Little Green Men.

All my life I’ve known the phrase little green men as a jocular description of extraterrestrials, but I never thought about where it came from; now Dave Wilton of Wordorigins.org has done a Big List post about its fascinating history: Before there were grays, reptilians, and other species of extraterrestrial beings that have visited earth in science fiction tales and in hallucinations, there were little green men. The phrase appears at the close of the nineteenth century but has its origins in older folklore about little people, a term for elves, fairies, and other mythical beings. […] The phrase little people begins to be applied to fairies and the like in the eighteenth century. For instance, there is this published in the Delphick Oracle of 2 October 1719, although the little people here are humans of small stature whom the writer believes to be the origin of beliefs in fairies […] Poet George Waldron uses both little people and little men to denote the fairies believed by the…