The Squire of Gothos said:
I thought it was just your bog-standard alien, "greys" were described as far back as Roswell weren't they?
No, they really, really weren't. The "grey alien" image is a product of the 1970s. The descriptions of aliens in alleged UFO encounters have always mirrored pop-culture images of aliens at the time. In the '50s they were claimed to be little green men or bug-eyed monsters, and in the '60s they were idealized humans in funny costumes (like the aliens in low-budget TV shows). The image we now know as the "grey alien" actually originated as a book illustration representing a speculation about what humanity might evolve into in a million years. Soon after that book came out and the image was popularized, it began showing up in claims of "real" UFO encounters. But at this point, the late '60s and early '70s, UFO hype was becoming a pop-culture phenomenon in itself, and so the media picked up and perpetuated these alien images in films like
Close Encounters of the Third Kind. So the image reinforced itself and came to be considered the "default" for alien appearance.
As for Roswell, although it's true that the original crashed object was described in a headline at the time as a "flying disc," that was within a year of the coining of the term "flying saucer," and it hadn't yet taken on the unambiguous connotation of "alien spacecraft," but was just being used for any unidentified object seen in the sky without any inherent assumptions about said object's origin. It was quickly identified as a crashed weather balloon and everyone forgot about it for over 30 years. But starting around 1980, UFO "researchers" dredged it up and began questioning people in Roswell about it, and those people were quite happy to take advantage of the free publicity and let the UFO buffs inflate this minor incident into some massive alien conspiracy. The mythology about Roswell is a product of the '80s and '90s, and the "greys" are a product of the '70s and afterwards. Nobody in 1966 would've been familiar with either.
I don't think the evil Balok looks any more like "The Scream" than it looks like a light bulb. It's just a representation of a gaunt, menacing humanlike head, with a hint of the oversized, bald skull that was common in monster-movie depictions of aliens in the '50s and '60s. The only thing it and "The Scream" have in common is that they're both derived from the human head or skull.
Besides, "The Scream" is another thing that's better-known today than it was in the '60s. It became kind of a pop-culture phenomenon starting in 1984 when Andy Warhol made a series of silk prints of it, and it's become a self-replicating cultural meme since then. As with the "grey alien" image, I think it's anachronistic to assume that designers in 1966 would've been as influenced by it as we are today.
..remember that he designed and/or built just about ever major prop you see in Trek - phasers, communicators, tricorders....not to mention specialty pieces like Balok and the Gorn...
