Overview
The “Greys” described in modern UFO and abduction lore—small, pale, large-headed beings with pronounced eyes—resonate with beings written in popular fiction, such as H. G. Well's "Time Machine" and the "Shaver Mystery". The pattern descriptions are consistent: pale, sensitive-to-light entities dwelling at humanity’s fringe, operating via control or manipulation. These similarities suggest that authors like Wells and Shaver were channeling earlier archetypes—what we now express as Greys—not in conscious self-invention, but as characters revealing cognitive or symbolic data transmitted through fiction.
Wells' morlocks
In H. G. Wells’s 1895 novella The Time Machine, the Morlocks are depicted as subterranean humanoids—pale and frail, with dull gray-to-white skin, chinless faces, reflective eyes, and sparse flaxen hair. Adapted for life underground, they avoid daylight and emerge only at night to prey upon the surface-dwelling Eloi. Their role is not presented as simple malice but as a grim survival necessity, feeding on those they once served. In this inversion of class relations, Wells transformed the industrial working class into shadowy predators, hidden beneath the surface yet sustaining the visible world above.
Read literally, the Morlocks are social allegory. Read as a channeled download, they align uncannily with later descriptions of Grey aliens—pale, subterranean, nocturnal, with an air of technological and predatory detachment. Wells’s proximity to elite intellectual and occult circles, including figures orbiting Aleister Crowley, raises the question of whether his imagination was seeded by more than social commentary. His descriptions resonate with archetypes that recur across channeled transmissions, abduction narratives, and occult visions, suggesting he may have tapped into the same current of unseen intelligences.
Crowley’s greys
Aleister Crowley’s occult practices often involved ritual contact with non-human intelligences, and several of his depictions closely mirror the modern Grey alien archetype. In his Goetia workings, the entity Vassago is rendered with a bulbous head, elongated features, and dark, penetrating eyes—eerily similar to Grey portrayals that would not enter the cultural mainstream until decades later. Crowley himself insisted these were not mere inventions of imagination but encounters with external intelligences accessed through ritual.This raises the possibility that Crowley’s visions were not allegorical at all but genuine close encounters framed through the occult lens of his era. His descriptions collapse the distinction between ritual invocation and UFO contact, implying both may be variations of the same phenomenon: intelligences crossing into human perception by whatever symbolic framework the host provides. If so, Crowley’s sketches and invocations stand as one of the earliest recorded appearances of Grey-like beings, predating the UFO era by nearly half a century.
Shaver's dero
In the 1940s, Richard Sharpe Shaver claimed to receive transmissions about hidden civilizations deep beneath the Earth’s surface. In his story Formula from the Underworld, he described the Hobloks—strange beings he likened to “fearfully anemic jitterbugs,” with pipe-stem limbs, pot bellies, bulging eyes, and fixed grins. These grotesque figures were presented as degenerate remnants of a forgotten subterranean race, yet their intrusion into his mind carried the hallmarks of unsolicited data: visions that demanded articulation. Over time, Shaver’s descriptions evolved into a taxonomy of parasitic beings whose presence blended fiction, channeling, and suppressed testimony.
The Dero, as Shaver named them, carried forward this archetype. Like Wells’s Morlocks, they were subterranean, pale, and predatory, but they introduced an unsettling dimension: the use of forgotten technology and psychological manipulation to enslave humanity from below. In this sense, the Dero echo the ancient Gnostic concept of the Archons—blind, parasitic rulers feeding on ignorance, blocking access to higher states of awareness. Where the Archons were cast as cosmic jailers, Shaver’s Dero embodied the same principle in pulp form: degraded intelligences working through shadows, intruding into thought, and weaponizing fear. The resemblance suggests more than coincidence—it implies a continuity of archetype surfacing through different channels, at different times, under different names.
Implications
These figures—Morlocks, Dero, and Greys—form a lineage of subterranean archetypes expressing primal themes of control, survival, and the Other. Their emergence across decades suggests that science fiction has functioned as a conduit for channeled downloads: authors channeling symbolic intelligences that manifest in fiction as beings of pale visage and hidden depths.
The persistence of these motifs in modern cultural consciousness speaks to their power. By tracing Greys back to Morlocks and Dero, we begin to see how anomalous content may emerge not merely from imagination, but from a shared stream of archetypal transmission—encoded long before modern UFO lore gave it new names.