Alien Motives

[Pumpkinhead]

I was thinking about the plot of UFO, and the X-COM series in general, and realised that I have no idea what the aliens' motives are for attacking us!

 

I've only ever played UFO (and the demos of Apoc and Interceptor) so I'm not that familiar with the overall storyline.

 

Does anyone know what their motives are? Do they want our resources? Our alliance? Or just our lives? Can anyone fill me in?

[ValveJam]

They just don't like us very much. Particularly civilians.

[Jman4117]

Aliens are on Mars. They send T'leth to Earth 65 million years ago. It is a colony ship of sorts. It crashes, kills dinosaurs and they presumably reseed the Earth. 1947 the aliens start the come back. We are their "cattle". 1999 the invasion of Earth begins. Alien War I is on. Humans go to Mars and stop the alien's arses. Cydonian base sends a tachyon beam signal to T'leth that is sitting at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. The ancient aliens begin to come out of stasis.

 

That's basically the plot of the first game.

[Pumpkinhead]

So we're just food to them?

[Jman4117]

Food, slaves, etc.

[Hobbes]

....there's always the hypothesis that humans turned into a threat to the aliens

[TabulaRasa]

If they want humans for slaves, why do you always see aliens killing the people in terror missions instead of taking them?

[Jman4117]

Fun?

 

There are plenty to go around. What's 6-12 humans anyway?

[mobius]

set the goescape timer to 1-day granularity, and ignore all ufos/terror sites for 2-3 months. then you will soon see what the aliens came for ..

[NKF]

Terrror missions are political. They kill a few humans to scare the countries to force the countries to stop funding X-Com. What's a few dozen humans when there are many more?

 

The attacks on X-Com are just retaliatory. You keep attacking them, so they want to fight back.

 

I guess they want their prize relatively whole. If they just nuked the planet with their endless supply of battleships, there'd be nothing left for them to breed, experiment on, grow their hamburgers and moo-juice for them and to peddle wholesale.

 

- NKF

[Zombie]

What are the aliens' motives?

The UFOpaedia gives some clues. First look under Alien Harvest. The aliens " 'seeded' the planet with its flora and fauna, and now they have returned to reap the harvest they have sown." Their planet (Mars) is unable to to sustain the organisms necessary for their very survival. So they "planted" Earth with the organisms and now collect them for food.

 

Second, look under Alien Abduction. It says that "The purpose behind [the bizarre experiments] appears to be linked to genetic mutation and manipulation of the aliens own genetic material." Now look under the Sectoid interrogation section. It says "The abduction is used to extract genetic material for cross breeding and developing clones for infiltrating human society. The cattle provide both nutrition and genetic material. This race appears to want to develop superior genetic hybrids to increase the efficiency of their hive-like society."

 

What the aliens want is:

1) Food.

2) Genetic material from cattle and humans.

3) The ability to create a alien/human hybrid.

4) Develop clones to infiltrate the governments.

5) Convince humans to let them carry on their gathering unimpeded.

 

Remember, the aliens do not start out attacking us. We start the fighting by attacking their ships and hindering their progress! Not that this makes much difference since the aliens always carry weapons!

[Fox]

I was always under the assumption that the aliens seeded Earth with the dinosaurs. Think of all the food they could have gotten from them. Then once T'leth crashed and killed everything off, they just ignored everything. Soon they realized that other species had begun to grow and evolve, and decided they would try and reap the new harvest.

 

Smarter than anticipated, the humans resisted. I don't think I would use the word "invasion" for the first X-COM game. I took it as mainly aliens trying to harvest humans here and there, and X-COM is there to hit them back.

 

Remember: Mars is not the alien's homeworld. It is merely a frontline base for the attacks on Earth. This is all made clear in X-COM: Interceptor I believe. There is more than one brain.

[Jman4117]

From the winning and losing outros:

 

Winning:

As you enter the chamber you see the alien brain - the object of your quest. Before you can fire it communicates to you via a screen at its base. It implores you to listen to its arguments for survival before you make the decision to pull the trigger...

 

The brain speaks: 'Many millions of years ago the planet you call Mars was alive. This life was brought to a barren planet by our civilisation as it was to yours. For millions of years we have visited your planet and genetically developed your species. You cannot kill us, you are part of us...

 

Here is the centre of Martian civilisation - the pyramids built millions of years before yours - by a species which is your ancestor. No planet is beyond our reach. This power could be yours before long. All we ask is your co-operation...

 

The alien brain is interrupted by a burst of hot plasma, and the entire alien force is defeated. Once the aliens have lost Mars they have lost the earth. Before long the XCom research allows humanity to flourish once more, and claim Mars for itself. The alien menace has gone, but for how long, no one knows...

 

 

Losing:

You have failed to stop the alien onslaught. One by one the funding nations sign pacts with aliens promising technology, prosperity and peace. However it soon becomes clear that the aliens have other plans...

 

The aliens attempt to exterminate all humanity, destroying cities and poisoning the air and sea. The resistance of earth armies is futile in the face of vastly superior technology. Surviving generations suffer terrible mutations as they flee alien destruction. They are rounded up into slave camps to help transform earth into an alien colony which is part of some unknown empire. The knowledge gained through the XCom project is lost forever. You have failed to save the earth.

[Pumpkinhead]

I've alreadys known that what the brain says is simply a trick to try and stop you from killing it, because it contradicts what happens if you lose. But I'd forgotten what the details of each were.

 

So basically, their motives are summed up as to "transform earth into an alien colony." We humans seem to simply be an obstacle to that end. Does that sound about right?

 

 

O/T: I love the image associated with the last paragraph of the "losing" description, i.e. the mutations:

 

https://ufopaedia.xcomufo.com/pics/outro.gif

[Hobbes]

Yeah, but how does the civilization on Mars fits on the whole story? Why would someone built a human Face on Cydonia millions of years before humans walked on Earth?

 

Questions....questions.....

[FullAuto]

I put it to the jury that the subjects, being aliens, do nothing according to 'logic'. Surely their ways of thinking will be, naturally, alien and hence, make little or no sense.

The defence rests, m'lud.

[JellyfishGreen]

Naw, that's a cop-out...

 

Maybe the multi-million-year-old Pyramids were from a previous expedition, when the Brains tried to rule Mars and its native life. Then Mars dried up, and it was some time later (due to the speed of light and politics) before the Brain home planet found out Earth was flourishing and ripe for the harvest. That's when they launched the current expeditionary force.

 

As one fanfic put it, the expeditionary force was expertly equipped to conquer Earth at the Napoleonic level of weapon technology - circa the original War of the Worlds, early 1900's. But the tachyon alarm clock was set wrong, they overslept, and Earth developed jet fighters in the meantime.

[Shades of Green]

Now, try looking at it from the alien point of view.

You build an ultra-expensive interstellar colony ship the size of a big astroid. You send it on a multi-millenial journey to a world you know is devoid of sentient life (gillmen aside that is, and those weren't as annoying as the Humans) yet rich with geological and ecological resources. And it's *YOUR* colony.

 

Then, just as your expensive ship approaches it's prize, it crashes.

 

Millions of yours later, you decide to send a recovery team to that colony. To your unpleasant surprise, this annoying, pesky, bothersome biped race decides to evolve JUST TWO MILLION YEARS before the rescue team's arrival. How rude of them!

And to make things worse, they call YOUR colony "their home"

:mad:

[Neorapsta]

Another view is the story trend which always seems to be tacked onto the 'sectoid type' aliens.

 

Through genetic modification and cloning their genes begin to degrade and they lose the ability to repoduce, the degradation continues to such a point the species would just die off due to stress place on their genetic structure due to cloning. In order to prevent this they need to have an influx of new uncontaminated genetic material. In these stories its always someway they are somehow similar originally to humans, so they use humans as genetic stock to prevent the extinction of their race.

 

I also did a project ages ago, charting the physical evolution of mankind, and assuming there is a constant reliance on technology we'd pretty much end up looking similar to what we see as greys/sectoids. A friend of mine then added the theory that these 'aliens' arent really extraterrestrial but time travellers or some such.

[Pumpkinhead]

A friend of mine then added the theory that these 'aliens' arent really extraterrestrial but time travellers or some such.

I've thought of those exact same "theories" before B)

 

Isn't it funny how people often have the same ideas without ever knowing each other

 

I heard once about the supposed "missing link" and this gave me the idea that Greys had come to earth way back when and genetically altered chimps or whatever with their own DNA, essentially creating humans as we are now.

 

The whole idea of Greys being humans from a distant future however, doesn't fit with the genetic engineering theory because you'd end up with one of those grandparent paradox's

 

Saying that the Sectoids were once humanoid would explain why there's a pre-homosapien-built "human face" at Cydonia

[FullAuto]

Once humanoid? Aren't they still?

[Pumpkinhead]

Maybe just a little

 

I meant more like humans, as in no bug-eyes etc

[FullAuto]

Depends on the human....but I take your point.

[Neorapsta]

though they were 2 seperate theories, you don't really get a grandfather paradox, as if your race is becoming genetically 'stale' the ultimate source of unharmed genetic material would be in the past before any tampering. So you could kinda end up with a whole race rebirth thingy going on at a genetic level.

[Pumpkinhead]

I have a few more questions:

• Which game is the story of the T'leth shown?
  
• Who were the crew?
  
• Did it actually come from Mars, or elsewhere?
  
• Was there a reason for its crashing?
  
• Is it correct that the crew had been in stasis for 65m years?
  
• Does this mean that the T'leth was still intact?
  
• If the aliens knew it had crashed in our ocean, why was there never a salvage?
  
• Are the revived T'leth crew the aliens in TFTD? If so, is it purely a coincidence that they're aquatic in nature?