What is an Alien?

A main theme that I found really interesting between The Matrix, Star Trek and Farscape was that "aliens" were of human form and characteristics and that reality is of perception.

I am not much for science fiction but I did sometimes watch the original Star Trek as a child and what made it interesting to me was that here were these aliens on a spaceship from distant planets and galaxies and many of them were very much what would be categorized as normal human beings. Not only that but every planet and galaxy they went to had there own idea of normal and what was real. There would be planets were giant gorillas like in the planet of the apes were of the dominant species talking and walking and working just like you and me; other times large, mis-shapen creatures in more futuristic and advanced civilizations than earth. It did not matter what the physical characteristics of the species were, everyone was considered normal. On the planet they stopped on there was nothing there but a door; once they walked through the door there was a whole other world on the other side. Though it was foreign to them it was very real to the people in that dimension who had no idea that they were just props created by aliens who had captured a crew from Nasa and had created this idea of human reality from a book to help ease the crew from being homesick.

In Farscape here was this "human" who got lost in space and befriends these "aliens' who are aiding him in finding his way back home to earth. In this episode he thinks that he has found his way back to earth. He finds his way to Australia where he meets up with father and colleagues and his is so happy to be back to what he knows as normal. Everything is going alright until his alien friends show up to make sure he is okay, once they show up his reality starts to slip away and he has to face the truth.

Perception played a big part in The Matrix, Neo thought that he was living in the real world come to find out that he was living in a computer generated reality designed by robots to keep humans dumb and uninformed as they used their bodies for battery.

When we think of the word alien were are supposed to be scared. The images that are portrayed are of foreign, grotesque, sluggish, scaly, power hungry, destructive and monstrous beings not of this world and therefore a threat that must be eliminated but in these three programs it showed humans can also be alien and reality is in the eye of the beholder.