Mjolnirpants via Wikipedia Commons
I’ve always found the popular depiction of Grey aliens to be suspiciously human-like. Their anatomy is extremely close to humans and unmistakably of simian descent. Greys match up pretty closely with what the public would draw you if you asked them to guess at what evolution would turn future humans into.
Mjolnirpants via Wikipedia Commons
Some have speculated greys are future humans, but they have certain cartoonishly improbable anatomical qualities which inspire doubt. Like the weight of their heads versus neck thickness, and general apparent muscle mass, or the size and shape of their eye openings suggesting eyeballs too large to fit into their heads.
In order for these qualities to make sense from a biomechanics standpoint, you’d need their eyeballs to occupy most of the interior volume of their skulls, and for their brains to be very small. That is inconsistent with the view that greys possess highly developed intelligence.
HannahMoss via Wikipedia Commons
Likewise with reptilians. Why would independently evolved life so closely resemble any recognizable branch of Earthly taxonomy? Reptilians just look like the popular imagination of what dinosaurs might’ve evolved into, if convergent evolution to humanoids was for some reason inevitable.
Nordics likewise seem like a self gratifying cosmic idealization, even deification of Nordic, or “Aryan” beauty standards. I would speculate Nordic aliens are a conscious or subconscious expression of old fashioned racial anxiety concerning the long term preservation and expression of Scandinavian features in human populations.
It feels more plausible to me than an independently evolved species of aliens that just happen to look like a Nazi wet dream. Had we been visited by actual authentic aliens which had close encounters with humans who lived to speak and write about it, I feel like they would’ve been a great deal stranger than these. Even human sci-fi authors in the modern day know enough to be more imaginative than lizard people, little grey/green men, or space Aryans.
Wander Mahet Public Domain
One defense I’ve heard of why all these aliens are humanoids is convergent evolution. We should expect to find a lot of alien crabs in the oceans of exoplanets due to carcinisation, or at least recognizably crab-like things. However, many of the traits we associate with certain taxa didn’t need to be like that. Exotic evolutionary flukes like the platypus, a duck billed egg laying mammal with venom glands, illustrates this.
I feel it reasonable to expect a body plan that isn’t too wild since evolution is miserly and usually takes place under near-starvation conditions. You don’t need a hundred legs to locomote efficiently for example, and there are no compelling use cases for six complex eyes that would justify the calories used up in growing them.
However I would also expect it to have a mixture of features we associate with irreconcilable Earthly taxa. Features we normally wouldn’t think “go together” on account of genetic distance, just because of how conditions led alien evolution down a different path than Earthly fauna.
I’m not yet sold on UAPs being of alien origin, or that if they are, that they’re not just autonomous probes or something. Recent revelations by the government do push me further in that direction, but if indeed there are intelligent ETs either piloting UAPs or instructing them remotely, I feel justified in doubting that they resemble Swedish babes or saurian hominids.
Not that either one wouldn’t be absolutely radical though, don’t get me wrong. Who doesn’t want first contact with hot blondes or dinosapiens? I’m just reminded of the maxim, “truth is not only stranger than we suppose. It’s stranger than we can suppose”.