To start, I come at this with a slightly different perspective. I’m somewhat disillusioned with the emerging two main schools of thought on the topic of NHI you see from our vaunted so called “insiders”.
The aforementioned schools being your typical “new age” idea of peaceful, ascendant guardian beings, watching us, helping us reach a higher form of existence etc.
The other school being that the NHI are controlling masters of unparalleled advancement that are farming us, harvesting us and too horrific to be disclosed.
The major issue I take with both of these is that they’re both pseudo-religious and not grounded in any of our observable social or biological sciences.
Let’s take what we know about the most commonly reported NHI bio forms and apply known methods to speculate reasonably.
A diminutive (by our standards) being with a bipedal humanoid form, large cranium and well developed eyes.
Applying known evolutionary biology, the only comparable forms are various types of Homo sapiens. One such example is the now extinct Homo sapiens sulutreans.
These were a humanoid that co-evolved with us from a common ancestor. Their extinction was likely the result of cataclysmic shifts in temperature and climate as opposed to being outcompeted.
They were small, but agile people with developed eyesight, speculated to have good low light vision and also adopted tool use.
Were things to have gone differently, it’s not hard to imagine they could have taken the place in which we now reside.
With that said, it’s not hard to imagine a diminutive but intelligent organism taking the top of the food chain on a similar if alien world. Forward facing eyes, bipedal stature and social cohesion is a winning strategy.
The physical nature of the grey tells you a few concrete things about them. In their archaic past, it’s most likely they were communal, used tools and likely hunted. (Well developed forward facing eyes is a trait of obligate predators)
The thing about hunting is that it can tell you a great deal about goals, desires and ways of thinking. We are the way we are because once we were social hunters. These things live deep in the genealogy of an organism and don’t just disappear, even after millions of years.
From this, you can extrapolate that an intelligent organism with this body plan, regardless of intellect, philosophy or social outlook views the universe in a fundamental way.
That fundamental outlook is the subconscious understanding of competition, predator, prey and your place in the food chain.
Obviously, a great deal follows those things but in that fundamental baseline there is a commonality, a basis for motivation and understanding. Something thoroughly un-alien. A shared experience, through similar evolutionary trials.
Placing the NHI in this context, you can see that they would not be bewildering gods, but rather something similar to ourselves, albeit with technology we do not understand.
With that said, technology does not posses an inherent progressive path as some can sometimes be tricked into believing. You could, for example, create the fusion reactor before the computer, if your brain was better suited to solving complex equations.
To assume that they are masters of all, is presumptive in the extreme. We know nothing of what elements they had access to, the progression of their tools. You might very well find that they discovered a means of interstellar travel before they discovered barreling in rifles, a discovery we made by accident.
My point is this. Don’t take anything for granted, don’t assume nor project a conclusion of incomprehensible superiority onto a life form that may very well be similar to us. Accident prone, curious, irrational, violent, compassionate and all the rest.
From the thousands of collected accounts, they appear to learn the same way we do. They watch, they sample, they test and they take.
Why would they do these things? Because it’s exactly the thing a social, bipedal being with a big brain and predatory past would do. It’s what we would do in (and do) in their position.
A rare bird that is captured, tagged and tested has experienced the same thing as a human abductee, only we were the perpetrators.
Sometimes we save animals, sometimes we kill them. But we have a rationale.
Look at their caution, their skittishness. Wouldn’t you expect such things from a diminutive organism that much like us, was not always top of the food chain?
Consider a human from that vantage point. An organism much like yourself, bipedal, tool using, social. Only larger, stronger, and clearly prone to violence.
I think there’s only three things you can say with any certainty in regards to the NHI we’ve all come to know and find fascinating.
They’re curios, cautious and more like us than many are willing to concede.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading! Tell me what you think down below.
submitted by /u/Spiritual-Driver-112
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