Little green men
Little green men is a popular expression used to describe extraterrestrial life. In astronomy it is also the name of the first signal, LGM-1, to be received from a pulsar.
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Extraterrestrials
Little green men are the stereotypical portrayal of extraterrestrials as little humanoid-like creatures with green skin and antennae on their heads. Originally they referred to Martians after Edgar Rice Burroughs spoke of "green men of Mars" in his first 1912 science fiction novel A Princess on Mars. But they soon came to portray extraterrestrials in general and adorned the covers of many of the 1920s to 1950s science fiction pulp magazines with pictures of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon battling green alien monsters.
During the flying saucer sightings of the 1950s, the term little green men came into popular usage. In the Kelly-Hopkinsville sighting on August 21, 1955, two rural Kentucky men described a supposed encounter with a 3-4 foot tall greenish, somewhat humanoid-looking alien.
From the 1960s, science fiction's aliens became more sophisticated. In alien abduction stories they are often grey and in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) they are unseen. The term little green men has since fallen out of general use in science fiction circles and is now often only used by the uninformed or to ridicule the notion that aliens may exist.
LGM-1
Little green men 1 (LGM-1) was the explanation given to a famous astronomical observation. In 1967, a radio signal was detected in a U.K. observatory by Jocelyn Bell and Anthony Hewish. The signal had a 1.337 second period and 40 millisecond pulsewidth, and originated at celestial coordinates 19:19 right ascension, 21 degrees declination. It was detected by individual observation of miles of graphical data traces. Due to its almost perfect regularity, it was at first assumed to be spurious noise, but this was promptly discarded. After that, the discoverers half-seriously proposed, as an alternative explanation, that the signal might be a beacon or a communication from an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization and named it LGM-1.
The signal turned out to be radio emissions from the pulsar CP1919 (the first one recognized as such). Bell noted that other scientists could have discovered pulsars before her, but their observations were either ignored or disregarded. She noted that Sir Fred Hoyle identified this astronomical object as a neutron star immediately upon their announcement.
See also
References
- Anna Karyl, The Kelly Incident, 2004, ISBN 29094-040814-200748-57.
- Jacques Valee, Anatomy of a Phenomenon: Unidentifed Objects in Space, 1965, ISBN 0809298880.