Why Earthlings Obsess Over Alien Penetration

What do aliens want? Science fiction and UFO abduction stories kind of make you wonder why aliens bother coming here at all. They descend upon Earth for some nominal reason—enslavement of the masses, a study of our physiology, a quick natural resource grab, whatever—and in the end the humans whomp them. They return to the stars, caudal appendage tucked between their legs, with a begrudging acknowledgment that those bald apes may be primitive, but their indomitable humanity makes them impossible to overcome.

Preposterous! In real life, humans are sucky and weak. If metropolis-sized spacecrafts actually plopped out of the skies, we’d toss over the keys to the planet in a nanosecond and surf away on waves of our own fear-pee. But we keep envisioning it going some other way. Meanwhile, we depict aliens doing really weird stuff. Slurping a sleeping lady onto a flying saucer? Tractor-beaming some hapless loser into and out of a spaceship orifice over and over again? Sending a giant alien downtown to smoosh people into jelly smears like hamsters under a hot lady’s stiletto heel? Probing?

That’s right: We basically think aliens will want to have sex with us, and we expect all sorts of penetration—some of it pleasant, a lot of it nonconsensual, a bit of it merely kinky. Once your body is snatched, the real “alien invasion” begins.

I know what you’re thinking: What about the nice aliens? Your naïveté is adorable. And dangerous. Look at Starman: “Hey, Karen Allen! I look like your dead husband. Wanna do it? Whoa, look at the time! I gotta go, sweetie! This planet is … uh … too hot … yeah, I need to get to a colder climate or something. Here’s a floating Ben Wa ball. And a baby.” In Cocoon, a lady made out of light rapes Steve Guttenberg’s soul in a pool. And is it that crazy to think that a movie called Close Encounters is really a space-age Red Shoe Diary? Just imagine John Williams’ five-tone riff on a buttery saxophone. The possibilities of E.T.’s erect, luminous finger are too numerous and disturbing to list. One word, though: “Oooooouuuuuuuch.”

This vision is truly irrational. It is almost certainly a product of our fear of the unknown. I mean, that’s a long way to travel to have sex with a different species. How far would you go to hook up with a zebra?

Unless … One thing could explain all this alien misbehavior: intergalactic fetish porn. Earth is the San Fernando Valley of the Milky Way. We’re just bestiality to horny higher life-forms. Think about it! How else could they fund all those invasions? It would take a multibillion-credit industry to make the prohibitive cost of interstellar travel worth it.

So next time you’re puzzling your way through the hot human-on-alien action of a movie like Skyline or Battle: Los Angeles, ask yourself: Why do those people make alien-fighting so complicated? If the extraterrestrial entertainment industry is anything like ours, we humans shouldn’t have to worry about uploading viruses into the alien defense grid, or sending a hate-filled Mel Gibson after the Visitors with a bucket of water. Fellow earthlings: Don’t play their game. Should a hairless being with no mouth and giant eyes drag you onto some two-bit star cruiser and start pulling out tools, simply refuse to sign a video release. All my Hollywood experience tells me that this rarely used legal loophole is the only way you will be returned to your car in the desert unprobed. You might never win a Galactic Adult Video News Award, but you can sleep easy knowing that nowhere out past the final frontier is a Rigelian cephalopod stimulating its sex-lump to your undignified violation on the space-Internet.