Aside: Did you manually code those links, or is the board’s automatic URL parser now correctly dealing with parentheses?
Manually. I fix 'em on preview. A minor annoyance.
I’ve skimmed this thread off and on, and I don’t consider myself more than a casual fan of the franchise. When they spoke of “bug hunts” I never assumed such hunts ever found anything. I took it to mean that the parent company was very interested in finding alien life but that it had not been found so far. Bug hunts had been trying to find alien life but had so far, been dead ends. Is that contradicted in the movies?
I have the box set but not the time to go through it again at the moment. 
Don’t they also say that sometimes they get religious cults springing up in the colonies? The marines are probably most challenged by localized rebellions with dug in civilians with improvised weapons.
No to both questions, in the movies at least, as best as I can recall.
Upthread, Gerald II points out that there’s nose art on the drop ship with the title “Bugstomper” and the slogan “we endanger species”. It’s possible to interpret that otherwise, but I think it pretty clearly points to “there are other aliens, just nothing like this”.
This purports to be a screenshot of it. (The url mentions Alien Covenant but the reference is from a thread discussing the “Bug Hunt” line from Aliens)
All they need to know is one thing… where they are.
I realized another thing that strongly suggests that the titular Aliens are not the only extraterrestrial creatures.
In the boardroom when she’s being castigated by the company flunkies.
If you lived in a universe where there were no aliens, you wouldn’t ask your co-flunky whether there were aliens like the one described on that planet. Because there aren’t aliens anywhere!
If you lived in a universe where there were no aliens, you wouldn’t respond about there being no indigenous life on another planet. That goes without saying! There’s no indigenous life anywhere but Earth!
If you lived in a universe where there were no aliens, you wouldn’t have to quote Ripley’s description of the alien in mentioning that no one had seen anything like that on 300 worlds… and so on.
Not “no other aliens”, but no other intelligent aliens. I would speculate that there are plenty of bugs to stomp, but they are of the sophistication of lions, or velociraptors. Something any squad of marines could easily deal with.
Nothing as “alien” (heh heh) as the titular xenomorphs, with acid for blood and the apparent ability to synthesize biomass out of the aether, considering how fast they grow. Or the observed at least semi-intelligence that allows them to cut the power (“How can they cut the power? They’re ANIMALS!”), and to realize they can’t get past the robosentry guns, so they stop trying before the guns’ ammo runs out.
Agreed. I was mostly responding to River Hippie’s question about whether W-Y had ever found any alien life. And it seems clear that they had, but also that it was nothing we couldn’t deal with.
In the first movie, they find that it has ransacked the food storage compartment. In the second, there’s obviously plenty of biomass at the colony. So they grow very fast, but do have to eat. In the later movies, they did dumb things around this, but I’m ignoring them because they’re not very good in many ways.
The alien dipping into the crews’ pantry was in the novelization I think but not the movie itself.
Well, the xenomorphs are about as intelligent as velociraptor spielbergis - working in packs, coordination, opening doors, some basic Unix skills…
My impression from the films is that there are other forms of extraterrestrial life. Just nothing as dangerous as the xenomorphs. The Nostromo had “protocols” in place for such encounters (even if they were ignored). The discovery of the space jockey ship full of eggs was more “this is interesting”, not “holy shit, look at this discovery, unprecedented in the history of man”. And there is some mention of “Arcturans” which are apparently humanoid and androgynous enough that it doesn’t really matter which gender you have sex with.
Begging my original question though. What sort of creature would one encounter on a “bug hunt” that is not as unprecedentedly dangerous as a hive of xenomorphs, yet considered so dangerous as to require a rapid deployment force of interstellar Marines to deal with?
It strikes me whatever terrorist, space communist, or other bad guy Colonial Marines usually fight all they have to his hide out next to a nuclear reactor. As apparently standard operating procedure is to send the marines without any of their weapons, in case they blow up the reactor, which will end as well with human enemies as it did with aliens.
I dunno, the choices are stand up fight or a bug hunt, that leaves a lot of latitude.
The corporation (or at least Burke) obviously didn’t expect any trouble whatsoever from the “xenomorph” or from the colonists, considering they did not even bother to send more than one squad of marines. “It was a bad call…”
They would have sent a lot more than that if they had to secure the reactor and facilities against human terrorists, for instance.
It was a small group of Marines and my guess is that, once the colonists were reported as offline, the government sends them as a standard procedure to check on things, assist in repairs and perhaps chase off any space tigers. Having a whole colony actually disappear due to xenomorph activity is probably almost unheard of.
Maybe. The total population of that place was 150, including children. How many terrorists are you really going to have? Enough to take down 20 hardened* marines?
*not really.
Just learned of this cut scene from Aliens, in which Burke’s fate is revealed: Burke's Fate in the Alien Hive - Explained - YouTube
Keeping in mind that all the inhabitants of Hadley’s Hope were presumably employees or subcontractors of Wayland-Yutani. At worst, maybe they were expecting to put down a labor strike.
One thing that isn’t clear, how accessible is LV-426 in the Aliens universe? They mention that rescue is 17 days away, so space travel isn’t fast. But outside of major corporations like W-Y, governments and military, and private salvage teams that picked up Ripley, how common is interstellar travel? Would it be likely that terrorists, pirates smugglers, or other third parties show up on LV-426 in their own ship to cause trouble? The mercenaries in Alien Resurrection had their own ship (the Betty), but that was 200 years later.
Employees or subcontractors, and their dependents.
We don’t really know just how common interstellar travel is at the time of Aliens, but it doesn’t seem particularly rare or exotic. I see no reason why folks other than W-Y personnel and Colonial Marines might not show up at Hadley’s Hope.