For a long time, mankind has been occupied with the idea that we are not alone in an infinite universe. Looking at the night sky with myriads of stars, people dreamed that, perhaps, from somewhere from a distant star, someone was also looking at the Earth.
The alien image is both compelling and intimidating. And the person is very inquisitive and attracts him
everything unknown, unidentified pulls all people like a magnet. But elementary caution and self-preservation instinct make a person think about the potential danger that extraterrestrials can bring to an extraterrestrial civilization.
In ancient times, people believed in spirits (air, water, underground), mythological Olympian gods. In the modern world, they come up with other intelligent creatures that can exist in parallel with us.
In the minds of people, an alien is a representative of an extraterrestrial civilization living on other planets. This image is fictitious, or hypothetical, i.e. supposed. After all, until now, no one has provided concrete evidence of the existence of aliens. That is, they seem to exist and, as it were, they are not.
From time to time, there are reports that they have found a creature that differs from a person in appearance and differences in DNA, but it soon turns out that this is some kind of mutation of a representative of the local fauna.
How do people imagine an alien? Most often, its appearance resembles a person, but significantly differs in skin color. Usually humanoids in the "classical" sense look like a humanoid creature with flabby skin, greenish or gray. The head of such a humanoid is disproportionately large, the hairline is completely absent; black almond-shaped eyes, huge and slanted; most often it is a sexless creature.
Aliens are almost always in the minds of humans - aliens from planets that far surpass humanity in technological development. This is understandable, otherwise how could they reach planet Earth? Most often, aliens come to our planet in spaceships (UFOs), communicate with some people (contactees), and sometimes kidnap people. There are many known cases told by people who, according to the idea, communicated with aliens or were abducted by them, experiments were carried out on them, and then they were returned to the place from which they disappeared.
It is impossible to call the UFO phenomenon entirely scientific, there is no material evidence, only oral stories of people and incomprehensible photos. A new parascience has appeared - uphology, which studies various anomalous objects. It originated in the 1950s and deals with all manifestations of UFOs, unexplained natural phenomena, alien intelligence, etc. Scientists are in no hurry to classify ufology as a scientific discipline, it is still in its infancy.
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Ufologists are engaged in collecting various information about unidentified flying objects, conducting research in areas where UFOs appear, searching for alien life on our planet. Sometimes ufologists even try to establish a telepathic connection with aliens.
In artistic culture, the concept of aliens is significantly different. Here the imagination of the authors goes much further. In books and films, there are completely different images of representatives of extraterrestrial civilizations.
In this regard, the interpretation of the image of aliens in the film "Stargate" is very interesting. Astronauts through a special portal by teleportation get to another planet. Outwardly, people are the same as on Earth, but technologically they are significantly behind the earthlings. The people of this planet call earthlings “ancient”, and the Earth is considered the primordial world.
The inhabitants of this planet are the ancestors of people who were once taken out by the goa'uld Ra and turned into slaves. This parasite can invade the body of any person and only sometimes takes on its terrible appearance. At the end of the film, the astronauts help the locals to get rid of the invaders.
In this film, people from another planet are peaceful and friendly. They cause a desire to continue contact with them, because they will not do anything bad to the inhabitants of the Earth.
But in many movies the image of an alien is aggressive, dangerous, bringing destruction to our planet. Often, aliens are depicted not as humanoids, but in the guise of various animals or insects. Sometimes these animals are similar to earthly ones, sometimes they are completely different.
Often in fiction, the image of extraterrestrial life is portrayed as a huge collective intelligence, waging endless wars with other civilizations. Sometimes these are ants, bees, often animal-vegetable hybrids; there is even an idea of extraterrestrial life as a kind of intelligent substance (in the book by Stanislav Lem and the film of the same name "Solaris" this is an intelligent ocean).
Most often in films, at the first contact with humanity, aliens appear as humanoids. Further, they can take on different forms, but the plots of many films are based on the fact that an alien race invades the Earth in order to conquer, often to obtain Earth's resources.
Films and books describing the distant future mainly depict the parallel existence of earthlings and representatives of other planets. Earthlings have to somehow coexist with other space civilizations. Based on the peculiarities of human consciousness, the authors depict negative and positive images of aliens in completely different ways.
Positive characters often appear as ideal creatures with a human appearance or elves. Sometimes the option is considered when earthlings meet with representatives of an extraterrestrial civilization, who fully correspond to the appearance of the inhabitants of the Earth and turn out to be our ancestors, with whom communication was lost a long time ago.
Negative characters from another world, as a rule, are portrayed as ugly creatures incomprehensible to the human mind. Usually it is they who bring war and destruction to Earth.
Scientists are critical of the idea of contact with other planets in our solar system, considering them lifeless. But the Sun is just one star out of hundreds of billions of stars. There is a likelihood of the origin of life on other planets of the Galaxy, significantly distant from our solar system.
So far, technological progress does not allow contact with other stars due to the endless interstellar distances. But scientists believe that contact at a distance is quite possible. Although some scientists, for example, astronomer I. S. Shklovsky, suggest that there is an extremely low probability of the existence of an extraterrestrial civilization similar to humanity.