This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/InevitableLow5163 on 2024-07-03 04:38:57+00:00.

Long ago the Aandrians, well, we call them Aandrians as we don’t have all the mouthparts to properly use their language. They had an accident with a migratory fleet that got too close to our Oort field and a small reproductive ship had to make an emergency landing on the nearest habitable planet. They’d scanned it and seen a monument of ours that bore a striking resemblance to how they designate safe spaces, like those “Safe Place” signs at Quick Trips, where the “A” in “Place” is a house. Their sign just so happened to be an arch, usually in an open area or over buildings.

Due to this, they ended up semi-crash landing their ship near St. Louis, Missouri, the poor fellows. And as luck would have it every organism survived the crash, unfortunately their gametozoa were all released from stasis in the process and began doing as they were wont to do.

These gametozoa are a reproductive middle state for their species. They reproduce similar to ferns, if a fern decided to get up and walk around with a pitch black carapace and a face even a mother like Echidna would struggle to love. Essentially the adults are genderless and when induced to reproduce they’ll lay an amount of eggs. Well, an analog to an egg really, it’s halfway between an egg and a larva since it doesn’t hatch, but pupate. When they pupate they produce a gametozoa, essentially a pre-offspring ambulatory organism that’s just a womb, gonads, and life support for the former. These gametozoa will wander around, determine which can best support a child, and then mate with another which will result in the best possible blending of genes between individuals. Once mating is complete they break down the gonads, limbs, and everything nonessential to growing a baby Aandrian. Later on this baby Aandrian will quickly develop over the course of three days and then tear its way out of the remains of the gametozoa that grew it, like if a human baby hatched from an egg, but that egg was also a womb and not attached to a person. It’s even more gorey than you’d think. And the gametozoa aren’t pretty either. Not something you’d want a child to see all stages of happening at once, spilled from a crashed ship while the adults of the species are running around in a panic wrangling their runaway Bait N’ Tackle like the worst version of herding cats you could imagine.

Unfortunately Daniel O’Bannon and his parents weren’t able to decide if he was allowed to see this as he’d wandered out into the woods near his home and the impromptu nursery the Aandrians had set up blocked his only way home. He had to see sixteen hours of this at a very young age. Luckily the Aandrians eventually noticed him once everything had calmed down a bit and wiped the event from his memory, but fragments would remain. And the human mind did what it did with them, interpreted the worst possible outcomes, and tried to plot out defenses and plans of action. This would all culminate in the movie Alien. Luckily the Aandrians are a very peaceable people and found the portrayal humorous, likening it to them writing a horror story about puppies or kittens.

This is just one of the many instances of humans encountering aliens and attempting to make sense of it, filtering it through our survival instinct.