A year of negotiation brought no results. Diplomatic contact was halted for 36 days, broken by a human surprise attack on Zeta Reticula A & B, the homeworlds of the Greys. The multi-agency force - including a massive complement of planetary bombers and escort craft - attacked on Twelve 9, 371 N.E.

 

This strike resulted in global devastation and the deaths of perhaps 500 million Reticulans and approximately 3 million human liaisons working. The resulting withdraw by the Reticulans from agency affairs was swift.

 

Reticulan ships, which had been a regular sight over large population centers, utterly vanished within 10 days of the attack - sometimes along with the human liaison officers aboard them.

 

It was initially thought that the Reticulan withdrawal was total and absolute. But it was soon clear that some Greys had been left behind- whether through their own choice or whether they were simply abandoned has never been determined.

 

It was said of Mensaw that he was enthusiastic in his work as a liaison. Close associates believed he remained with his humans by choice.

 

Many of those Grays left near human habitation were killed by vigilante groups. Some retreated to remote locations, but usually they lived in conditions that would be hard on humans, and those who had escaped human wrath quickly succumbed to disease or the elements.

 

Mensaw, however, was a science liaison in a remote fencepost station, Fencepost 09878. He had worked with some of his colleagues at the fenceopost for 12 years or more and in fact he was the fencepost's longest resident member, taking up his duties as advisor specialist in sky sciences only 8 years after the station went online. He was aboard the fencepost - only rarely leaving it, and only as his duties demanded - for 37 years. Mensaw's cause of death is unknown. The fencepost's recorder shows him remaining at the observation platform for 3.4 hours longer than his usual shift., then going to the library for another 108 minutes, and only then to the Gray Quarters.

 

One of the crew on Fencepost 09878, Patrick G'tupta, wrote an autobiographical account of his time at the station working under Mensaw, called "Mensaw and Me". It is still widely read. Some critics initially dismissed the memoir as "romanticized rubbish", but in the post-Gray years it was one of the only works anywhere which addressed and realistically described the one-to-one relationships that frequently developed between humand and their Gray advisors.

 

During the Throwing Off - and for sometime after - Grays were demonized in literature, art and press, depicted as soulless meddlers who regarded humans as mere containers of genetic material.

 

Mensaw - largely as a direct result of his depiction in Patrick G'tupta's memoir - has become an icon of the benevolent exosentient/xenosentient who wishes only  peace and partnership with humanity.

 

Mensaw has appeared as a character in at least 23 different historical dramas and other fictions including:

At least 4 songs have been written which refer to or employ Mensaw or the folklore surrounding him.  Titles are "Illey", "506-4", "Mensaw Soc", and "A Revoltin' Development".