Why does popular culture depict extraterrestrial aliens as about 4 feet tall, with large bug eyes,

[raccoon]

bald, no chin? Who first saw aliens like this?

[Blue_Tires]

1. hey...no one has yet explained to me

why japanese anime girls have super-slender frames with beach-ball sized tits, grapefruit-sized eyes, no noses, spiky hair and postage stamp-sized mouths...

[Strong Atheist]

3. "and legs up to their armpits" nt.

[HopeHoops]

5. LOL! - Exactly!

[Strong Atheist]

8. It is a quote from a comic called

Dork Tower...

[Sanity Claws]

2. Well, I wasn't the first but

I saw them. The ones from a particular far off galaxy look like that; I think it has to do with the long flight. It kind of squashes them.

[Orsino]

4. Well, the idea is old...

...but Close Encounters of the Third Kind surely gets some credit for putting the image in so many minds all at once in the seventies.

Huge dark eye sockets, no nose or lips? I think that's a subliminal skull.

[MissMillie]

6. because that's what they look like

or the ones I've seen anyway.

[Aristus]

7. I guess it's all about making them "alien" without being completely unrelatable

Two arms, two legs, a head (and we have bald people here on Earth, so that's not too bizarre) and two eyes. We can relate to that. If the aliens were to be depicted as sparkly protoplasm that has to be carried around in jars, we might not be able to get our heads around that.