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On 24 June 1947, private pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing a string of nine, shiny, unidentified flying objects flying past Mount Rainier at speeds of over 2,000 kilometres per hour. He described the objects’ movement as being “erratic, like a saucer skipping over water.” A newspaper journalist misinterpreted his words and reported that Arnold had seen “flying saucers,” and a phenomenon was born. This was the first post-WWII sighting in the United States that garnered nationwide news coverage and is credited with being the first time that alien encounters were taken seriously as real things outside of science fiction.

Stories of alien encounters include UFO sightings, little green men, anal probes, alien lovers, mind control, crop circles, cattle mutilations, and other wonderful things. People have fantastic experiences, which they believe are alien abductions. While I don’t think it is impossible that aliens could visit us, it is remarkable that many alien encounters come across sounding like weird wet dreams. Would aliens travel billions of light years across to the universe to see what is up our bums? Our speculations on alien encounters often put humans, and even individual humans, at the centre of the experience.

The similarities between eye witness accounts of what aliens look like has been used as evidence that they are real, but could conversely be seen as evidence that the encounters reflect pop-culture. The first depiction of a grey hominid alien with a bulging head and large, almond-shaped eyes was in an episode of Outer Limits in 1961, and the image had stuck with us since. This is an example of our unwarranted human-centric idea of aliens; as human-level intelligence in a bipedal primate species has only occurred once, by chance, on Earth, the likelihood of it happening again is practically nil. Or is it? Palaeontologist Simon Conway-Morris thinks it is actually quite likely that aliens would look like us. He also says given the way evolution tends to unfold, dinosaurs, had they not become extinct, may have evolved a highly intelligent bipedal reptilian humanoid. He believes that intelligence is conducive to the large head, forward-facing eyes, free hands, and upright stance of a human. Though the source is reputable, Conway-Morris’s theory has largely been dismissed as an example of human chauvinism, where we see our own example as the most logically superior idea. After all, of all the primates who have evolved on Earth, humans are the only ones to have evolved our level of intelligence, with the possible exception of Neanderthals, whose intelligence didn’t help prevent their extinction well before they had the chance to develop space-travelling technology. And the surviving non-human primate species don’t appear to be increasing in intelligence as they evolve, as there is no need for them to in order to survive.

Our chauvinism about alien life extends beyond pro-primate assumptions. As Psychologist Michael Shermer puts it, “We are carbon chauvinists, oxygen chauvinists, temperature chauvinists, vertebrate chauvinists, mammal chauvinists, among many others.” But there are some assumptions that can be tentatively made about alien life. Biologist Richard Dawkins assumes that alien life will be Darwinian life, in that it will have evolved from simple forms into more complex forms, with something resembling (or even identical to) DNA or RNA. If the DNA is not made of carbon as Earth DNA is, it will be made of a substance with similar properties capable of “storing” information with which to replicate itself. He also predicts that, given enough time, aliens will evolve eyes, because they have evolved many times over on Earth and give an organism a massive evolutionary advantage. Similarly, our open-minded ideas of aliens being very different to us, in the form of giant glutinous blobs, sentient gases, or slithering worms may also be unlikely. If the creatures come from a planet with a sold terrain like our, then legs are an advantage, just as they are on earth. If they naturally live underwater, they would benefit from having fins to swim with, just like many sea-creatures. So if they come from an Earth-like planet, there may be a good chance that alien life will resemble Earth’s creatures in some way.

Humans usually assume that whatever the aliens’ intentions are, they will care about the human race in some way, whether as novelty creatures to be studied, equals to be communicated with, or resources to be farmed or harvested. But why would aliens ransack our tiny world for resources when there are whole uninhabited planets made entirely out of water, diamonds, and metals floating around in space? Why would they want to give us their knowledge and have sex with us if a human is, to them, the intellectual equivalent of a hamster? How can we expect to ever be able to relate to an alien species when we can’t even be kind to chimpanzees, with which we share almost our entire DNA? We can’t even get along with other humans particularly well, or communicate well with someone who doesn’t speak our language. Scientists believe that the absolute best possible scenario for communication with intelligent alien life would be if we could exchange maths with them.

Alien encounters used to be portrayed as malevolent colonisations, destroying or enslaving the human race. More recently, alien encounters have been characterised by the New Age movement as potentially enlightening meetings with superior, benevolent beings. Cognitive psychologist Susan Clancy sees this kind of belief in aliens as offering similar benefits as religion – meaning, reassurance, mystical revelation, spirituality and transformation. But why would an alien species travel all those light years just to tell us to be nice to each other, to have faith and to love? We all tell each other those things anyway. Some time-and-space-defying maths would be far more useful.

New Age ideas of alien encounters are even more self-obsessed than those of science fiction, in that they focus on the experience of the human and the benefits we can gain from their knowledge and our relationships with them. Have you ever had patches of memory missing that you couldn’t account for? Have you ever woken up conscious but unable to move? Have you ever dreamt of having sex with an alien? Do you have any unusual markings that you can’t remember the source of, like bruises, cuts, or spots? According to regression therapist Barbara Lamb, aliens may have abducted you! One of her patients has memories of having married an alien, an amazing cat-faced primate whom she has drawn pictures of, and having borne him four children, two of whom live on Earth.

I believed in alien abductions as a teenager around the time I also happened to have bouts of isolated sleep paralysis (ISP). I’d wake up in the night completely paralysed but conscious, with a roaring static in my ears and a deep feeling of dread. Sometimes my thoughts would mingle with dreams that were so lucid I believed I was having some sort of out-of-body experience. Terrified, I told my parents about it, who thought I was making it up. Then my uncle happily told me that it was an alien spirit. I interpreted the alien as having the form of a radio wave, which entered my body through my chest at night. For a while when I was about 15 I suffered through bouts of sleep paralysis almost nightly, and one night it happened over and over again until I was a near jibbering wreck.

For sure, I was scared but, worse than that, I thought I was special. I thought the aliens had selected me for a special purpose. The last thing a teenager needs is to be convinced that some paranormal force is working through them. Thinking I must have gained some kind of superpowers, I convinced myself I could see auras, the future and the fabric of time. Luckily my friend told me people were starting to say I was crazy and, thankfully, I shut up.

What I was going through was a very common form of ISP in which a person regains consciousness before the natural bodily paralysis that helps us to sleep peacefully has retreated. While we now know its probable physiological cause, different cultures have had varying traditions to explain what ISP is. In Scandinavia, it is a “mare,” a damned woman whose spirit leaves her body when she sleeps to sit on the rib cage of villagers to give them terrible nightmares. In Fiji, the sufferer is being eaten by a demon. In Nigeria, it is the devil on your back (in North America, it is an old hag or a witch on your back). In Turkey, the culprit is a supernatural being called a jinn that is trying to strangle the sleeper. In Thailand, it is a spirit that can reportedly leave physical bruises, and in Eastern China, a mouse who steals your breath. If you haven’t experienced sleep paralysis, these descriptions give some idea of how real and distressing the feeling is. But now, with the recent invasion of aliens into our social consciousness, it is common to credit ISP to alien abduction.

If you believe aliens have abducted you, there are people who can help you remember what happened. Hypnotic regression therapy is a form of psychotherapy by which people believe they can uncover repressed memories years, or even decades, after they have been forgotten. Leading questions can manipulate people into constructing memories that never happened. The therapy assumes the brain is like a video tape recording its observations perfectly and then keeping or erasing them. But there is no recording device in the brain. Memories are pieced together in a kind of patchwork created by a combination of association between things and events in the environment. Repetitive replaying of a memory in your head is likely to alter it, so sometimes the memories we think we remember best are actually inaccurate. And we are highly susceptible to suggestion. In an American experiment in memory fabrication, adults were shown photoshopped pictures of themselves as children, doing things they had never done, such as riding in a hot air balloon or on a sailing ship. 33 per cent of people claimed to not only remember the experience, but could add details of their own describing what happened.

I am in no way saying that people who report alien encounters or uncover repressed memories are liars or fantasists. The memories are real and may create real joy or trauma for their host. Barbara Lamb says, “When we do the regressions, it is like reliving the whole experience that they do not consciously remember.” What is actually happening may be the exact opposite – rather than uncovering memories that have been forgotten, the therapists are implanting new memories that never happened. The most damaging manifestation of this is when a patient is led to believe they have experienced some kind of abuse as a child. In the 90s there was a spate of people recalling their parents being part of satanic cults who they had witnessed murdering babies. In 1992 Missouri woman Beth Rutherford received an out-of-court settlement of $1 million from her ex-therapist for implanting memories in her mind that led her to believe her mother and father had repeatedly raped her as a child, and forced her to give herself two abortions. Tragically, she believed the memories were true until a medical examination revealed that she had never had penetrative sex or been pregnant. This is not to say that the memory does not now exist and the person is making it up. Implanted memories can be as real in the mind of a person as any real memory. Memory is malleable. Repressed memories have more to do with our own brains than extra-terrestrial beings.

NASA has recently reported that we are probably not alone in the universe and that alien life will be found in the next 20 years. Italian physicist Enrico Fermi calculated the likelihood that aliens have arrived on Earth. He reasoned that any civilisation with rocket technology and some imperial incentive could rapidly colonise an entire galaxy, and, given the age of the universe, this has almost certainly happened, and actually should have already happened in our galaxy, so the aliens are here somewhere. This is called the “Fermi Paradox,” and has been compared to the horror story of a jigsaw puzzle that turns out to resemble your bedroom, with the final piece being a monster at the window, and when you turn around, the monster really is there! Perhaps even creepier is the “Simulation Argument” conceived by philosopher Nick Bostrom. He argues that if at least one of the following propositions is true, then we are currently living in a virtual simulation of reality: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilisation is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation.

If you combine Fermi’s Paradox with the Simulation Argument, then you can conclude that we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation fabricated by our alien colonisers. Maths + philosophy = doom.

Fermi’s Paradox comes with the assumption that it is normal for intelligence to evolve. However, in our own world, human-level intelligence has only evolved once (as far as we know) with no other animals getting close to our mental capabilities. We are biased in thinking that intelligence is the most important factor in world domination. We are not the dominant species on earth. Beetles outnumber us millions of times, and bacteria trillions of times. Humans could be seen as mere vessels to harbour our microbial rulers, which keep many steps ahead of us by their rapid evolution and will certainly outlast us.

Speaking of evolution on Earth, what if “alien” life doesn’t come from space at all, but from somewhere closer to home? We have two entirely different eco-systems on earth – land and sea. Humans have explored less than two per cent of the ocean’s floor, because it is so expensive to do, and is apparently fairly boring, thus far yielding not much more than some weird species of fish. There could, conceivably, be life-forms rivalling humans in intelligence who live in a place so disconnected to us that we haven’t been able to cross paths (unless their technology allows them to surface and probe us at night.)

Vastly superior intelligence is incomprehensible to creatures like us. We are technically much more intelligent than cats, but cats probably believe us to be intellectual equals, or (maybe more likely) much less intelligent. My favourite analogy of aliens existing among humans came from David Wong at cracked.com. He points out that humans can often successfully convince other animals into thinking they are one of them by a simple trick, such as dousing themselves in the animal’s smell or putting on a costume with the appropriate markings. This can make the human completely undetectable to the animal. “If there was another species who wanted to study us the way we study gazelles or rare birds, if they’re that much smarter than we are to these animals, they would absolutely have ways to walk among us that are absolutely undetectable. In movies we always portray aliens as really clumsy in how they do it, like they don’t know how to mimic human emotion or they don’t understand love. We’re kind of insulting the aliens when we assume that. Just as we know how to smear animal urine over our bodies, they would totally know how to imitate love and charisma and all of those things.”

Our human chauvinism may be useful in speculating what an alien encounter may actually be like, but it could be pretty boring. Realistically, we are far more likely to come across alien technology than the aliens themselves. The Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) began sending out radio transmissions in 1960 as a signal that there is intelligent life on Earth. We may encounter aliens by their radio signals, discarded debris floating in space, or by a contraption sent out for space exploration. Like the robot rover Curiosity exploring the freezing, toxic surface of Mars, it is far safer and more logical to send machines into space than animals. With our diet of alien movies and real stories of alien abductions, it may be disappointing if our first verifiable alien encounter (if it ever happens) is a single-cells organism, a piece of space trash or a bit of maths.