They're After Our Precious Bodily Fluids

On a bulletin board recently, someone stated that alien abductions were quite real, and that they were here to harvest our “genetic material,” whatever that means. Here’s my reply:

Well, here we have a civilization far more advanced than we are (able to travel between the stars in a reasonable amount of time,) and you claim they’re here to harvest our genetic material. This requires specially-equipped ships, probably a base in-system somewhere, and hundreds of highly trained individuals willing to treat another sentient species as cattle.

I also note that your alien civilization seems to act exactly as if they were the worst of Humanity.

And yet, we’re perhaps decades (or less) away from being able to efficiently move atoms around with nanotechnology. We will no doubt develop this ability long before we’re able to get to even the nearest star. We’ll be able to create and manipulate molecules (like DNA) on a massive scale.

So this alien race has decided to do it “the hard way?” Rather than just get a couple of samples from us and manipulate to their heart’s content, they feel the need to get millions of samples and to keep getting them over decades.

I would say that your idea is the product of an active imagination, but really, it’s the product of a lack of imagination. You see a phenomenon and you come up with a reason for it that fits your cynical world view. You don’t stop to think that maybe sentient beings from another planet might not act like Wall Street brokers, and that if you’re going to ascribe “magic” levels of science to them, you have to ascribe it to ALL of their sciences, not just spaceship design.

So which is more likely? That many people have alien-like sleep paralysis experiences, a number of hypnotherapists have no idea what they’re doing, and PR firms for certain Hollywood movies promote anything that will raise interest in their client’s product, – or – , that a super-advanced race (in every field but one) is abducting millions of people because they need…? Material?