Earth can be shitty. Sometimes, being whisked away by a passing starship sounds like a pretty good idea. However—it completely depends on who’s behind the controls. Hanging with the Arrival heptapods would be pretty chill. Being shanghaied by any of the following kidnap-happy aliens, however, would not.

1) The Predator in Predators

Military badass Adrien Brody is alive at the end of the movie... but for how long? Image: YouTube screen grab

In the earlier movies, Predators came to Earth to conduct their hunting rituals (and/or brawl with the Alien aliens). But in 2010's Predators, we finally learned what it would be like to be spirited away to a far-flung planet, having been deemed vicious enough to become designated prey for Predators-in-training. No surprise, it’s an almost immediate death sentence... unless you are a crafty scavenger played by Laurence Fishburne. Even if you manage to survive, you’re still stuck on a Predator playground that’s constantly being restocked by killer creatures cherry-picked from across the universe, with very, very little chance of escape.

2) The Klowns in Killer Klowns from Outer Space

In this campy horror comedy, aliens who look like Pennywise’s bratty younger brothers beam to Earth in a flying circus tent, wielding guns that spray cotton-candy cocoons and other ghoulish weaponry. Though the Klowns don’t necessarily seem interested in snatching any humans to their homeworld, imagine what a teeth-rottingly terrible journey that would be, full of freaky balloon animals and “pranks” that are actually designed to decapitate you. Developing a debilitating case of coulrophobia would be the least of your worries.

3) The Greys in Communion

In this nightmarish tale, a man teeters on the edge of sanity after becoming convinced that he’s being targeted by alien visitors. Whitley Strieber, who penned the film’s best-selling source material, claimed the tale was based on his own real-life experiences. Christopher Walken’s typically passionate performance as Strieber suggests just how traumatizing spending time with the Greys would be—especially with the side effect of everyone around you assuming you’re a complete wack job.

4) The Sumerian-Speaking Aliens in The Fourth Kind

The Fourth King is mostly remembered for its gimmick of producing fake “archival footage” to make its “dramatizations” (starring Milla Jovovich and others) feel more authentic. Still, its aliens—who make late-night bedside visits to communicate threats in ancient languages, and are fond of snatching children as well as snapping the necks of their adult targets and/or framing them for hideous crimes—are a nasty bunch, to be avoided at all costs.

5) “Them” in The Forgotten

Grieving mother Telly (Julianne Moore) is already mourning the loss of her son in a plane crash when she awakes one day to find that nobody besides her remembers he even existed... and everyone’s acting like she’s completely nuts. Fortunately, her motherly love is enough to set things right in the end—but the aliens who grabbed her child, faked a plane crash, wiped the memories of seemingly everyone in Telly’s orbit, and have various Earthbound government agencies under their control—are definite contenders for cruelest kidnappers in the galaxy.

6) The Grays in Dark Skies

A suburban family attracts the unwholesome interest of extraterrestrials who take sadistic delight in putting them through a series of Horror Movie 101 terrors. After they consult an expert (an excellently-cast J.K. Simmons), the family goes into full anti-alien-abduction mode to protect the young son who appears to be the chosen target—only to see their other kid ripped away right before their eyes. If you were gonna grab the boy, aliens, why not just go ahead and take him without all the sinister build-up? Making matters worse, mom and dad are blamed for their son’s disappearance, along with everything else.

7) The aliens in “Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space,’” The X-Files

This third-season entry is a fan favorite for a reason—despite the show’s recurring alien themes, it’s a stand-alone monster-of-the-week episode with plenty of trademark quirkiness (exhibit A: Jesse Ventura and Alex Trebek cameo as Men in Black). As is tradition, it’s not entirely clear if the aliens in this particular episode are real or part of a government conspiracy (or both), but many of the people involved in the tale end up dead or just thoroughly confused. No good for them... but great for the scifi author who pens a book about the incident, and excellently fun (if, again, a little confusing) viewing for us.

8) The Scowling Extraterrestrials in Fire in the Sky

Like Communion before it, Fire in the Sky is based on a purportedly true story of alien abduction. Unlike Communion before it, Fire in the Sky contains maybe the single most terrifying close encounter in cinema. The aliens in Communionwere scary, sure, but the creatures in Fire in the Sky are goddamn merciless, and so is this flashback scene.

9) The Martians in Mars Needs Moms

We’ve covered the various unpleasantries of this movie before, but it still stands that being abducted by Martians who want to suck out your “mom-ness” so it can be used by child-rearing robots would be abundantly shitty, if not as terrifying as the other aliens on this list. (Reminder: Mars Needs Moms is not a horror movie, it’s an animated comedy for the kiddies.)

10) The Martians of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians

Again, these spandex-wearing green men are more obnoxious than scary, but that doesn’t make hanging around them any less unpleasant. In this Mystery Science Theater 3000 classic, the Martians realize their American TV-watching kids are all dead inside, and kidnap Santa to bring them joy and consumer products. Along the way, they reveal themselves to be belligerent, like the sullen anti-happiness Voldar, or deeply annoying, especially “comic relief” Dropo. The good news is that these Martians seemed solely interested in Santa, so unless you put on a fake white beard and work at the mall during the holidays, you’re probably safe.

The science world is all in a tizzy this week about the supposed discovery of an alien megastructure. It’s an intriguing theory, no doubt, but one deserving hefty amounts of skepticism. As we’ve learned before, inexplicable observations are all too often confused for aliens. Here are some classic examples.

A strange star located about 1,500 light-years from here is confounding astronomers. As reported by Ross Andersen in The Atlantic, the star, dubbed KIC 8462852, appears to be surrounded by “a strange mess of objects,” compelling scientists involved in the hunt for extraterrestrial intelligence “to get a closer look.” 

A likely explanation for the anomaly is a massive and irregular cloud of debris left over from a celestial collision. But Jason Wright, an astronomer who studies exoplanets and astrobiology, suspects it may be a Dyson Sphere—an alien-built megastructure consisting of solar panels placed in orbit around a star.

There’s much more to this story than my summary, so I highly recommend Phil Plait’s post at Slate. As Plait himself admits, this star’s behavior is indeed difficult to explain and it’s “clear something weird is happening there.” To be clear, it’s probably not ET, but the suggestion that aliens may somehow be involved is not completely outrageous. As I’ve said before, the search for alien artifacts—or what’s called Dysonian SETI—may be our best route to finally detecting signs of an extraterrestrial civilization. 

This issue brings to mind previous instances in scientific history when a “God is in the gaps” explanation gets invoked for inexplicable phenomenon. There seems to be a tendency—and again, not a completely unwarranted tendency—among some astronomers to attribute extraterrestrial intervention when they observe something unexpected or seemingly outside the bounds of established knowledge. But in virtually every instance, these initial deliberations have been superseded by more reasonable explanations, as these following examples attest. 

Canals on Mars

Back at the turn of the 20th century, American astronomer Percival Lowell posited the theory that an advanced alien civilization had irrigated crops on the surface of Mars with water drawn from the Red Planet’s poles via an elaborate canal network.“That Mars is inhabited by beings of some sort or other we may consider as certain as it is uncertain what these beings may be,” wrote Lowell in 1906. 

Since the time of Lowell, however, closer inspection of the surface has shown that Mars does indeed feature a complex and dynamic surface, one carved by the ravages of time rather than an alien civilization. 

Pulsars

Another example is the discovery of pulsars, those freakishly precise flashes of electromagnetic radiation produced by highly magnetized, rotating neutron stars.

(Credit: NASA)

Because they flash at such steady and rapid intervals, some astronomers speculated that pulsars are actually beacons set up by advanced alien intelligences. When they were first described in 1967, one of the scientists involved in the discovery, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, said that

we did not really believe that we had picked up signals from another civilization, but obviously the idea had crossed our minds and we had no proof that it was an entirely natural radio emission. It is an interesting problem—if one thinks one may have detected life elsewhere in the universe, how does one announce the results responsibly?

Despite their initial skepticism, they named the pulsar LGM-1, which stands for “little green men.”

The Wow! Signal

There’s also the infamous Wow! signal— a 72-second-long radio burst that initially appeared to good to be true. It was. 

Patrick J. KIger from National Geographic explains:

[Jerry] Ehman, a volunteer researcher for Ohio State University’s now-defunct Big Ear radio observatory, perused data from the telescope’s scan of the skies on August 15, a few days earlier. In those days, such information was run through an IBM 1130 mainframe computer and printed on perforated paper, and then laboriously examined by hand. But the tedium was shattered when Ehman spotted something surprising—a vertical column with the alphanumerical sequence “6EQUJ5,” which had occurred at 10:16 p.m. EST. He grabbed a red pen and circled the sequence. In the margin, wrote “Wow!”

Ehman’s excitement over that bit of arcane information stemmed from the Big Ear’s mission at the time, which was searching space for radio signals of the sort that might be emanated by extraterrestrial civilizations, if they were attempting to make contact with intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. To Ehman, this signal, which had come from the direction of the constellation Sagittarius, looked an awful lot like it could be such a message. Observatory director John Krauss and his assistant Bob Dixon, who subsequently examined the data, were similarly astonished by it.

The signal, which lasted 72 seconds, was never detected again, even during follow-up studies. Though never fully explained, the signal was likely a natural, continuous signal, or some human-caused artifact. 

Perytons

More recently, astronomers at the Parkes Observatory in Australia detected mysterious radio signals known as perytons.

(Credit: CSIRO)

These brief but intense bursts, which appeared to emanate from deep space, were so strange that some scientists thought they might be coming from, what else, aliens. But a follow-up study ruined the party by showing that the signals were coming from—get this—microwave ovens used in the observatory to re-heat coffee. Ouch. 

UFOs

Of course, supposed signs of aliens need not be limited to space.

Unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, are often associated with alien visitations, though empirical evidence for such claims are completely lacking. In virtually all cases, however, there are perfectly reasonable explanations for these observations. 

Keep an Open Mind

The strange behavior of KIC 8462852 may never be explained. Our inability to posit a more reasonable explanation may be due to our limited technologies, insufficient science, or lack of imagination. 

In time we may discover what’s really going on, and it’ll probably be a really fascinating explanation. Until then however, we should seek out the simplest solution, while keeping an open mind to other, more radical possibilities. Failure to do both would be a terrible disservice to the scientific process.

Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus is the latest target in the perennial excitement around finding extraterrestrial life. Its warm subterranean ocean is thought to contain all the right ingredients to harbor alien microbes, which would arguably be the biggest scientific discovery in human history. While finding microbes—even biosignatures on places like Mars—would be incredible, perhaps we’re overlooking something critical in the search for life in our solar system, specifically intelligent life. Take that, tiny microbes.

A new paper from astronomer Jason Wright, Prior Indigenous Technological Species, poses the question: Have we exhausted our options in searching for signs of extremely old, intelligent life? Contrary to what this outlet or this outlet or this outlet claims, Wright’s paper does not offer any evidence or proof of an ancient alien civilization—instead, it ruminates on whether or not there’s a chance we’re overlooking some critical clue in our hunt.

“There is zero evidence for any prior indigenous technological civilizations,” Wright told Gizmodo. “My paper asks, have we completely foreclosed the possibility, or is there a chance that there could be some evidence we overlooked? [And] if we have overlooked something and we find it in the future, what are the chances it could have come from a prior indigenous technological species versus an interstellar one?”

Technosignatures, however, are a bit different from the “biosignatures” astronomers will be looking for on places like Mars or eventually, within the TRAPPIST-1 system.

“A ‘biosignature’ is any sort of indication that life exists somewhere,” Wright explained. “Astrobiologists hope to look for biosignatures in the atmospheres of other planets on on Mars or Europa, things like oxygen or other products of biology and metabolism. A ‘technosignature’ is evidence of technology.” An example of a technosignature would be an artificial radio signal from a distant star. In our own solar system, Wright suggests it might be worth looking for signs of alien space mining activity, or even underground settlements. “We might conjecture that settlements or bases on [rocky moons or asteroids] would have been built beneath the surface for a variety of reasons, and so still be discoverable today,” he writes.

Because we’re living in the era of Ancient Aliens, it might seem natural to compare this to the “ancient astronaut” idea the show explores. For those who have not seen a meme in the last five years, the idea is that a group of intelligent extraterrestrials visited Earth thousands of years ago and helped them achieve various feats of science and engineering. But according to Wright, his paper suggests “quite the opposite.”

“‘Ancient’ means something very different to an astronomer than to a historian,” he said. “We think ‘billions of years,’ but in history ‘ancient’ means “thousands of years.” These aliens, if they ever truly existed, would not have influenced humanity at all, since they would have gone extinct long before our ancestors roamed Earth.

So if technosignatures from intelligent life are somewhere out there in the solar system, where could they be? Unfortunately, searching here on our Pale Blue Dot would be pretty inefficient because, well, people. And plate tectonics.

“The Earth (and humanity) destroys evidence of technology very efficiently in most cases,” Wright explained. “Millions of humans lived and used tools on the Earth for tens of thousands of years but archaeologists can only recover and recognize tiny fraction of their tools. If such a species lived millions of years ago very little of their technology would be detectable today.”

Still, not all hope is lost for finding technosignatures of past alien civilizations on Earth. In his paper, Wright suggests studying the oldest rocks on Earth and looking for unnatural isotope ratios—something that would provide us with even the smallest hint of technologically adept life that existed before humans. And while finding technosignatures on our planet might be tricky, places like the Moon or Mars might offer a more pristine record of the distant past.

“Work on Earth could show that there has never been a prior tree of complex life, that there are no signs of recognizable technology in the geological record (say, evidence of prior fossil fuel burning or nuclear reactions), and that we would have seen such evidence if it existed,” Wright said. “The surfaces of the Moon and Mars are ancient, so if we can show that there is nothing on or just beneath them that would indicate technology that would make it pretty unlikely anything was ever there.”

In short, if we’re going to embark on an alien scavenger hunt, we might as well pursue all our options.