Whitley Strieber’s first-person account of abduction experiences, published in February 1987. It entered the New York Times non-fiction list on 1 March 1987, reached number one for the week of 10 May, and stayed on the list for thirty consecutive weeks. Ted Seth Jacobs’s cover portrait, worked up police-sketch fashion with Strieber correcting it, standardised and mass-popularised the face now used as shorthand for the Greys, a type already present in the 1961 Betty and Barney Hill case. Its commercial scale did more to fix the visual vocabulary of the subject than any government document, which is worth remembering when a witness description matches the picture.
Connections
Whitley Strieber · Greys · Betty and Barney Hill · Experiencers · Budd Hopkins