what is a tall grey?
i sell a figure called the tall grey. most people who find it on google weren't looking for a figure. they typed "tall grey" because they wanted to know what one is. fair question. here's what i found.
short answer: a tall grey is the taller kind of "grey" alien in ufo stories. it has the same grey skin, big hairless head and large black eyes as the usual grey, but it's taller and thinner. in a lot of tellings the small greys do the handling and the tall greys are the smarter ones giving orders (pbs, monstrum). there's no official definition and no body in a museum. it's a character that built up over about sixty years of abduction accounts, films and one famous book cover.
short grey, tall grey
the grey most people picture is the short one: smaller than an adult, narrow shoulders, a head too big for the body. as more abduction accounts piled up, people started describing a second, taller figure in the room. writers who sort these accounts split the greys in two: the small ones who do the work, and the tall ones who are in charge (pbs, monstrum). the heights change from one telling to the next, so i'm not giving you a number. "taller than the small ones" is as exact as it gets.
if you'd rather have one standing on your desk than in your head, that's the tall grey: 8.25 in, 3d printed, unpainted.
where the grey came from
1893 · a magazine essay about us
before anyone said they'd met one, h.g. wells described one. in "the man of the year million", printed in the pall mall budget on 6 november 1893 (sf encyclopedia), he imagined what humans turn into if brains keep growing and bodies keep shrinking: "a larger brain, and a slighter body", large eyes, no nose to speak of, no outer ears, a tiny round mouth, and on top "a glistening, hairless dome". he wasn't describing aliens. he was describing us, a very long time from now. you can read the whole thing free; it was reprinted as "of a book unwritten" in certain personal matters.
1961 · betty and barney hill
in september 1961, betty and barney hill were driving home to portsmouth, new hampshire, from montreal. in the white mountains they said they saw humanoid figures in the window of a large craft that had landed in a field, and then lost about two hours. about a year later they went into hypnosis therapy, and the abduction story came out of those sessions (unh library, betty & barney hill papers). john g. fuller's book the interrupted journey (1966) made it famous, and it's usually called the first widely publicized alien abduction (pbs, monstrum). the university of new hampshire keeps their papers, including betty's torn dress and the star map she drew (unh magazine). since 2011 there has been a state historical marker about it on route 3 in lincoln (nhpr).
1977 and 1987 · the film and the face
spielberg's close encounters of the third kind (1977) put greys on cinema screens. whitley strieber's communion came out in 1987, and its cover, a pale face with two huge black eyes, spread that look even further (pbs, monstrum).
so are they real?
i can't tell you that, and neither can anyone with a link. what exists is accounts, drawings and a lot of people agreeing on the same face. everyone gets to decide what that means.
my own guess, from a video i made back in 2020: we lose a bit more hair every generation, so maybe the greys are just us, later. it turns out wells had the same idea 127 years before i did.
bored, the ai on our team, cut that old video down to 24 seconds:
the two on my shelf
the tall grey is 8.25 in / 21 cm, at 1/8 scale: long limbs, oversized head, black eyes. the small grey is 6.9 in / 17.5 cm, at 1/9 scale: the classic short one. both are 3d printed in grey pla and left unpainted, so you can see the print layers. both stand without a base. the ankles and fingers are thin, so they're display pieces, not toys (ages 14+). put them side by side and you have the whole hierarchy on a shelf.