aliens in suits that look like aliens

 Leads from: 

The Seed of the Space Jockey as a suit 

"Engineer" sized
space jockey suit
See more photos

a.) Once we have seen the film, we understand that Ridley Scott has been telling us that the Space Jockey we had seen in the original Alien film was a suit. There might still be a way to turn the idea around because of the dissimilarities between the space jockey in Alien and the space Jockey suits in Prometheus.

b) However Ridley asked the question and out of that came the answer that it must have been a suit and for Ridley this happened around 1995, or near enough twenty six years after Alien going by Ridley's memory.

c) What ideas were these floating around in Hollywood at the time?  My own explorations about the matter brought me to think about the alien space suits seen in the movie Fire In The Sky back in 1993, but this movie was preceded by the film Communion which featured the idea

engineer sets the controls from his seat

of aliens that were suits containing a different sort of an alien within and then a few years after Fire In The Sky came Independence Day which developed the idea even further of an alien in a space suit that might have been mistaken for an alien life form itself.

1. (37:35) Simon Mayo: Now as we have people spalling back in their minds to this character that you're talking about, this is the, there's a mysterious being this giant creature, I know it became known as the space jockey, but erm, could you, could you just

   

   engineer as his helmet is being put on

   describe him so that people can picture him.
   (37.53) Ridley Scott: "He was perceived, the giant was perceived as skeletal and erm, I kept staring at the skeleton which was kind of a wonderful drawing by H R Giger, and erm, then I thought, twenty, thirty, twenty, actually twenty six years on (1995?), I thought what if this is not a skeleton, but, because we only see it as a skeleton, because of our own, the way we see things in our own indoctrination, and er now I thought, what happens if its another form of protection or a suit? If its a suit then what's inside the suit"( Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo's Film reviews, BBCRadio 5 live, 01 June 2012.)

   

   engineer with head encased in helmet

                                     
2. Often Scott will have a trigger image in mind when he begins prepping a film. With Prometheus  it was the Space Jockey. "The big guy sitting in the seat, " he recalls.
   'Somebody said it's a skeleton and I said it doesn't have to be, it could be a degraded suit. It's only you saying that because you think you're looking at bone structure and a rib cage. Why isn't that a suit? It's been lying there disintegrating for two or three thousands of years in deep cold, that could be a suit. The suit works great as a kind of organic, very sophisticated spacesuit." (Prometheus: the art of the film, p20))                                               

b) Communion (1989)

The subject of extra-terrestrial abduction called Communion which was about the experiences of the writer Whitley Strieber and it displayed the idea that the ETs that he was seeing were somehow unspecifically just outside skins for something else within. In the movie the Grey's face opens up to reveal something reptilian inside.

1. Philippe Mora: There's a fourth alien figure that we reveal in the film. It's a figure that Whitley saw once - a version of the Communion figure that actually showed the face was a kind of mask and there was something underneath, ("Report on Communion" by Ed Conroy, p186)

Scene from "Communion" exploring
 the idea of the alien creature's heads as masks

Image of a Grey's face with a reptile
face within, from Communion

c) Fire In The Sky (1993)

videotape cover for  
Fire In The Sky, (1993)

In 1993 the movie Fire In the Sky was released, the script written by Tracy Tormé who tried to depict as near as possible the events surrounding the Travis Walton alien abduction UFO case and this movie brought up the same idea about what we perceive to be extra terrestrials, that they're suits with something inside them. The space suits in Fire In The Sky might well be considered a nod to Communion and also a development of the idea.

This idea came about because the film was based on the ET abduction experiences of Travis Walton and what he wrote about as his extra terrestrial abduction experience had already been seen on the screen before so they decided to replace it with something else and Tracy Tormé came up with a visceral interpretation of Walton's abduction that in a clever way became an idea about a perception regarding these alien beings, that what we saw as typical greys were space suits and maybe there was something else inside them and here there were some strange almost humanoid aliens.  Perhaps is was a very interesting idea.

Head of an extra-terrestrials space suit that resembles a stereotypical 'Grey' from 
Fire In The Sky. Click here to see more shots

1.   Tracy Tormé: I've heard many abductees say if they could just find the zipper on these little grey guys and pull it down, they could see what's really underneath because there is a sense amongst a lot of them there is something very artificial about them... (Coast To Coast Am, April 9th, 2008)
2. See: Just like "Fire in the Sky" for more photos from the film

d)  Independence Day (1996)

Independence Day poster

In 1996 which is the year that Ridley did claim to have the idea, the movie Independence Day was released which had the idea of extra terrestrials that were slightly Alien inspired which turned out to be organic suits (designed and created by Patrick Tatopoulos who later went onto design the pyramid and its interior and the Predator-Alien chestburster in Alien Vs Predator) with smaller extra-terrestrials slightly resembling the idea of a Grey hidden inside. 

See images of and read more about the development of the "Independence Day" biomechanical suit

alien biomechanical suit