When I was a kid, aliens were big.
In the 1990s, we had shows like the X-Files, we had movies like Independence Day, Men in Black, Mars Attacks, or the somewhat more high-minded Contact.
Stories about aliens, UFOs, and abductions had, of course, become pretty popular during the 20th Century. H.G. Wells' 1898 novel The War of the Worlds was a couple years shy of the 20th Century, but established a lot of the (scarier) alien tropes.
The truly bizarre thing about aliens is that it's actually perfectly rational to believe that they exist. The universe is utterly, staggeringly enormous, and especially as astronomy has determined that stars having planets orbiting them is the norm, rather than an exception (as had previously been hypothesized,) it means that there must be a staggering number of planets out there in our galaxy (itself almost incomprehensibly huge on a human scale and yet just one of staggeringly many in the cosmos,) and so if life was able to occur here on Earth, there's basically got to be life out there.
And yet, any direct evidence of such life is, so far, missing, other than deeply dubious unconfirmed accounts from individuals whose experiences could be interpreted with much more mundane explanations, assuming that the experiences weren't wholly fabricated fictions.
(As an aside, I think it's important to note that the human brain is capable of making us perceive things that aren't there - human perception is a fuzzy thing that our brains try to organize a lot of stimuli into a coherent narrative, and sometimes the narrative it creates isn't consistent with the objective reality. My skepticism here is not intended as an insult to so-called witnesses' intelligence, and for what it's worth, it's not even really if alien abductees' experiences were real or not, because if we can't confirm with solid evidence that they actually happened, there's not really anything we can do about it.)
I've always been fascinated by the intersection of science fiction and fantasy. To a large extent, the two genres are twins, sharing nearly all their "genre DNA." The difference, I think, is one of perspective - whether you think that there's a rational way one can comprehend the mechanism behind the extraordinary, or if there's an inherent mystery (in the deeper, religious sense of the word, rather than "something you can solve if you investigate it successfully").
The "Paranormal" is a term that kind of just means "supernatural," but with a more sci-fi connotation, suggesting perhaps that, well, this isn't supernatural because it is ultimately explainable, it's just that it's so radically outside of the familiar territory of existing scientific theory that it may as well be magic.
One of my favorite video games of recent years, Control, looks into this distinction in a really interesting way, and we can follow a somewhat hidden side-plot in which a controversial memo, the Tennyson Report, argues that the paranatural (the game's term used in place of paranormal, but meaning roughly the same thing) is just the supernatural in rationalist drag - that the game's eponymous bureau is stubbornly clinging to a rational, scientific way of thinking when what they are dealing with is just full-on magic.
Aliens come in various varieties in fiction. I think we can roughly break them into three categories:
1. Star Trek Aliens:
Star Trek Aliens are basically just other people. Vulcans, Klingons, Bajorans, etc., are just basically the equivalent of other human nations and ethnicities. Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry wanted to tell allegorical stories about cultures and natures interacting, and so decided to make his aliens relatable by making them only superficially alien - most indicated only by some makeup and sometimes prosthetics, and even imagining a world where it was perfectly possible for them to interbreed, with the iconic Spock actually being half-human (though like Elrond in Lord of the Rings, who is half-human and half-elf but comes off as far more elvish, he clearly identifies far more with the Vulcan side of his ancestry).
In D&D, we already kind of get something like this with the many humanoid species (indeed, many Star Trek species can be put into a practical one-to-one comparison with classic fantasy races, with Vulcans as elves, Klingons (Next Gen and onward) as orcs, even Romulans as dark elves. I might be getting a bit of chicken-and-egg confusion here, but Ferengi even work quite well as analogues for Warcraft-style Goblins, though the Star Trek ones came first).
In a Spelljammer game, where you're literally traveling from planet to planet, the "aliens" are just the people on other worlds. The funny thing is that if you're using the established fantasy world of D&D, because each tends to have a pretty diverse mix of species and cultures, you're actually likely to find "aliens" far more like you than some beings from your own planet. If you're a human from Waterdeep, you probably have way more in common with a human from the city of Greyhawk than you do with a drow in Menzoberranzan.
2. Lovecraftian Aliens:
Admittedly a lot of Lovecraft's creatures weren't even from another planet - just far-distant eras of Earth (the then-fairly-recent theories that our species has only existed for a tiny sliver of our planet's history I imagine was part of what inspired Lovecraft's existential terror at the vastness of the cosmos). But both the vastness of time and the vastness of space allow for beings that are basically the opposite of Star Trek aliens - they're utterly inhuman, and so unlike any other creatures we're familiar with that they can be terrifying.
The aberration creature type is largely there to represent these kinds of beings - Gibbering Mouthers are more or less Lovecraft's Shoggoths (though a bit lower CR than I'd think for such beings - the Kobold Press books have a CR 17 or something Shoggoth that seems far more in keeping with the creatures from At the Mountains of Madness). Beholders and Mind Flayers are D&D's most iconic aberrations, though I think both are arguably a little too human-like to fit with the Lovecraftian notion (depending on how the DM plays them).
3. Classic Aliens:
Here, we find what I think of as something of an intersection between the aforementioned. Classic aliens, as I see it, are the kind from UFO fiction (and folklore). There's a sense that they represent a culture, that they are somewhat humanoid in form, but they are just far more technologically advanced than we are. These are the Little Green Men, or the Greys, who will conduct mysterious experiments on abducted humans. These are the creatures going around in flying saucers. They are "people" in some sense, but their motivations, methods, and mindsets are never understood.
While they can certainly take on different forms in different pieces of media, there's a kind of form that they always seem to kind of gravitate back toward: big, tall heads with large, all-black eyes, tiny slits of nostrils with a flat nose, and either a small mouth or no mouth at all. Different properties will play with this form in various ways to give it something of their own spin - Starcraft's Protoss, I believe, are meant to evoke this kind of alien. Indeed, some earlier folklore involving fairies and demons have described similar forms, and UFO believers will point to this as evidence of a long history of alien visitation, though a counterargument is that this form basically describes the basic pattern hard-wired into the human brain of what a face is roughly shaped like, and that we might thus be primed to see these, either when not getting a good look at a real person's face, or that we might see a face when we see something coincidentally making this general shape.
There are a number of candidates here among D&D creatures. Indeed, I would not be surprised if different creators at different periods of D&D's history wanted to make the "classic aliens" and as such, we have a few options. So, let's look at them.
Gith:
The Gith were considered humanoid up until the Spelljammer and Planescape books re-categorized the stat blocks at least (for Githyanki and Githzerai, respectively) as aberrations. But of all aberrations, the Gith are very clearly the most people-like (we even have a Githyanki party member in Baldur's Gate 3).
And yet, they do check a lot of the boxes: Green (or Yellow, but both in a kind of green-yellow range) skin, very flat noses with somewhat slitted nostrils, slightly pronounced foreheads. The Githyanki are infamous as pirate-raiders on the Astral Sea, but the Githzerai might actually fit the UFO-alien tropes even better, as their Adamantine Citadels come to worlds of the prime material plane, landing in remote locations to remain hidden and conduct their business without interference.
Again, while more human-like than other aberrations, their way of life is very different than it is for Primes. The Githyankis' hostility and the Githzerais' secrecy both lend themselves to the "mysterious alien" tropes.
Doppelgangers:
While the playable Changelings align more with fairy-tale tropes, their monster manual counterparts are implied to be far stranger. While they can imitate humanoids, their true form is almost precisely the "Greys" trope. While not generally associated with extra-planetary travel, these creatures would fit perfectly within the paranoid alien invasion tropes, like They Live or the alien bounty hunters from The X-Files.
They're monstrosities, but that's such a catch-all creature type that I think it works totally fine. I honestly think it would be cool to get a larger variety of these doppelgangers to make them a true "monster tribe," for a campaign with a lot of paranoia.
Mind Flayers:
The truth is that the Mind Flayers, while clearly inspired by Cthulhu from Lovecraft's oeuvre, nearly fit this trope to a T, except for the tentacles. Grey skin? Check. Do they abduct people? Check. Do they do weird experiments on living subjects? Check. Do they have bizarre flying ships that can travel to other worlds? Check.
Honestly, the only problem with using Mind Flayers as your classic aliens is that they're so well-known and iconic as D&D monsters that they come with a lot of D&D-specific lore baggage that will distract from using them as your aliens. You could just use Mind Flayer stats and re-skin them as classic Greys (maybe make their tentacles some kind of psionic pull and their brain-devouring something they do with a tool rather than their mouth). Or just play with players who don't know a ton of D&D lore.
Ultroloths:
This one might seem like it's coming out of left field, but have you seen the art for the Ultroloth? (Even more in the 2014 Monster Manual). I mean, that's our guy, isn't it? Its mind-bending abilities are also very in-keeping with the tropes of the classic aliens.
The challenge, though, is that Ultroloths come from a less sci-fi-compatible creature type - the fiend is more of an inherently fantasy monster. Likewise, Ultroloths will naturally work alongside (or command, more likely) lesser Yugoloths, who don't conform with those classic alien tropes in the same way (hell, the next Yugoloth down in the hierarchy is an Arcanoloth, who usually looks like a big fox-man wizard).
Once again, re-skinning is an option, though at that point, it doesn't really matter what the monster looks like.
These, to me, are the most obvious and straightforward candidates to take on your "spooky saucer-men" aliens. And yes, stealthily or not-so-stealthily, this has been part of my Post-Industrial D&D series - I love the idea of a D&D campaign taking place in the fantasy-world equivalent of the American Southwest (or Pacific Northwest) in the fantasy-world equivalent of the late 1940s-1990s.
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