Unidentified Creatures in Hawaiian Shirts

I saw two movies this weekend about aliens. One was good and the other was so-so. I won't name the titles, lest I ruin them for anyone. But aliens make for some good speculative fiction, even if it isn't well told. I find that our fascination with other-worldly beings is an expression of hope that we aren't alone in the universe, and that we aren't the worst.

Think about it. The majority of aliens are monsters who try to eat us up. Rarely are they cool beings who want to be our friend or give us hugs, take pictures, and then keep going to their vacation spot on Rigel 4. It must be our predisposition to fear what we don't understand. And we all know that fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, and hate leads to the dark side. So we make our space friends out to be baddies who probably don't have souls and just want to blow us up like some kind of faceless Mongol horde. Their motives are reduced to animalistic instincts for survival and territorial superiority.

If beings contact Earth by direct means, such as flying near it in saucers or whathaveyou, then I wonder if they are bent on evil. We could prepare for the worst. But if another species has perfected interstellar travel, which we haven't (yet), then would they be so predisposed to malevolence? What would NASA do? If we found life on another planet, would we want to just stop and say, "Hey dudes, what's up? We're from Earth; do you like playing cards?" Or would we discover if they posed any kind of credible threat and try to set up shop and figure out some sort of trading scheme that would ultimately benefit us at their expense? That's what the 17th century Dutch would have done.

So, I wonder if those little dudes that came from the skies and found in New Mexico were sinister or not. Did they deserve such bad treatment from us? I bet they were just lost as hell and the dad didn't want to ask for directions, and you know how that goes. Then they find themselves all crashed and dissected. I guess the moral of my story is: always ask for directions when you get the chance!