been expanded in one study published in Magonia that traces a continuum of anti-machine machines back through wartime rumors about Marconi developing engine-stopping rays and a sizeable culture backdrop of films, film serials, and pulp stories imagining future wars and the superweapons that would fight them. Meheust early saw that the more common species of aliens in ufo experiences were well represented in the Hugo Gernsback era (1926–36) pulps. This insight has been followed up in increasing detail by subsequent researchers. Grays, in particular, are now well understood as having been a stereotype in large part because Gernsback specifically asked his writers to do stories where future evolution caused beings to develop large brains but atrophied bodies caused by technology making muscles irrelevant to survival. Gernsback loved H.G. Wells's writings, reprinted his work, and it was Wells who first developed the logic of such degenerative evolution which he inserted into his masterwork War of the Worlds (1898). Important modifications to the stereotype were introduced by the creative team that built the aliens appearing at the climax of Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Completely black eyes and thin pencil necks soon appeared on bald brainy aliens in ufo encounters in mimicry of film imagery. While the public was given the impression that the aliens would be based on those found in ufo investigations; the CE3K alien design team had never been given drawings to base their work on. They were only given a brief verbal directive that they should be large-headed and short. Some work has also been done on the cultural back-stories to insectoids, reptoids, and some lesser horror clichés. Even precursors to alien fashions have been looked into in a light-spirited manner. A number of other pieces in this tradition explore such science fictional saucer esoterica as doorway amnesia, miraculous ascension by lifting light, the physics of travelling through walls, magnetic propulsion, and aliens taking nutrition through the skin along psychosocial and historical lines. The saucer rumor Arguably the most far-reaching and surprising mystery solved by psychosocial research was the puzzle posed by J. Allen Hynek in 1977: "Why flying saucers? Why not flying cubes or flying pyramids, or for that matter, why not flying pink elephants or even flying buildings, reported from a hundred different countries? Indeed if UFO reports were entirely the result of excited imaginations, why not hundreds, possibly thousands, of totally and