What are Nordic aliens?
Nordics are a type of alien said to be tall, with long blond hair and blue eyes, closely resembling the people of Northern Europe. They are almost indistinguishable from humans and are usually described as beautiful young people with fine features. They are often presented as the opposite of the now-familiar Greys, small beings with gray skin and large black eyes.
Adamski and the “Venusian”
The image of the Nordic alien was spread by “contactees,” people in 1950s America who said they had met and talked with aliens. The most famous of them was George Adamski. Adamski said that on November 20, 1952, in the California desert, he met a man from Venus who had stepped out of a flying saucer. The Venusian, he said, looked like a calm young man with long blond hair reaching his shoulders.
According to Adamski, the Venusian was worried about humanity’s continued testing of nuclear weapons and had come to convey the importance of peace. His story became a book read around the world, and it helped spark the UFO boom in Japan as well.
Nordics as “space brothers”
The 1950s were the years of the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union were racing to develop nuclear weapons. Many of the aliens described by contactees had civilizations far more advanced than ours and were portrayed as “space brothers” who warned of the dangers of war and nuclear weapons and preached peace and love. This image of aliens is thought to reflect how people, amid growing fear of nuclear war, imagined saviors coming from the sky.
In the 1970s, a Swiss contactee claimed to be in contact with human-looking aliens from the Pleiades star cluster and drew attention by releasing UFO photographs. These “Pleiadians” are also counted among the Nordics.
The age of the Greys
From the 1960s onward, as accounts of alien abduction increased, the leading role among aliens shifted to the cold, expressionless Greys. Even so, some abduction accounts mention tall blond aliens who were directing the Greys or who helped the abductee.
“Human-looking aliens” in film
The image of human-looking aliens who come to warn humanity about nuclear danger can also be seen in films of the same era. In the 1951 American film The Day the Earth Stood Still, an alien indistinguishable from humans lands in Washington, D.C., in a flying saucer and warns humanity to stop its conflicts. The “space brothers” described by contactees are thought to have spread in people’s minds while overlapping with the image of aliens painted by such films and novels.
How to read the Nordic story
Adamski’s photographs and accounts were suspected early on of being faked with models, and later space probes confirmed that Venus, with a surface temperature well over 400°C, is a planet where nothing could live. There is also criticism that portraying superior aliens as white people reflects the biased views of society at the time. Other alien types that are talked about include the reptile-like Reptilians and the mantis-like Mantis aliens.
