That the figures in Keane’s artwork look like aliens is not a novel connection. It’s often the one of the first remarks made about Keane’s portraits by a contemporary audience. Just look at any of Margaret’s paintings posted on social media and it’s likely that the first comment about them will be from someone making the connection to the well-worn image of alien Greys.
However there is a puzzle here: which came first, Keane’s alien-like images, or aliens?
The large number of documented abduction accounts (and experiencers themselves) would argue aliens came first. They claim real aliens are here interbreeding with us and showing us hybrid children. They believe they have the memories of it happening and when they share their images of what they look like as sketched drawings many of them are uncannily alike even if they are made by people with no contact with one another.
If they had no opportunity to confer, how are their images so similar?
Media Effect
The obvious answer might be that science fiction in the media distributes these images across social barriers and that once an image is in the media it finds a way to duplicate itself.
However, this has been challenged. In various television interviews promoting his book Abduction (1994) Dr. John Mack would lean on the authority of his standing as a Harvard professor to brush aside the notion of such media effect, repeating an arguement he makes in that book:
“Most of the specific information that the abductees provided about the means of transport to and from spaceships, the descriptions of the insides of the ships themselves, and the procedures carried out by the aliens during the reported abductions had not been written about or shown in the media.”1
John E. Mack
Author and former director of the British UFO Research Association, Jenny Randles, provided a supporting argument against media effect theory, writing of the “claim that science fiction [is] the trigger for UFO abduction stories” saying “The evidence is simply not there” . Randles asked why, if Hollywood influence was so powerful there is so little variety in the beings who kidnap humans. Why are the aliens from the most widely seen films such as Avatar, with its ten foot tall blue Navi, nowhere to be seen in abduction accounts, and why with numerous monsters available on the science fiction menu, we get consistent accounts of small hairless dark-eyed humanoids that make up the bulk of abduction reports. The little guys are doing nearly all of the abduction work.
However, in making his argument, Mack – who’s credentials did so much to bring alien abduction into the mainstream imagination – demonstrated either a lack of awareness or unwillingness to examine decades of science fiction that includes imagery and descriptions of a very similar nature.
For an example of a description of an interior space lit by an unseen light source with a central item of furniture, something that many abductees report finding themselves in, you need only look at the opening paragraph of E.M. Forster’s, The Machine Stops published in 1909.
“Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk–that is all the furniture.”
For alien creatures that capture humans and takes biological samples from them with bizzare looking instruments you could read The Invaders by Don A. Stuart in Amazing Stories 1935. (Notably the illustrations for which are of creatures with large goggling eyes, a familiar motif in early science fiction that we’ll see more examples of below.)
And Spacehounds of IPC by E.E Smith2, 1931 includes the description of a tractor beam and many elements of a high-tech interiors of spacecraft described by abductees such as doorways that suddenly appear where sections of walls become transparent. It even includes a description of a “weirdly-transparent being, staring…with large, black eyes.”3
These are just a few examples that counter Mack’s claim that specific details of alien abduction don’t already exist in the literature and could have been available for his subjects to draw their accounts from.
Should science fiction images like these be dismissed as the cause of shared details in abduction accounts because Randles seems to expect direct transposition of images from Hollywood to abduction therapy session, and we don’t quite see such proper alignment here. What do we do with indirect influences – like Keane’s art that contains compelling images of little people staring out of large dark eyes but which were not apparently designed to be threatening aliens that are out to capture us? These images lived in millions of homes quietly shaping the collective imagination and were there ready to be drawn upon during intense introspection or therapy. In terms of popularity Keane’s images were more likely to have been seen by a wider audience (and perhpas one with no interest in science fiction at all) than the pages of obsucre science fiction because they were visible household items such as postcards and wall posters.
We should also note that Walter Keane had a goal in mind. He told LIFE magazine in 1965:
What I want is for what I do to be seen. I take an emotion, I put it on canvas, and I want it to infect a lot of people’s lives. [Emphasis added].
Walter Keane
In this endeavour the Keanes’ were successful. So again, with such an alternative being offered, do we really need to look to science fiction for its powerful infectious influence? Is it more likely these reported abduction images (even these memories, especially peculiarly specific reports of hybrid children seen in UFOs) have a less obvious common ancestor that has been overlooked; the artwork of Margaret Keane?
There is evidence that can help answer this.
A Shared Trend in the Composition of Big Eyes – From Human Sized Irises to “KEANE” Eyes
In a 1999 follow up his 1987 comparative study of abduction accounts Thomas Bullard describes an “unmistakable trend” in reports over the period 1966 to 1996 in how abductees describe the eyes of their captors.
Consider the following shared trend of changes in the composition of big eyes found in alien abduction accounts, and of science fiction imagery over the same period of time.
Large eyes are an invariant feature in alien abduction accounts but over time their particular composition changed noticeably.
In the early days these eyes often had irises of human or smaller size. A steady darkening has followed, with only 17% of the eyes described as wholly or almost entirely dark in the first period, while this description grew to 48% in the middle years and then to 71%. Here then is one abduction motif that has changed too dramatically to ignore or to excuse as an accident of faulty reporting.
It may not be faulty reporting but does it mean what is reported is real? A similar evolution appears in how abductees describe the apparent hybrid humans they encounter. One example is a description from Jacobs’ 1998 book The Threat, from an abductee who tells him how the hybrids don’t have the entirely black eyes of the fully alien creatures we see in films like Communion or Close Encounters of the Third Kind: “Their eyes are very big and slightly almond-shaped…they seem to have big irises but there is white in their eyes, though. And they have cute little noses and their mouths look normal, .
The change in eye appearance reported by abductees is significant because the descriptions of alien eyes correspond with science fiction images at the beginning of this period up until 1966. For example, the goggling depiction of abducting aliens found in pulp science fiction publications like Amazing Stories 1932, Astounding Stories 1935, or the movie Killers From Space 1954. But they also changed in the same way to depict darker eyes with larger irises, and most importantly this change occured over the same period of time in which Margaret Keane’s art became massively popular in the United States.
Goggling Eyes With Relatively Small Irises in Early Science Fiction of the 1930s – 1950s
Large Goggling Eyes With Inconsistent Form Seen in Early Witness Reports of the 1940s – 1960s
KEANE Eyes of the 1960s and ’70s – Consistent, Repetative Big Eyes With Large Dark Irises and Little White Showing
Over the same period of time that Margaret’s art became popular the science fiction images of alien appearances also changed, and in addition, as Bullard noted, so too do the accounts given by abductees.
The Norm for (Fully Alien) Eyes Accepted Since the Mid 1970s – Completely Black Almond Shaped “wrap around” Eyes, Shiny With Specular Highlights.
This particular way of rendering eyes began with Margaret Keane, but her work was so iconic that it inspired many copy-cat artists over decades who tried to emulate the enigmatic staring gaze of the figures she painted.
Perhaps most salient to the child presentation alien abduction routine was a nightmare-inducing doll created in 1965 by Hasbro toys. Directly inspired by Keane’s art (the Keane’s declined to officially endorse it) it was called Little Miss No-name. The doll is a pale-skinned blond girl in a coarsely patched sackcloth dress. She has large dark eyes with the hallmark KEANE tear running down one cheek. When her arm is raised, the hand cups upwards like a beggar’s.
A television commercial for the doll includes this rhyme:
She’s Little Miss No-Name, she’s lonesome and blue. She’s longing for someone exactly like you. She has no one to talk with, she just sits and she stares. She needs someone to hold her, someone who cares…
Hasbro TV commercial for the Little Miss No-Name doll
With toys like this available since the mid 1960s, John Carpenter’s hypnosis subject talking in the 1980s (who we heard about in part 9) could truthfully claim to have no knowledge of abducting aliens or hybrid children to form her doll phobia.
It’s remarkable how similar the message about needing to hold and care for this doll is to the child presentation ritual. For example Mack remarks on the need to nurture listless hybrid beings not just because they are like poor pitiful waifs but because they would ultimately be used to repopulate the earth or other planets.
So, If there was no connection between Keane’s art and alien abduction accounts this would all be a significant set of coincidences because within a very narrow window of time the imagery of aliens and hybrid beings formed a new consensus opinion about what they looked like, and this period just happend to coincide with KEANE becoming a nationally recognised brand.
This connection doesn’t just apply to the waifs Margaret painted but to her portraits of young women, as we’ll see in part 13.
Continue to Part 13 – Very Ethereal, Very Esthetic-Looking
Summary
- Media Effect Theory is challenged by the consistency in appearance of alien beings
- However researchers didn’t fully explore reference images from outside typical SF sources – like Keane’s art
- Hypothesis: Keane’s art was mass-produced material and an unrecognised source of media effect
- The Keanes’ intention was to influence the population on a mass scale
- The specific way alien eyes were rendered changed
- in the same way across Science Fiction AND at the same time across alien abduction accounts
- in the same period KEANE art became massively popular
References
Footnotes