What did the first fictional aliens look like?

Laura Miller explains:

Before the nineteenth century, if authors depicted the inhabitants of other planets the aliens were essentially human. The suave Saturnian described by Voltaire in a satirical 1752 story, “Micromégas,” looks like an earthling, except that he’s six thousand feet tall. (And he has a Continental spirit, keeping a mistress—a “pretty little brunette, barely six hundred and sixty fathoms high.”) The Saturnian’s primary fictional purpose, as he visits our planet, is to marvel at the relative puniness of humankind, whom he examines with a very large microscope.

It was only after Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s and Charles Darwin’s theories of adaptation and natural selection gained wider acceptance, in the nineteenth century, that writers began to speculate in earnest about the sorts of creatures that might flourish in environments beyond Earth.

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March 20, 2012

I once told my grandmother that my favorite character from Star Wars was the blue elephant guy at the piano. She seemed to think it was a pretty lame choice on my part.

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March 3, 2012

The work of illustrator Frank R. Paul shows just how much influence pop culture can have on our perceptions of reality. An article in a recent issue of Skeptic magazine credits Paul as “The Man Who Invented Flying Saucers,” and argues that, by way of “mental set,” his designs led to the first flying saucer sightings. People who saw UFOs imagined them to be disc-shaped objects because, thanks to Paul and his many imitators, that was what spacecraft were supposed to look like. This theory explains the different forms UFOs began to take after flying saucers fell out of vogue in science fiction, as well as the sightings of Jules Verne-style airships in the late 19th Century.

But don’t tell that to this guy:

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