Little green men

I'm always on the lookout for images that might have helped to popularize/disseminate the appearance of the quintessential alien (as depicted in Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and on the cover of Whitley Strieber's "Communion").

This charming cover art, dating from 1959, shows levitating humanoids not unlike the famed Hopkinsville goblins, who made their dramatic appearance just four years earlier.





Note the conspicuously Martian-looking terrain, a staple of 1950s science fiction. Somehow the notion of a desert planet, bereft of recognizably human structures, speaks to our innate sense of the "other."

Related: The Deep Politics of Hollywood: Close Encounters with the Pentagon.

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