Of particular interest, many abductees have reported having experiments conducted on them where males have had semen extracted and females have been artificially inseminated or had their ova extracted. In other cases, abductees have reported mating directly with aliens (and having out-of-this-world sex). The aliens typically tell them that they are doing this to create alien/human hybrids because they want their next generation to have the intelligence of their own race and the emotion of ours. But what implications does this have on our knowledge of the genetic structure of these alien rapists?

There are two basic problems with these reports. The first is that for aliens to successfully create alien/human hybrids, it is required that both aliens and humans have the same general molecular biology (DNA structure, etc.). And if they can create hybrids by direct mating, this means that there are no prezygotic or postzygotic reproductive isolation mechanisms between aliens and humans. Therefore, if the abductees' stories are accurate, then aliens and humans must be mechanically compatible as well as having the same DNA structure. This is virtually impossible if aliens and humans have evolved independently of eachother, because it would require virtually the same random chemical reactions and electrical activity to have occurred on the aliens' planet and on Earth over billions of years, to have led to such similar life forms. 

The UFO community has attempted to answer this problem by proposing that the aliens may have intervened in hominid evolution when apes roamed the Earth, and created humans using their knowledge of genetic engineering (explaining the elusive “missing link” of human evolution). But unfortunately this explanation does not hold up to scientific scrutiny and reasoning, because all life on Earth has the same genetic code and general DNA structure, suggesting that it has been evolving from one form to another since it began. If aliens had intervened when apes roamed the Earth, humans would be expected to have a different molecular biology than all other life on Earth, which is not the case. 

The only remaining possibility is that aliens could have introduced life to Earth in the image of their own genetic code; effectively using Earth as one of the biggest biological laboratories imaginable (perhaps in an effort to understand the evolution of life by natural selection beginning from the most primitive alien organisms). This is a captivating idea, and would explain the supposed genetic similarity of aliens to humans, as well as the current interest that aliens seem to have in humans (and cattle of course). However, since evolution is guided by the fitness of individuals with certain random gene mutations and recombinations, such an experiment would still be unlikely to produce humans of such similar physical appearance and sexual compatibility to these hypothetical (and very patient) alien creators.

The second problem with the abductees' reports is that, assuming that the aliens have the same general molecular biology as us; if they also have sufficient technology to traverse the immense interstellar distances between the stars, then it is most probable that their knowledge of molecular biology is well ahead of ours too. In this case, to create an alien/human hybrid would not necessitate abducting a human and extracting sperm or fertilizing a female egg, but would merely require one human cell (containing human DNA), which is easily obtainable without sexual violation given that we shed cells by the thousands every day. Creating a hybrid by direct mating would certainly not be necessary. Therefore, the aliens seem to be surprisingly genetically backward if the reports of abductees are accurate.

Perhaps I should coin this peculiarity as the “Marshall hybrid paradox” – if aliens do not have the same genetic structure as us, then they will be unable to create alien/human hybrids; and if aliens do have the same genetic structure as us, then they should be able to create these hybrids without abducting and sexually violating innocent human beings. So why are humans really being abducted? The answer in Craccum next semester …