Dan Mooney

I’m pretty sure that aliens as we know them – or deny knowing them – are not extra-terrestrials from galaxies light years away, but have got to be of much closer origin, probably from another planet in our solar system.  Maybe Earth, if we keep this going, or after it shuffles us all off and starts fresh; or if our cultures do go all Launch Arco on us and find some other planet to molest, Mars, Venus; either way, it’s life from around here somewhere, some number of generations down, who have mastered not space travel but time travel (I know, same thing) and are simply coming back in time.  Could be why the general alien iconography is humanoid.  Eyes where they should be, big ol’ noggins.  Definitely fits the bill in the sense that their time machine technology, while advanced, is capable of being built with today’s technology i.e. the elements that are around and never change.  Laws are laws.  They’re scientists, not alchemists.

Coupled with the fact that time travel is wonderfully, theoretically possible – I got the go-ahead from a physics major years back – in one way or another, through wormholes, by exceeding the speed of light, any which way they will have already have been unstuck in time, it’s all good and it’s all us, man.  When the naysayers are done saying nay and then chime in, “well, if time travel exists, why don’t we see people from the future?” they might consider that we’ve already been visited by these critters, but only in sparsely populated areas and then only revealing themselves to people who those on the coasts are convinced are crazy anyway.  Time-traveling alien life forms don’t jive with Creationism.  All the better to keep their real history under wraps.

Also, think of how interested our species is with itself.  You don’t need too many hot high-angle arm-length pout shots to realize that we are absolutely head-over-ass in love with ourselves – puppy love, to be exact – because given obesity rates, the proliferation of television, and the continuing stranglehold of office jobs on our essentially creative nature, we sure as fuck don’t love ourselves in that healthy, self-honoring kind of way.  Nonetheless, we are exceedingly curious beings who always want something new to examine, a book, an atom, an unforeseen orifice.  Once our humanoid descendants are done examining themselves, and given their technology, they’re bound to want to see where they came from, and really how we fucked it up so bad for ourselves.

“Aliens” = Intra-Solar System Time Travelers.