>>115912
>inspired by aliens
I think they're more like different visions of idealized humans. Anime is a secular meeting of more iconographic eastern art with western portraiture and cartooning. It shares some proportional similarities with some other iconographic art traditions (such as the enlarged eyes, and similar treatments of noses and mouth proportions), and in trying to talk about anime and 2D vs 3DPD, people intuitively reach for flat out Platonic concepts. IIRC either Socrates or Plato was a sort of eastern-western encounter as well, as somewhere in the dialogues Socrates alluded to being initiated into the Egyptian mysteries and framed the more symbolic Egyptian artwork as superior to Greek art's imitation of the 3D world. Medieval art and the Eastern iconographic tradition also grew out of Greco-Egyptian funerary art, and were themselves, you guessed it, an attempt to portray the higher "2D" reality, but as perceived by the soul of a saint.
Greys, on the other hand, appear in UFO encounter stories as weird, manipulative creeps that flatter what they hope is your modern normalfag worldview before they stick stuff up your butt. They show up in what look to normalfags like science fiction starcraft, and physically appear like superficially more advanced and rational beings: huge eyes, big heads for big brains, atrophied noses, small mouths, de-emphasised bodies in general, and no outdated evolutionary leftovers such as hair. Sometimes they'll tell you fashionable stories mixing biological, intellectual, or spiritual evolution with the oneness of all religions, or pretend to be whatever religious figure they think you'll like most, yet they also have a reputation for quickly screwing off if you start invoking divine help around them. On that note, various ufologists have also noted that a lot of the phenomena around their appearances are either highly similar or outright identical to ones reported in stories of things like fey encounters, ancient sorcerers, and monastic encounters with demons.
Even if you believe greys were completely made up by people fabricating false memories under hypnosis (as a side note, it's common knowledge that Crowley bumped into something very close to one before they began appearing to normalfags), it's noteworthy that they kind of look like a naive normalfag's idea of what an "advanced" being would be, and disguise mythological patterns under science fiction tropes. They're kind of inherently frauds and normalfag bait, if you will.