and I came home and I came home,

I checked the clock. And it was a whole, a whole day was, you know what I mean? Right, yeah, yeah. That's just a good narrative kind of twist that, uh, I see why we keep using it. It's good. But this goes back to like the gods of ancient Greece and Rome. Like they, they used to do that, like Zeus, uh, took the form of a swan and sexually assaulted a Spartan queen.

Religious texts, angels appear to deliver divine messages, uh, fairies. in European folklore, witches and demons. Demons is such a good corollary because, yeah, the thing that you were describing of like many-headed beasts, but it like stands on the head of a needle. Like, isn't that how the Bible describes, like, demons and stuff? Like, it's just, the angels where it's like, it's impossible to draw a picture of it.

It's like, well, there were wheels within wheels, and the wheels were covered with eyes, and they were 13 wings, and it spoke with a thousand voices. It's like, nope. It's a woman with a harp and she's got, she's got wings. That's what it's a baby with wings. What about that? What if it's a baby with a heart?

Yeah, yeah. Right. Oh, on a wheels with eyes. Ah, shit, man. I just got done with like mastered boxes. So I don't know if I can do that. But I also think this is an interesting time to bring up the Axial Age hypothesis of history, which Carl Jasper's points out that like Confucius in China, the Buddha and India,

in India, Homer and Plato in Greece and Zarathustra in Iran, like all happened around the same time in history. Like, and just this idea, because it's, I think we tend to want to view things as like a linear story of like how a thing comes to happen is like this person did that. But then sometimes it just feels like it, it's actually time for something to happen. And this is why we get, you know, a good example is we like to think Edison invented the light bulb. And it's like actually five people invented the light bulb around that time at various places. Like it was just time for the light bulb to be invented.

And, you know, there are just these moments in history. So like before cultures were in the time of demon and witch abductions, and then we hit this time where suddenly it makes sense to everyone at the same time for that to switch over and for it to be gray aliens and for them to kind of look like this. The weirdest example and the silliest example is one that we covered in crack, the fact that Dennis the Minnis, the comic book and cartoon character, that comic was Dennis de Minis, there were two different characters called that that were developed at the exact same time on the opposite sides of the world, one in the United States, one in Scotland.

And they both debuted on the same. day. Oh, March 12th, 1951, after all of human history passed without a

single person or character being called Dennis the menace. Suddenly. Suddenly, on 1951, that same,

these two, the two artists had never contacted one another, they had never interacted. The companies

had nothing to do with each other. Their inspirations were totally different. There was not some famous Dennis they both picked and decided

to do a comic about. It's just, it was time. Just rhymed, man. It was time for there to be. at least one, Dennis Bennis. Yeah, we wound up with two. And those are just the ones that made it. Imagine like the five Dennis the menaces. We're on the cutting room floor of like the, you know,

Tokyo newspaper and like in Mexico. Those are just the two that people were like, yeah, they kind of ate with this one. So in terms of the history of anything resembling the grays, there's a book about a visit from a large-headed alien that was published in 1888 that people point to as maybe the first instance of a gray showing up. Mehta, a tale of the future. The stature is diminutive, large heads out of all proportion to their bodies, baldness of their head, and solemnity of their men. But they also have different pale gray eyes. So, like, there's a lot of stuff that's different back then.

And we also have H.G. Wells who wrote War of the Worlds, also wrote an article called The Man of the Year Million about what humans would look like in the distant future. And that does look like a modern day alien. It's got like a big bulbous head. For some reason, he's got the little butthole mouth from Mac and me. You know the alien from Mac and me that's like the little round weird butthole mouth? And also his ass is permanently up in the air. Like he's asking for it at a dog park. or something, but for the most part, it does look like a gray. And there's a time traveler theory that the grays are coming from the distant future, the way that H.G. Wells imagined the trajectory of human evolutions being that, you know, we'd get more frail and more, you know, we'd continue to select for how smart people were. And more and more we would, like, wither away into just these, like, thin, frail, giant-brained bodies and then we would like need to go back in time

to raid people for sperm essentially, which is where that part of the story comes from. Oh, the concept was because the aliens got way too intellectual with their shit. Humans got so that's why. Hey, and then they became the grays are us in the future after we've spent too much time

having sex with smart people. Right. Yeah, yeah. Sometimes you need a brute with a nice looking nose. They're like, oh, that's a good nose on that one. Not like our non-existent slit noses. That's right. But I think it's important to note that you can find throughout, like, animation, that character design of, for one thing, just big head, little tiny body is a common

way to draw characters since forever. But also, if you find old Looney Tunes like Mad Scientist character, real good chance it's going to be huge bald head. that's just like an iconic signifier of the next like smarter than a normal person right so if you're imagining your aliens as like they're like super nerds it's it's the thing we picture when we think of like a nerd or mad scientist it's only that's everybody over there right right yeah we were talking about how Sherlock Holmes one of his deductions in our Sherlock episode one of his deductions was like look how big this guy's head is he's got to be be smart. Easy. And that guy's never wrong. Right.

But yeah. I mean, you were pointing out that like, if you think about like charting, you know, we think of ourselves as like smarter versions of animals and animals are hairier than us.

And so there's just like a certain internal logic to, okay, so it's going to be even less hairy than then, then we are. It'll just keep going on that, which is an interesting.

Again, it's like kind of smart design work that we're doing collectively as we create this. It's like, you know, there's an internal logic of making it hairless and like having a big brain because we have like bigger heads than some of the, you know, lower creatures and we have less hair.

But then it's also just like, and what if it just was the easiest thing to draw in all of human history. Right. Like to Jason's point about the simplicity, it's like the simplicity in the design and also the simplicity of your ability to conceptualize it too.

They're like, oh, right, right. Yeah, that makes sense that we're trending towards this kind of thing. So yeah, it's like similar to what you were saying about Stephen King, about how he just had this ability to find a shared fear that humans have and just find a way to exploit it.

This is like operating on that same way where it's like everyone's kind of familiar with thinking like this. So yeah, you're much easier to be like, oh, yeah, yeah, I can see it.

I just dropped in the chat timeline of like alien descriptions and like what, you know, people basically drawing what, uh, everybody's aliens looked like. So you can get a,

a look at the 1954 guy that is a, uh, button with legs coming out of the bottom. What the fuck is? Wait, what's the story with that? It looks like a light switch with, legs. There's a lot of wild shit and as we're going to get to, the people who like really

popularized the grays, the hills go through a lot of different descriptions even of like as they're recovering the memories and like one of the guys' first descriptions of the alien is like, yeah, he's like kind of got red hair, like an Irish guy. You used to get that a lot. You used to get a lot of, in other ones, it's like, well, they were a little short guys and they had like slicked back black hair. Like, yeah. And it's like they're Italians. Yeah, what do you?

What do we say? The most foreign thing that they can think of is Italians. Right. It's exactly that, though. It's like vaguely ethnic is as far as they can get. That's the farthest their imagination. It's like, yeah, they're Italians from Mars. And yeah, in my most cynical version of this, it's like, they're like, man, a black person and a white, like a biracial person.

They're like, a gray? I don't know. This kind of alien. I cannot fathom. Right. Well, but you're also getting on this chart, the people who occasionally see the Nordic, the beautiful white, blonde, sexy lady. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, they have achieved a higher plane of existence. Right. Even wider version of humans than what we have now, the ultimate perfection. I'm like, okay, dude, I get it. They're beautiful, the most beautiful. Yeah, yeah. So let's get into that.

So in 1897, the world's a buzz of efforts to build the first airplane. Two Americans reported separate encounters with alien spacecraft and extraterrestrial. A farmer in Missouri claimed that a vessel landed in the field with six foot propellers. Next to it stood a stunning alien woman totally naked, could see everything. Quote, she was the most beautiful thing I had ever be held. Oh, man. Under medium-sized with golden hair, wavy and glossy that hung to her waist. Next thing you knew, some balls attached to propellers started spinning quickly,

and the ship shot away like an arrow. Like, the propeller thing obviously doesn't make sense for traveling through space in a way that they probably weren't aware of at the time. But they did guess how planes would be designed their early planes. They got the propellers. So that was good. They were still six years away from. Yeah.

Yeah. And the spinny balls. And they were shoot away like an arrow. And then there was a guy in West Virginia who spotted an illuminated ship with propellers in the sky. When it landed, eight Martians stepped out, each measuring 11 to 12 feet. Yeah. So you get a lot of different descriptions. The uniformity thing is overstated.

And in fact, the Nordic type, the one that. that Jason's referring to that is like the most perfect, evolved species you can possibly imagine is the default alien sighting in the UK. In the UK, 44% of the aliens are normal height, 35% are Nordic, which is like super tall and 12% of the grays. In Europe, 15% normal height, 25% Nordic, 48% grays. In the U.S., 12% normal height, 6% Nordic, 73% Gray's.

So it is kind of a U.S. phenomenon. Right. Well, because again, it's like, it's all just

informed by your culture, right? Because like, if in America, we're getting like the Hills version of the grays, then everyone's like,

all right, all right, that's the hymnal we sing from. And if in the UK, your first ideas are like, these beautiful white people,

man. Yeah. And you're like, that's, yeah, that's our alien. Or whatever. The most white.

Yeah. They have achieved maximum whiteness. Yeah. We must, We must become more like them. Bless them. Bless the tall whites.

All right, dude. Yeah. You're starting to show too much here in your story of your alien encounter. They're sexy and they will be able to play in the NBA. Power forward. Just wait. Just wait. It's coming.

The Europeans, I'm saying. They've invaded. But it's mostly the Balkans. They play a superior, advanced form of basketball. They're not just out there trying to show off. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The ball seems to fizz about so fast when they're out there. Causing confusion in their opposition.

Jesus. Next Monday, our 2026 IHeart podcast awards are happening live at South by Southwest. Just the biggest night in podcasting. We'll honor the very best in podcasting from the past year and celebrate the most innovative talent and creators in the industry. And the winner is creativity, knowledge, and passion. all be on full display. Thank you so much. IHeartRadio. Thank you to all the other nominees. You guys are awesome. Watch live next Monday at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific free at veeps.com or the Veeps app.

Hi, this is Joe Winterstein, host of the Spirit Daughter podcast, where we talk about astrology, natal charts, and how to step into your most vibrant life. And I just sat down with a mini driver. The Irish traveler said when I was 16, you're going to have a terrible time with men. actor, storyteller, and unapologetic Aquarian visionary. Aquarius is all about freedom-loving and different perspectives, and I find a lot of people with strong placements in Aquarius are misunderstood. A son and Venus and Aquarius in her seventh house spark her unconventional approach to partnership. He really has taught me to embrace people sleeping in different rooms,

on different houses and different places, but just an embracing of the isness of it all. If you're navigating your own transformation or just want to chart-side view into how a leading artist integrates astrology, creativity, and real life, this episode is a must listen. Listen to the Spirit Daughter podcast starting on February 24th on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcast. I'm Clayton Eckerd, and in 2022, I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor. Unfortunately, it didn't go according to plan. he became the first bachelor to ever have his final rose rejected. The internet turned on him.

If I could press a button and rewind it all I would. But what happened to Clayton after the show made even bigger headlines. It began as a one-night stand and ended in a courtroom with Clayton at the center of a very strange paternity scandal. The media is here. This case has gone viral. The dating contract. Agree to date me, but I'm also suing you. Please search warrant.

This is unlike anything I've ever seen before. I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trapped. This season, an epic battle of He Said She Said, and the search for accountability in a sea of lies. Listen to Love Trapped on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nancy Glass, host of the Burden of Guilt Season 2 podcast. This is a story about a horrendous lie that destroyed two families. Late one night, Bobby Gumpbright became the victim of a random crime.

He pulls the gun, tells me to lie down on the ground. He identified Jermaine Hudson as the perpetrator. Jermaine was sentenced to 99 years. I'm like, Lord, this can't be real. I thought it was a mistaken identity. The best lie is partial truth. For 22 years, only two people. knew the truth until a confession changed everything.

I was a monster. Listen to Burden of Guilt Season 2 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, host of the on-purpose podcast. I'm joined by Luke Combs, award-winning country music artist and one of the most authentic voices in music today. Luke opens up about success, self-doubt, mental health and what it really takes to stay true to who you are when your life changes overnight. I hate fame. I hate the word celebrity. I hate those words. They make me uncomfortable. But I think when you get to a certain point, the fame or the success or the influence, it just accentuates and exacerbates the inherent person that you are. The guy that says he's always

going to be there and that will do anything to be there is the only guy that's not there. I'm in Australia when Beau is born. My whole identity is that, no matter what, I'm going to prioritize my wife and my children over my job. I dread the conversation with my son. What do you think you'd say? Listen to On Purpose with Jay Chetty on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. But yeah, UFO sightings are very common in the late 40s and everybody thinks it's Russia. They think it's Russian spacecraft.

Then there's a 1953 sci-fi horror movie called Invaders from Mars. The TV series, the outer limits from 1963 to 1965, comes through and really starts putting aliens on the map. Even the, like, image that they created of aliens isn't that much like the grays, but like it does start putting this idea out there of like, I just put it in the chat, but it does start putting the idea out there of alien abductions. That could be a dude in a ham mask. Yeah, it does. look yeah it's just like yeah you could put a piece of baloney over you're like I'm an alien

someone's like fuck you know but it's the 50s so you don't know better but this is where we start getting like tractor beams pulling things into UFOs the big brained big eye and I do think TV has an interesting impact on the zeitgeist because it's

massively impactful, especially at this time, when it's like this monoculture, there's only like a handful of channels. Everybody's watching the same thing. They're watching it in like crazy numbers that we can't even like conceive of right now. And it's also completely disposable. Like they taped over like some of the footage from the first Super Bowl from the moon landing. Most of like the first couple years of like Johnny Carson don't exist anywhere. It's this like thing that everybody was watching that was like dumping ideas into like so many people's brains at this time and like we don't even really have like a record of it in the same way that we do of like film like or at least like we don't like really study it because it's kind of dumb and so everybody just like doesn't really

pay attention to it but I think that's another place where people are like and then suddenly there's this rash of UFO abductions and it's like well there were like three different shows where that sort of thing was happening and everybody was fucking watching it every night constantly but just like nobody really wrote that much about it or like we don't even have probably some of the episodes

in the Library of Congress. Right. But this is when so 1961 a couple Betty and Barney Hill. They're liars. You can already tell those names. I would nah, I'm sorry. Behanie and Barney. Yeah, try to know. And this is

one Jason. What's the Flintstones couple? That just now That's right. Betty and Barney Hill, nay, rubble. We know why the aliens picked them. The Flintstones are, you know, some people think they are

what are happening. Like, the Flintstones is what's happening down on earth. While the Jetsons are happening up. And the whole thing is like a post-apocalyptic version of the planet. So the aliens are fans of the Flintstones, clearly,

because Betty and Barney Hill returning home from a long long road trip when they spot a bright object in the sky that appeared to be following their car. The last thing they remember is a loud beeping noise and strange vibrations. After that, their memories become jumbled, and they arrive home three hours later than expected, missing chunk of time. They have strange physical evidence. Betty's dress was ripped and covered in a fine pink powder.

There were circular marks on the car, like large suction cups. had been attached to it because the aliens are using the aliens are using the same technology as like 1960s Batman To go up a wall and suck you pull it up fire up the wench it's like come on y'all got you can do better than that This is the detail that I'm just like Barney buddy uh barney found a ring of genital warts around his dick oh my god and is blaming the aliens I'm just saying that's okay All right, Barney. So some interesting details. Betty, already a believer in UFOs.

She was a fan of sci-fi movies and TV shows about alien abductions, read books about UFOs, including the popular 1950 book. Flying Saucers are real by Donald Kehoe. She had written the author who recommended she read The Great Flying Saucer Hook. She's not just like casually interested in this. She's writing the author of books about UFO abductions. Right. He recommended she read this book,

Great Flying Sauser Hoax, which includes stories of UFOs following cars down quiet country roads. Because they're from New Hampshire, right? Doesn't that like these people are from? They're from New Hampshire. Their road trip was up through Canada. Oh, long-ass drive. Like where they were coming from?

Where were they going in Canada? They were going up on a road trip. What happened was they were going to stay in a hotel, and then there was a snowstorm supposed to come in, and they were scared that yesterday ended up there. That's important to the story because they drive back. They had been on the road for 18 straight hours when in the middle of the night their brains start to not work right.

Yeah, it's going to say. They were both very, very sleep deprived and driving through a mountain road where back then would have been pitch dark. There's some lights up around there now, but it was... Right. Yeah, you start seeing stuff. If you ever talk to a trucker, talk about the stuff they've seen in the middle,

the night. It's not because they are conduits to the paranormal. It's because they've been driving for 14 freaking hours. Right. And your brain just starts showing you stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Right. And like this, I do think, like, one of the things that also

I always found interesting about alien sightings or UFO sightings is like how many pilots also have like seen wild shit in the sky. And like pilots you like think of these like sort of sober-minded people hopefully you know that we're putting our lives in their

hands and a lot of them there's a lot of testimony from pilots being like oh yeah I've seen you know crazy shit up in the sky yeah um but was that fucked up yeah I was pretty fucked up but yeah they're also kind of the truckers of the sky you know they're like flying these long hours looking at nothing you know and the brain just like starts to do some wild shit to you There's at least one account of a fighter pilot who would try to pursue a UFO because he thought it was something from like the Russians, right, in experimental aircraft and was chasing it up into the sky and talking to hell is just zipping all over the sky. It's on my left and the right. He was chasing the planet Venus. Right.

Because he spotted, which appears to be a very bright star. Again, he's a pilot. Right. You say, well, if he was a pilot and he saw something, it's like, no, these guys are just guys. they're not experts in extraterrestrials they're experts in flying an aircraft and yeah I've seen Top Gunn

wouldn't do that I do call Tom Cruise's character Top Gun in that movie Yeah top gun wouldn't do that Top Gun would know the difference No way Yeah yeah yeah not Top Gun would have shot that alien down Dude

So soon Betty starts having a series Of vivid dreams in them She and Barney Are led through the woods By short humanoid creatures With gray skin Slits for noses Large Wrap Round Eyes

they're taken aboard a spacecraft where the alien performed terrifying medical experiments on them the worst moment for Betty was when they inserted a lung needle into her navel. That is a thing that's something that happens though in one of those 1950s UFO

abduction movies. That shit also happens to fucking Neo in the Matrix. I know. When that shit goes in his navel. I'm like that there's something so unsettling about that because that is sort of like our connection to our baby development. Yeah, just go fuck.

Yeah. Any listeners out there, just jam your finger into your navel. As hard as you can, you'll realize. It'll be so fucking uncomfortable. Yeah. That's a part of your guts, just connected to your skin. Just put something in there if you want to see why that's like a primal fear. But it is important to note.

This is a part of the story that I think people don't realize that she, on the night, they had nothing. Then she recovered the memory in her, sleep that has had a dream and decided that was a memory coming back. That is not how memory works. There are people out there today who still think that they will make the joke, well, I must have repressed that memory because it was too traumatic. There is no such thing. That's pseudoscience. There's no such thing as recovering a memory of something that was too upsetting to you. Now, I realize they're probably saying, well, the alien technology wiped our memories or whatever,

and it came back to us. But this is not evidence for anything. This is a dream. But from that dream, birth of modern mythology because now people see her dream all over the world. I think that's crazier than the aliens. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't think it's crazier than the aliens, but it is crazy. I think it's crazier than the aliens. Because I think a thousand years from now, people will still be claiming to get abducted from alien

grays, and it all starts from this random lady's dream. Do we still, but do we still, what's the, what's like the latest one? Are people still claiming alien abduction these days? Oh, yeah. now okay because i feel like everyone's on the fucking drones and shit it like goes viral like yeah at that point i don't i don't know like how common it is today that's what i mean like yeah yeah yeah like yeah yeah yeah i think the new one is like drones like everyone now has videos that they're catching of shit uapes or something drones and the tick tack yeah yeah which

you know that that that's like i i think these things just keep kind of well i'd imagine it's our cynicism too now with like cameras and everything being documented is like well dude, if you don't have a video of a fucking alien taking away, then shut the fuck up. But like, if you got a little Tick-Tac video, then people can kind of, you know, project their own meaning onto that versus just the claim of like, yeah, dude, they took me a lot. But also the fact that, for example, in the original sighting where those guys claimed that they saw flying saucers, those pilots, whatever year that was, 1940 something. Even the saucer, they didn't describe them as saucers. They described them as shapes that seem to skip like saucers if you flip the saucer over a lake and kind of skips. That's how they said they were moving through the sky.

But now that you've established that the aliens fly in like a pie plate. Right, right, right, right. There was all these little drops of look, I saw a flying saucer and they just looked through a hubcap in the air. Right, right, right, right. Again, the simplicity of the ship, the simplicity of the design and how easy it makes it to fake. Yeah. And how key that is, because now you've got something that's very, look, I can see a circle up there and everybody's like,

aha, flying saucer. Because it's also like, I feel like attached so much to like this, like wanting to stand out from other people too. So what a, what a convenient way to do that or differentiate yourself by claiming. I saw the saucer. I got it. The alien took me.

But I also think that it's important to, like in the same way I talk a lot about the, uh, uh, Havana syndrome on the show and the way that people, uh, they think that like those, CIA agents slash diplomats are making it up for but it's like why would they make it up it doesn't

really make sense I think they believe that this shit is happening to them and I think like in the case of Betty and Barney Hill like I think the like to what Jason was talking about with the recovered memories in hypnosis like it's really easy for people to add and like memory is like incredibly malleable. They've done like tons of experiments where you can just like add stuff to it, but that doesn't make it a thing where you like know that you've done that and you're like knowingly doing it for attention. You're suddenly like that's just a thing that's incredibly real to you, you know, which is so wild. When you walk through how this thing plays out with the hypnosis and the hillcase, this is a perfect, this is like the platonic ideal. That's why I love this story of how

something like the spreads because this is like this is almost step by step how it works. Yeah. So she's going to these UFO meetings and people say you should try undergoing hypnosis to see if you can recover these lost memories of that night. So over a period of four months in 1964, this is three years after the initial abduction, they participated in several hypnotic regression therapy sessions. they do their sessions separately and it kind of takes a while

for a coherent narrative to emerge. The narrative that emerges is the UFO landed on the highway, the hills partially immobilized or taken on board, subjected to medical examinations, found themselves back in their car hours later. But yeah, you can listen to the audio from one of Barney's hypnosis sessions. At points in the session, he seems like really freaked out,

like to the point that you're, like, Jesus, this is, again, like, so this is not a thing where this guy just happens to be a great actor. Sure, sure. He believes that he is re-experiencing something that happened to him, you know? He starts screaming that it feels like eyes are peering into my mind. It feels like eyes are pushing their way into my brain and start screaming that during his hypnosis session. Yeah. Wait, they were, I didn't know they were an interracial couple.

Yeah, they're an interracial couple. No, way to bury the little. What? I just pulled it up. I'm like, Barney, my guy. This is key. Yeah. The Hills told nobody about this.

Right. Because they did not want to be on TV because that was not, this is 19161. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They did not want to draw attention to themselves. They did not go out and try to sell a book. They didn't do the talk show circuit. They told nobody. The only reason the world knows about this is because somebody else leaked their

that hypnotism session notes and then they started doing press. When they first came home, the only people they told is they called their local Air Force base and it's like, hey, there's a freaking spacecraft that's giving people general warts.

You should be doing something about that. They didn't go to the press. They didn't try to write a book. They never tried to this ruined their lives. Like Arnie died in early death. He had like he had health problems ever since this. They did not get rich off this. That's crazy.

They didn't try to get rich off this. They believed this happened. But when people say, well, Barney, you know, he independently told the story. It's like, no, his wife had the dream and she had been talking about this, this took over her life. She had talked about this every single day for two to three years before they had their hypnosis session. He knew the story. Under hypnosis is the exact same thing, but the satanic panic. Do you get a child under hypnosis or a teenage group? and ask her, under hypnosis, you're not recovering anything. You're just extremely susceptible.

Right. You're suggestible. So you can sense what they're wanting out of you. So when you tell a little child, like, now, did they perhaps take you somewhere in some sort of a dungeon? Yeah. Yeah, they did. Yeah. And there were men in robes.

It's the exact same thing here. They're like DMing your memories. They're like being the dungeon master of your memories. Exactly. It's exactly that because he loved his wife. Yeah. He wanted to support her in this, and he didn't want her to be, like, alone. So under hypnosis, like, yeah, he. Yeah, right, right. Subconsciously, he's not going to contradict that. Yeah. To himself, like, yeah, this did happen. Yes, she's not crazy. And it's such a powerful thing to me because he just wanted her story to be true. And so he told it became his truth. And lots of things work that way. They're not fraudsters.

I like she spent the rest of her life trying to get abducted again and it never happened. Damn. Right. That's also the same thing with like the CIA thing and the like it it is so such a fundamental mind fuck for people. It's like why would they tell this lie? It's like because they don't think they're lying. Yeah.

And also it's just fucking me up because I was joking about the biracial thing being called a gray and then this is where we get the term. Right. It's from a biracial couple talking about the shit they saw. I'm like, God. damn this is fucking okay it's so funny because I I just I knew of this case I never saw a picture or anything and then when you brought up the hypnosis session I was like let me see like let me see where this thing's at and I saw that I'm like this looks like my great grandfather um what but just

in terms of where like going back to the grays and the description of the grays because this is one of the things that really popularizes that image it was many sessions and in some of those I just want to read this one from the Barney sessions. One alien person looks friendly to me. He's friendly looking and he's looking to me over his right shoulder and he's smiling. What does the face make you think of? It was round. I think of a red-headed Irishman.

So that's an early version. And another one was he has an evil face. He looks like a German Nazi. He's wearing a black, shiny jacket and scarf. I've never seen eyes slanted like that. His eyes are slanted. oh, his eyes are slanted, but not like a Chinese. They began round and went back like that, and they went up like this.

Please, can I draw it? And then he draws it, and the guys wearing like a biker, like it kind of looks like a gray, but it has pupils in the middle, which make it look really goofy. And he's also wearing like a biker hat. Like a black leather biker hat. And then they finally, you know, like it's this process of, And then they finally, like, you know, after the hypnosis sessions, they commissioned a local artist to paint a portrait of the alien.

And that's the first time we get this, like, very specific look of the grays. Right. Yeah. So. Wow. Even then they're wearing, I think in all of their accounts, they're wearing clothes. They're always describing little jackets or shiny jackets and jumpsuits or what kind of pants they were wearing.

And at some point, we've decided that looks stupid. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like him naked. Alien is not going to tuck their shirt in. Yeah, yeah.

It's smooth. No dick and balls. It's scary because. And that's final. The moment you're picturing these guys like getting dressed. It's like, well, how is that shirt going to fit over that head? Like, look at your picture. How's he going to get that shirt on?

Yeah. Think about it. Think about it. That better be a button up. That better be a button up. Not getting it through the neck hole. What if he was wearing a blousey button up? That would be pretty fun.

Flowing blouse. Yeah. They're talking about that. Telling you, he needs a blousey button up and a dick and a dick and balls. It doesn't make sense. It's the puffy shirt from Seinfeld. They're describing like, who is this person? So we just, we got a bunch of copycat books and movies.

We also get, uh, so this is around the time that fire in the sky happens. I remember that being like a big moment for me. I think that is like where I was first hooked was when I, I think I saw that in a theater as a child and was like, God damn. This basically is real. It has a damn lie detector. It's a documentary, yeah. And then, yeah, you get the close encounters of third kind, which has aliens that look.

It has both the short grays and the tall grays, which that's like the kind of distinctions. That's like sort of how they have the grays organized into like these different groupings and genuses and stuff like that. And then ET comes through and like makes us all. all kind of forget about the close encounter aliens, but then also the close encounter aliens are still kind of out there. Right. And, you know, able to be used. The greys are often connected to the Roswell incident, which happened in 1947. And I assumed that we had descriptions of the grays from that time. And like, that's where it all started. But that's actually not true. It basically just got kind of retconned over,

like after, like basically the late 70s and early 80s, two popular paranormal writers kind of go back and re-examine the Roswell incident and write bestsellers about this. There's one in 1980 that I think is the thing that puts that one on the map. And that's when they start creating fake videos that's like this, you see this alien autopsy? Like that.

Yep. It's as real as it gets. It's from 1947. And then it's later proven to be false. No. So like everything that depicts the grays comes after the hills in the 60s. And then it like gets retconned into earlier versions of alien abductions, essentially. And gets retconned as far back as like there's people that will find cave paintings and insist they can see aliens.

in gray zone there. There's ancient, you know, whatever. There's carvings from, from Egypt. And look at the shape of this thing. It's clearly that's a gray. Because once you've got that, you can just retroactively, everybody does this. Like, this self folklore works, is it works backward. Because if you can make something seem old, that gives it validity, right? Because it goes back forever. Of course, it's valid. It's like, well, yeah, but it took you a long time to iterate that specific design before or you started transposing it on every previous incident. And so all the little deviations and the fact that the aliens and some of these famous cases were wearing hats, that just gets written right out of it. Because we've got to make it consistent going back and to make it seem like we've got one truth.

Now, I can't think of anything else in life that works this way. It probably is just the aliens where people are just going back and insisting that, no, it's always been like this. That's right. Right, right. Yeah. I just like though, too, they're like, man, look at that big ass. head. It's like, I think that's a hat. Like, nah, bro, it's all skull under there, dude. It's all skull. They're fucking aliens. I've seen it right here. They were onto something trying to put a hat on it,

because hats are iconic. They're usually right. But I guess when you have a head that is very uniquely shaped. So the Roswell incident was presented on an episode of Unsolved Mystery. And that, I think Unsolved Mysteries had in the credits, like I think you see a gray. alien um like what one of the grays in there oh just like to as part of like the opening credits yeah i think so i think that was like part of the iconography of the of the series there was 1995's alien autopsy factor fiction a tv documentary that purported to show 1947 footage of a top secret alien autopsy and people were like up and down dude there's no way it kind of reminds me of uh how Arthur Conan Doyle fell for the,

those fairy hoax photos. It was like, how could it possibly be fake? Look at that, like, because I don't know. He just didn't, you'd never seen a photoshopped image before. Right. And, uh, yeah, people were really buying into that in the mid 90s. And then eventually people were like, ah, sorry, I, I made that up.

That's a sheep's brain. That's a dummy. Uh, that's chicken and trails. that's just goo, this general goo over there. Those are baby back ribs. I should have eaten them. It's such a waste of money. But yeah, eyewitnesses have claimed that they've seen alien bodies in 1947,

but then they superimposed the physical characteristics of the grays, which didn't emerge until the 60s and 70s, which is kind of crazy. Yeah. They're getting a lot of mileage out of this because there's this dude on TikTok who he calls himself the ATL alien. And it's this dude who just wears a straight up gray costume, but he's talking like he's from Atlanta the whole time.

But like lightly doing like alien coded shit on there, which is pretty fucking funny. But yeah. It's interesting too how like that one like does incredibly well because people are like oh yeah, man. Like that's what an alien looks like. There is something about like the

late 70s, early 80s. Carl Jung wrote a book called Flying Saucers a modern myth of things seen in sky. He was interested in this just from like the shared consciousness, shared unconscious realm, but it again got published in 1978 and was all about like this being an archetype in a universal image or pattern of thought that represents the collective unconscious of all human beings. And his read on it was that this is like coming from people having a desire for there to be something larger, some larger meaning and like having lost their, having lost religion as,

as an option for that thing, which makes sense to me. But it's like, do you see like that the interest in it changes like between like pre-Cold war and post-Cold War? Like what those sort of stressors are on a society that like kind of allow this kind of thought to proliferate like that? You know, like, because I know so much of like you're saying, those early things were like, it's the Russians or whatever. Like there was something seemingly rooted in reality that allowed people to have that momentum.

And I'm curious what that, you know, what those factors were. Well, I think the Roswell crash is answered your question because the actual thing they were doing in Roswell, the actual thing that crashed was just a big weather balloon that had a bunch of sensors on it because they were trying to detect Soviet nuclear tests. Because that would be like radiation that they could detect. When it crashed, that was a classified program, so they covered it up saying it was a weather balloon or something where it clearly was more, it wasn't exactly that. But when rumors started going around that it was a UFO, they were happy to let that get out there. Right. But think about the truth of the matter, that our enemies and us had developed a weapon that could vaporize a city in the blink of an eye.

Right. And they could drop it on you at any moment. think about how much scarier that is than four aliens. One, visited Earth and are such incompetent flyers that they crashed for the desert on a nice day. Right. Like, you prefer the aliens over the real doomsday device that we had just invented. Right. Like, this was brand new.

You know, nuclear weapons are terrifying. This is so much more fun. There's, of course, you gravitate towards this. the thing that's scary, but it's scary in a way that's actually very easy to understand. They're travelers from another planet. And hopeful in a way,

because they have better technology than us and they haven't just destroyed us. So, like, that's always been my, like, hopeful interpretation of if aliens are here, they are, you know, the government is covering it up because they want you to believe that any civilization with a more superior technology

is going to just destroy because they can. They're going to capture and conquer and colonize. And so, like, if there are aliens here, and if they've been here with superior technology for the past, you know, since the 40s, that makes it seem like, oh, maybe you guys are actually completely fucking wrong and we shouldn't have nuclear weapons.

So that was, like, sort of my moral universe that I wanted to, like, put the aliens on to be like, yeah, we're wrong the way we're current. That's what my aunt would always tell me because she's big into aliens. And she's like from a young age, she's like, no, they're here to watch over. That's the point. Yeah. But I also like the idea that they're here and their technology is kind of made.

So it's taking a real long time for them to figure. I know, they're always crashing. And the fact that they're still like anal probing people 70 some years later, it's like, you've got all of the data at this point. You know what it looks like in there. I'm sorry. There's a point where it's hard. It's clear you're just doing this. Yeah. It's like we can take someone's temperature with a laser without even touching their body these days.

So like, well, what's really going on, guys? There is a Jungian theory that this actually, the shape of the alien face actually comes from Frederick Maelstrom, who says that human babies are pre-programmed to recognize their mother's face. And it's an important survival advantage selected by millions of years of evolution, so deep inside a baby's brain. or deep inside a baby's brain is the blurry image of a woman's face as seen from a newborn's perspective. And this is like where the gray alien face comes from because the baby's mother tucks her chin to look down at the nursing infant. Her chin naturally appears smaller.

It's like a very cool sounding theory that is not at all how perspective works. If I'm looking from below someone's face, they're going to look like they have a giant jaw and like not a tiny non-existent nose, but their nose is going to look massive. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. You know? And I don't think it needs to be that complicated.

Yeah. Because like in my, the horror novels I write, one of the bad guys are shadow people. They're just shadowy figures. And I will occasionally get fan mail from somebody saying, I saw one of these. It's like a shadow and it just had eyes. It's like, no, I didn't invent that. it's a very common hallucination all over the world because your brain thinks you're in the room with somebody, but there's not actually anybody there.

So it just makes like a shape when you're like, it's like a sleep paralysis thing. And so it just makes a shape out of the corner of your eye. And the only thing it knows to do is just like a dark figure. And then you're always, because we're social animals, we're always looking to the eyes because that's where you look at it. Right. You look on their eyes. So it's just like you have a vague suggestion of eyes. Well, a gray, like if you take a toddler and ask them to draw a face, they're not going to start shading out the nose and everything.

It's going to be a circle. Big eye. Yeah, sure. Eye, mouth. It's just a simplified face. And like clown makeup, they do the same thing. They put big, colorful, like they make their eyes bigger and a big cartoonish mouth. It's just a simplified, exaggerated face that your brain is obviously programmed to recognize from birth because we're, you know, that's how we function.

Yeah. So there you have it. That's where the gray has come from. It comes from us. And also another gray from a biracial marriage also. You know what I mean? A biracial union created this gray also. So now I really have a respect.

I didn't read this. It really just that of all the shit we're talking, that detail blows my mind so much that like it's pre-loving versus Virginia. So for these people, they're like, we don't want to put the fucking lens over here. But there is such a, I feel like there's like a beautiful, dramatic film you can make from this. That just kind of like plays with all this shit because it's such an, so, so interesting, like learning that about that. Is that filmmaker who made like the vich and the witch, but it's spelled with two V's.

Is it Robert, Robert Eggers? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Who, uh, he, he like sets the movies inside like the world as it existed for those people. with the magic that was real to them. Like 1630s, New England was fucking weird. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel like if he put,

he would be a good person to like make that movie because that shit was very real to her. I do think it does seem to be the thing that we have the hardest time grappling with is that like these things that aren't true that people are saying happened are, like they did happen as far as those people are concerned. And so, yeah, with this couple, you know, the hills, it doesn't make any sense that

they would make this story up. Like, they didn't want it. They didn't want the attention at all. It like kind of happened through a backdoor way of happening. But like, you know, that that doesn't matter because it was, they believed it happened even though it probably didn't happen, you know. I feel like there's some people out there saying that we've skipped over the detail of all the physical evidence they had, like the marks on their car and the rips on her dress, and they claim there's like a fine red dust all over everything. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

The, the warts around his groin. Yeah. But you understand that once they decided this had happened, everything gets incorporated into the story. So if their dog had ran away a week later, that would have gotten looped into, oh, yeah, the dog could sense it. Right, right. We had encountered an energy, and she just, we could tell she just wasn't right after

that. Like anything that happened, if they had had a leak in their basement, they'd be like, yeah, then the alien force caused the pipes to burst from the psychic energy. Do you see what I mean? Like everything, once you start examining everything around you, this happens all the time. You just start, it all becomes part of this, this mythology. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Jason Pargin, great having you on to talk about this subject. where can people find you, follow you, see you all that good stuff. The Betty and Barney Hill story actually comes up in my last book called I'm starting to worry about this black box of doom.

Great book. It's out in every possible format including paperback audio. You could just straight up have a dude read it to you. Don't even have to, don't even have to read it yourself. You just have somebody read it to you for a small thing. Nice and easy, like you right into your brain. Mm-hmm. Amazing. And where can they find your more important work, your Rizzler work?

Yeah, your Rizzer work with the tiny hat and new trademark gesture too. I am Jason K. Pargeon. Don't underestimate the pipe. Yeah. Jason K. Parson on TikTok, Instagram, Jason Parson on Facebook. Just type my name. You'll get all of those links. I have 2.3 million followers now across the short form video platforms. I even know what all they are. YouTube. I'm on Twitter still, even though I probably, probably shouldn't be probably not morally correct for me to still have an account on there.

Are any of these clean? I don't know. Tell me which, write in to tell me which of the social media platforms are not evil. Let me know. Yeah.

I check every day to find out what the latest is. It turns out they're all fucking bad. Miles, where can people find you? Find me on this. You're already subscribing to where you'll find me.

And I love you. Aw. So nice. All right. I'm talking to the listeners, Jack. I know. I just love that for you and to them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You and I, we'll talk after this. We got some things to work out. You didn't tell me the hills were a biracial couple. I was looking for this whole fucking time. All right. I'm going to be back in a couple of minutes for my notebook.

We'll talk to y'all in a bit. Next Monday, our 2026 IHeart podcast awards are happening live at South by Southwest. It's the biggest night in podcasting. We'll honor the very best in podcasting from the past year and celebrate the most innovative talent and creators in the industry. And the winner is creativity, knowledge, and passion will all be on full display. Thank you so much. IHeart Radio. Thank you to all the other nominees.

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Listen to Burden of Guilt Season 2 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton Eckerd, and in 2022, I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor. Unfortunately, it didn't go according to plan. He became the first Bachelor to ever have his final rose rejected. The internet turned on him. If I could press a button and rewind it all I would. But what happened to Clayton after the show made even bigger headlines.

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Right. That was our episode about the Greys. Thanks to Miles Gray and Jason Pardgeon. Always so good to have Jason back, especially for these icon apps. Feels like the old days of the cracked podcast. All right. This is the No, no, no, no, no, no book.

Don't. First of all, if you're, asking, why would these people who see the grays make shit like this up? I get that it's counterintuitive. I don't think they're always intentionally making it up or even usually intentionally making it up. I highly recommend the documentary capturing the Friedman's. That's the first thing that kind of blew my mind on the sheer malleability of human memory and how we can kind of recover things that we think happened to us.

that may not have actually happened. I'm sure there are believers in aliens who are annoyed by this episode. I get it. I've personally been fascinated by the sightings of the new Tick-Tac-shaped UFOs, UAPs, whatever you want to call them. At various times throughout the history of the Daily zeitgeist, I've been kind of openly fascinated by those. The first of the things from this UFO alien contact realm that broke through into the

mainstream media. I'm still fascinated by those. I still find the USS Nimitz sightings very weird. If you don't know what that story is, go look it up. They did a 60 minutes on it. Not an unsolved mysteries. A 60

minutes in which these serious naval aviators, not high school creative writing teachers, not UFO book club members, the guys from Top Gun come on and say they witness a tick-tac-shaped craft doing impossible things over the ocean with their naked eye.

I find that very interesting. I find it interesting if they didn't witness a weird tick-tac-shaped UFO flying impossibly fast because then why did a bunch of naval aviators agree to tell that lie that makes them look crazy? And if they did see that, what the fuck was it? I haven't heard a good explanation for either case. Maybe we'll cover that in the Tick-Tac-shaped UFOs episode somewhere down the road. But this is the Gray's episode. And if you're mad, if you're a believer, I get it.

But this is just what I found in doing research on the Grays, my conclusion is that the reason that so many people land on the same image is not because they're seeing the same creatures. It's because of a weird process of creative design by way of evolutionary natural selection that's happening in our shared memetic hive mind, which is like almost more far-fetched. It's a very strange process. The big mystery for me heading into this episode was it's not just that the people all see the same alien face and report it.

that the face they see makes sense to me. That is what a hyper-intelligent alien would look like in my mind. Everyone who sees that can't be that smart, you know, to come up with that same design. But I wasn't making room for, in my imagination, first of all, all the stupid-looking alien sightings that people made before they all started seeing the grays. Stupid-looking aliens, people are probably still seeing, and we're just not hearing about the ones that get past. around and shared are the ones that make sense enough to be scary and we have collectively settled on the grays. The ones that don't make sense and die off and we never do episodes about, they don't influence other people's sightings. The grays make sense. They remain. They proliferate.

There are aliens that I'm going to link off to in this PDF that look absurd that we never found out about because they look bad. They were the pitches in the writer's room of our cultural unconsciousness that just got rejected. You know, I'm interested in aliens. I never saw some of the, like this push

button with legs was incredible. Jason had actually put in the dock a really good example of how this kind of mind-meld evolution works, not having to do with aliens, but just Jason Vorky's. Very

good example. Jason Voorhees in the Friday of the 13th series didn't have a hockey mask for the first two Friday the 13th movies. He was a gross swamp monster that jumps out at the end of the first. A guy with a, I think, a burlap sack on his head in the second, which was spooky.

But then in the third one, he puts on a hockey mask and now you can get a knife and a hockey mask and go anywhere in the world, and people will instantly recognize that you are Jason. It's almost like, I mean, it's almost helpful

for understanding how natural selection works. So it's like a random mutation in Friday the 13th 3 that allows a species to be better and survive. You know, if they hadn't randomly found that mutation of this

character and he stayed a guy with a burlap bag on his head, you know, that character, that franchise would have probably died off like dozens of other slasher franchises and it just wouldn't be around anymore. And, you know, that's how I think we get the grace is a sort of writer's room process of pop cultural evolution. I guess I don't think I forgot to cover that in the conversation, but I guess I think it bears going over from a couple different angles because it's sort of a mind fuck. A couple other things. I think I mentioned briefly the idea that the,

late 70s and early 80s were the bullshit factory era, the way the axial age was the big religious and philosophical ideas era. Yeah, I just keep coming across this in the research. I've talked before about how the Iq bin Ayn-Berlinner thing was from a spy novel that came out in the early 80s. A spy novel was just like, you know, people actually thought Kennedy was saying, I'm a jelly donut. That was just totally made up for a spy novel, well, it was not true.

It just sounded kind of interesting. But yeah, a lot of JFK conspiracies having to do with his assassination, not the jelly donut thing, start cropping up late 70s, early 80s, Elvis's death conspiracies, which feel like a particular stretch to me, start cropping up late 70s, early 80s.

I just keep noticing this time was a particularly first, mass spreader event for bullshit. Not sure why. Hit me with theories. Was it just like a current event and like, you know, weird news magazine shows on TV? But yeah, so during the research for this episode, I came across the fact that the Roswell incident was brought back into the spotlight

by two paranormal writers in the late 70s, early 80s. And really, that's when it started to become popular as a thing that people, you know, people had just dropped it before. There's also an anecdote about Young. Like, he wrote a book called Flying Saucers, a modern myth of things seen in the sky that people were like, oh, we're not going to publish this. He wrote it right before his death in 1961.

It was published in 1978. They were just like going back through the archive to find stuff and be like this smart person believed in UFOs and aliens. That's not actually what the book says, but people wanted to believe, particularly in the late 70s, early 80s, early 80s. Last thing, finally, when we were first putting the dock together for this episode,

I had asked Jason why he thought so many people started having alien encounters all of the sudden at the same time. So, I mean, yes, we've covered how the alien, like how we landed on that design, how we honed in on the grays being the design. But a detail that I might have brushed past in the conversation was that when we first started seeing UFOs in the early 20th century, people just believed they were experimental Russian aircraft. We weren't really doing

the alien thing at that time. So like, why suddenly did everyone go alien crazy in the 20th century and their first part of the 21st century? And I liked his answer that he wrote into the doc. So I just want to read it here. He said, I think running into a strange creature from elsewhere is one of the fundamental experiences of any living thing.

At some point in the past, a primitive ancestor of humans ran into an alligator for the first time. That was an alien encounter. And if it wasn't running into an unfamiliar predator, then it was running into an unfamiliar disease or sensation. A volcano erupts and takes away the sun. The sun has run away.

But as we chart more of the world, we still expect that sensation of running into unfamiliar things. Sailors used to imagine the ocean was full of sea monsters and mermaids, When we charted the oceans, then we looked up to the moon and wondered if there were moon creatures living up there. We have this fundamental curiosity and fear and awe of things out in the dark because there was a time when it wasn't a fantasy. If you wandered too far into the woods, you would get eaten. As we understand more or more of the world, we still have that in our brains, the idea of the strange and dangerous unknown and a desire to commune with it to imagine what's out there.

It's perfectly natural. even if we could magically map every planet, we would just imagine they're coming from another dimension or the future or something. It's not just me who wants to believe. It's not just X-Files fans who want to believe. There's a natural human yearning for something that we can't explain that's mysterious.

And I think there is plenty that we can't explain that is mysterious out there personally. So I want to believe and I still have to believe personally. Me. All right. That was our episode on The Grays. We are back on Monday with another new icons episode. I actually don't know which one it's going to be quite yet.

But I just want to say thank you to Dave Ruse, who helped with the research on this one. Thank you to Jason, who provided research. And thank you, as always, to Brian the editor for putting it all together. We're going to be back later today with another episode of the Daily Zyke. and back next week with more icons. Talk to you all done. Bye. Next Monday, our 2026 IHeart podcast awards are happening live at South by Southwest.

This is the biggest night in podcasting. We'll honor the very best in podcasting from the past year and celebrate the most innovative talent and creators in the industry. And the winner is creativity, knowledge, and passion will all be on full display. Thank you so much. IHeart Radio. Thank you to all the other nominees. You guys are awesome.

Watch live next Monday at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific free at Veeps.com or the Veeps app. Hi, it's Jill Wintersene, host of the Spirit Daughter podcast, where we talk about astrology, natal charts, and how to step into your most vibrant life. And today I'm talking with my dear friend, Krista Williams. It can change you in the best way possible. Dance with the change. Dance with the breakdowns. The embodiment of Pisces intuition with Capricorn. power moves. So I'm like delusionally proud of my chart. Listen to the Spirit Daughter podcast,

starting on February 24th on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcast. This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall. In 2018, the FBI took down a ring of spies working for China's Ministry of State Security, one of the most mysterious intelligence agencies in the world. The Sixth Bureau podcast is a story of the inner workings of the and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its fault of secrets. Listen to the Sixth Bureau on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nancy Glass, host of the Burden of Guilt Season 2 podcast. This is a story about a horrendous lie that destroyed two families.

Late one night, Bobby Gumpright became the victim of a random crime. The perpetrator was sentenced to 99 years. until a confession changed everything. I was a monster. Listen to Burden of Guilt Season 2 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton Eckerd.

In 2022, I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor. But here's the thing. Bachelor fans hated him. If I could press a button and rewind it all I would. That's when his life took a disturbing turn. A one-night stand would end in a court. room. The media is here.

This case has gone viral. The dating contract. Agree to date me, but I'm also suing you. This is unlike anything I've ever seen before. I'm Stephanie Young. Listen to Love Trapped on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.