Everyone knows what space aliens look like. They're small, they've got big, light bulb-shaped heads with big, black, almond-shaped eyes. Incorrect! UFO abductees report a fairly wide variation in the shapes, sizes, colors and configurations of monsters from beyond the stars. I have my personal favorites: the school supply space mummy that abducted Sandy Larson, the octopus keg monsters that kidnapped Antonio La Rubia and in first place, the little raisin-headed jetpack creatures that scared a pair of drunks in Ririe, Idaho. Those little guys beat out a lot of contenders, and here are just three more of them.

Luce Fontain, a farmer on Reunion Island near Madagascar, was gathering grass for his rabbits when he came across something abnormal: a flying saucer containing a pair of marshmallow men.

He described the ship as a saucer sitting on top of a glass goblet, with another upside-down goblet on the top. It floated roughly five feet off the ground and had a dark blue center surrounding a large window. The marshmallow men stood about three feet tall and wore overalls and helmets that partially obscured their faces.

One of them turned towards Fontain, and then, with a blinding flash of light, the spaceship disappeared. There was no trace evidence of the spaceship on the ground nearby, though reports indicate that there was some "radiation" both in the area and on Fontain's clothes.

Considering Fontain was 25 meters away from an object five meters in diameter, floating two meters off the ground, it seems odd that there's only radiation underneath it and on his clothes, but nowhere else. Though, compared with a pair of marshmallow monsters from beyond the moon, I suppose it's not too bizarre. There's a long history of space people being reported wearing what looks like diving equipment, which comes to us directly from early science fiction that envisioned outer space as an enormous ocean (thanks, jerks), but this type of Michelin Man outfit is a one of a kind.

 At least those guys had bodies, though. In 1971, John Hodges was driving down the road with his friend, Peter Rodriguez, when they saw what looked like two enormous human brains lying in the road. Hodges dropped Rodriguez off at his home, and only when he returned home did he realize two hours of his life were missing.

Under hypnosis, he recalled some sort of entity contacting him and promising to talk again. Seven years later, the space brains kidnapped him again. They were, apparently, rather discouraged by humanity's development of the atom bomb, a theme that reoccurred throughout the contactee movement of the 1950s and 60s. They also explained that devices were being implanted in people to augment their psychic abilities, bringing in a little flavor from the abductee implant craze into the mix.

Unlike the marshmallow men, I'd actually heard of something similar. In 1958, a giant brain from outer space used his telepathic powers to thwart the launch of a nuclear weapon into space while living in a cave. Unfortunately for Mr. Hodges, this case occurred in Hollywood, on the set of a movie called The Space Children. You may have seen it on Mystery Science Theater. So I ask you which is more likely: a man with absolutely no influence on atom bomb development was contacted by giant brains from outer space, or he saw a movie with the same plot and somehow lost his grip on reality to think that it really happened?

The UFO enthusiasts would have you believe that the whole phenomenon is fairly simple: space monsters from beyond the stars that look like little gray critters or gigantic praying mantises come to Earth in their spaceships to do things to our genitals. Let me say first that that's hot, and I'm surprised there's so little porn with that theme. Or so I'm told.

Second, that's not true. Space aliens and their vessels come in every shape, size, color, conformation, form and figure you can imagine. In these three alone, we've got midgets in marshmallow suits, and enormous human brains. These guys have shown up one single time and then flown back into space, never to be heard from again. And the ship from Fontain's story? As far as I can tell, nothing similar has ever been reported.

So what is more likely? That hundreds of different species of space alien are coming here to mess with us, or that some people have gone a little nutty, had a bad dream, hallucinated, played a prank or some other purely human explanation?

You don't need to be a statistician to realize that there must be something up with this. Why there is a wide range of monsters supposedly coming to earth is a question that remains unexplained by those that believe in UFOs and should be the source of a great deal of skepticism from those who hear about it.

Be seeing you.

Aaron Sakulich is a graduate student studying engineering and materials science. He can be reached through This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it