One of the biggest mysteries and question in today’s world is not whether anyone is out there, but rather, “who is out there”? The reason being that with so many Earth-like planets being discovered, the prospect or possibility of life in worlds or planets besides Earth has already been accepted by the best researchers and scientists of the world.

But the question is what would a life form from another planet look like? The simple answer is that it would be a species which is adapted to the environment of its own world, just like we are to ours. But here too there are a lot of interesting aspects to life. There are places here on Earth deep under the oceans where there is no sunlight. Yet there is life. There are extremely hot boiling geysers spurting out of the earth with life in the bubbling fluid.

In Russia, microbial life has been found under miles of thick ice. There are tiny living organisms inside the layers of rocks found deep in Earth where there is neither sunlight nor water.

So how does one define or describe life on another planet? Yes water is the most important ingredient for life as we know it, but now astrobiologists are of the opinion that it is possible that life on some other planet might also be silicon based. So here is the big question; what does ET, the Extra-Terrestrial really look like? There are hundreds of claims of people having seen aliens or having been ‘abducted’ or let’s say kidnapped by aliens and remember undergoing some sort of experiments by a species other than human.

Many of them have been proved to be hoaxes, hallucinations or the result of a disturbed mind. But, yes there is a ‘but’ here, there are still many unsolved cases that remain a mystery. Among the ones that even sceptics are not able to solve or give an explanation to, are people examined by qualified and respected professional psychoanalysts and doctors who do agree that their patients have had some kind of encounter with an outer world being.

But let’s put that debate aside for the time being. We will only try to see what are the kinds of descriptions and possibilities of what an alien being would look like according to the most accepted claims.

First of all, Hollywood has played a great part in showing certain type of aliens from another planet with their typical physique of thin grey and medium or short beings with large eyes and long limbs. Whether the idea came from the alleged UFO crash at Roswell New Mexico during the 1940s in which alien bodies were said to have been found which fit the description of the so-called Greys, or whether it was just an acceptable specimen to put in movies which would be believable, one does not know. It would be the right image to have us see that though the beings from another world do look kind of weird, they still have two legs, two arms, two eyes and a head on their somewhat odd-looking necks and shoulders.

But would an alien really look like that?

A group of people on a holiday in October of 2002, in Southern Chile, found a tiny creature, which was just 7.2 centimetres long but had comparatively long fingers and a large head. The strange being was reported on the local channel Mega News. Then there was another incident in Chile in which Eduardo Vega and his brother saw a being that was 80 cm tall, had shiny skin, which was red. They claimed that the thing looked like “a child wearing a driver’s suit” in an interview they gave to the local press. The human-looking creature stood still for a few minutes and then sparks came out of its head!

Honestly, quite bizarre to say the least. But to put it in a nutshell, the three most popular alien types are; Greys, which are commonly described as being anywhere from three to five feet tall with dark grey coloured skin. They have large heads and have no hair and have long thin necks. Their eyes are large and black with strangely invisible lids. They are known to feed on fluids of animals and humans.

Then there are the horrible, ghastly and extremely menacing reptilians that have cone shaped heads, scaly skin and a small tail. They are claimed to be very hostile and dangerous to humans.

Then there are the Nordics. These are alleged to be fair, somewhat Irish-looking with blonde hair. They are supposed to be friendly and posses high powers of intelligence. We have left out all the other descriptions that are many. Like some having webbed fingers, being 15 feet tall or just orbs of light, etc.

But here is the downside of all this speculation. Scientists, especially people who look through large telescopes all around the world and radio astronomers, think this is mere speculation. If ET wants to say “Hello” or “Howdy” or any such greeting for that matter, they will use extremely advanced communication technology, not go prancing around Earth in strange crafts to pick a few unsuspecting innocent humans to perform silly experiments.

According to senior astronomer, Seth Shostak of the SETI institute, aliens would have to be extremely advanced than Earthlings to undertake the long hauls of space travel. They have to have advanced from just being biological to being bionic, android or capable of sending very advanced machines to other worlds than their own.

So, what does ET look like, does it have a mask, a metal device, a human-like but a look-of-its-own face, or no face at all?