List of alleged alien beings (T-H-L-K-D)

I don't know what to say, other than "wow."

Complete with gratuitous penises in every single illustration. And an alien Klansman.

It's funny how descriptions of purported aliens tend to be mere variations on the human figure. One might suspect they all had a common origin, such as the human imagination.

Hah. That's nothing.

Skeptical Inquirer's book Bizarre Cases contains a large drawing showing various depictions of aliens, drawn by alleged "abductees" and people who had a "third kind" encounter. It was vastly more informative than this WP article.

Throughout the 20th century, the "aliens" people drew were a random mess--giant hairy humanoids, tiny pixie humanoids, a transistor on legs, blobs, goblins, ghosts, etc etc......until the Hills came along in 1961. They drew the first so-called "gray" alien, with the big head and big dark eyes. Because of the massive publicity the Hills got in the 1960s, most of the abductees after the 1960s drew "aliens" that increasingly resembled the Hills' drawing.

And just for fun, compare that list of aliens to the list of BattleMechs.
Now, isn't that incredibly useful information?

Oh, this is funny for me. Last night I dusted off an old VHS tape of the film "Chariots of the Gods" and watched it for the first time in ages. When I was a kid back in the 1970s, I thought it was so cool that ancient astronauts were decorating Easter Island.

It's as if you lived in my house growing up, Horsey. I'll bet you also read Hal Lindsey's "The Late, Great Planet Earth", and (if you're like me) it took you a few moments in 1975 to figure out the guy starring on "Barney Miller" was not the author of that book!

I didn't read the book, but I saw the 1979 film starring Orson Welles. And a friend of mine reminded me of a similar endeavor: the long-running TV series "In Search Of" starring Leonard Nimoy.

Damn, I miss the innocent naivete of seriously wondering about aliens, lost cultures and paranormal shenanigans.

To be fair, those alien cartoons might be more notable than Ryudong's Power Rangers. There's probably quite a few books and articles written specifically about them, as opposed to the dozens of cartoon characters on Power Rangers. Fancruft reigns though.

There's also articles about Faeries for good reason. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and most of the turn of the 19th-20th century world was agape about them and how they'd been (supposedly) legitimately photographed.

Fwiw, there's an excellent podcast series out these days called something like "The Skeptics Guide to the Universe".

And it has been since verified that Klansmen were in fact a lower form of life than human beings.

"In his 1980 work The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon, Lindsey predicted that 'the decade of the 1980s could very well be the last decade of history as we know it.'" Maybe the end of Barney Miller in 1982 was what he was predicting? The mind reels.


Penn & Teller: Bullshit! does some hilarious debunking of this stuff, too.

And the article helpfully links to Nordic aliens (T-H-L-K-D): "Nordic aliens (Aryan aliens) are said to be a group of humanoid extraterrestrials. They are so named because they are said to resemble Nordic, Scandinavian, or Aryan racial images."


So how come there are no reports of aliens who look like horses? If Gulliver could find a race of intelligent horses why cant people today?

I found some wolves in spacesuits but they appear to work for NASA.

http://royalrhinoflying.files.wordpress.co...t-band-shot.jpg

There are problems with the non-human shaped aliens, though. For example, if they looked like pigs they would generally have three, sometimes two, legs. Well, if they are that smart you wouldn't want to eat them all at once.

I see that there are no alleged aliens that look like the British Royal Family - David Icke is going to be so pissed!

Also, if you believe in the mechanics of evolution then other world intelligent life is probably going to look something like us generally - binocular vision (and thus upright, and likely bipedal), with focusing eyes and colour vision, grasping appendages at end of non-locomotion limbs, warm blooded oxygen breathers, communications based on sound production and reception at least in part, gender differentiation (may be more than two, but that would mean that the entire higher animal structure would be the same), food ingestion and digestion - and waste disposal.

There would be variations, of course, in height, width, "skin" texture (panting or heat gilled aliens would not need sweat pores, for example, in heat regulation), but even things like skin colour - if vitimin D production is required - will not be too dissimilar.

The markedly thing that will make them "alien" is the culture that shapes them - they same thing that makes 'alien' other human cultures today.

Bleh, the reason we're bipedal is an accident of tetrapod design that "froze" us into having only 4 limbs to work with. Not good. Six (at min) are clearly better. That gives you 4 to run with (never try to outrun a canid-- they're just better, that's all), and two for manipulation (the centaur design, basically). Horsey should approve. The same thing happens with bats and birds-- they ended up without enough limbs to work with after losing two for flying. But a bat with four legs like a tree-squirrel would clearly be a formidable critter.

In a 3-D world you do need at least 2 limbs for manipulation, and indeed squids and octupi, with many limbs to choose from and no bilateral symmetry, still have 2 semi-dedicated graspers. Still, it might be useful to have 3, just to have 2 to hold something and a third to mess with it. I've wanted a third arm since I don't know when.

Eyes? Again we're stuck with 2 only due to a bilateral symmetry design, and there are critters like jumping spiders which have a bunch of accessory ones. You need two for depth perception, but a rear-view eye would help a lot at airports and other places where some boob stands right in the middle of a walkway looking at something, not realizing there's a giant pile-up of traffic behind him.

Vitamin D??!? Another accident. It takes UV to make it everywhere on Earth, but again there's no chemical reason for that. Some other molecule would be doing the same job.

It does seem likely that "animals" are going to need some powersource better than photosynthesis (which is very sparce in energy production for terrestrial planets-- not enough to move very fast), and oxidation of plant fuels collected slowly by "plants" looks like it might be a winner in a lot of places. So I would guess there are a lot of tube-animals out there with "mouths" and "anuses," that need to "eat" solids. On the other hand, there are animals like tube worms on Earth that use O2, but "eat" only small molecules like fungi do, so even solid food intake for an animal (at least a water animal) is not a given (I don't know how intelligent tubeworms insult each other, but not by suggesting to each other that they've mixed up ass and mouth; since they have neither).

Our multisegment design also gives us a directionally polarized central nervous system (not like a hydra or sea urchin) which again gives us a brain at one end, where it ends up being rather exposed. That could happen better-- we "wear" our brains kind of out in in the wind, and it would be better to have them centrally located and better protected, like our hearts are. You can always run nerves farther from your sense organs back to the middle.

Eventually we'll get to the point that we'll have full control over biology, and will be able to try out all these designs ourselves (genetics and body plan becomes a matter of art and culture). So humanity will be able to try on all these designs for itself. The thing we perhaps need to realize about aliens with star travel tech is that they won't look like anything in particular-- they'll look like anything they want to look like. Squids and whales for exploring the ocean, 6 legged birds and centaurs for working on air and land, and so on. The frozen accidents from old evolution that has build our present bodies from the bricolage of past junk, will no longer have to be tolerated. We can start over, and will.

I'm not even sure it will be worth meeting aliens for their different cultures. At the thinking speeds of our future, any separation of minds will result in our own cultural evolution which will speciate cultures far faster than we can find new ones by looking through thousands of light years of space. Probably as strange aliens as we'll ever meet, is when we go someplace for some number of clock cycles, and then come back and meet our isolated selves again. By that time totally transformed, and as unrecognizabe as you like.

MR

If you think about it, intelligent life could theoretically evolve in a form even weirder than we could possibly imagine. Being able to handle and manipulate objects, or propel oneself solely by walking, isn't even really a prerequisite for life. Nor is sight, at least as we understand it (the ability to sense EM radiation in the window of ~380-750 nm); there's plenty of other theoretical senses that would be just as or more useful, like sensing other bands of wavelengths, or sensing gravitational pull. And I'd imagine the ability to manipulate electromagnetism directly would be so much more efficient than pumping electrical impulses into muscular tissue like we do.

At any rate, extraterrestrial life would probably be about as far removed from Hitler's "Nordic" wet dreams as possible.

There's been at least two art books about that: both by Wayne Barlowe.

Pigs? I've seen pigs. And I've seen very few with three or two legs. They have four I assure you.

or are you thinking of this?
http://www.toysrus.co.uk/medias/sys_master...16614016448.jpg