You’ve only heard of Roswell, New Mexico for one reason. If an alleged UFO hadn’t crashed outside the city and scattered unfamiliar hardware across a cattle ranch back in 1947, Roswell would be no different from any other inconspicuous dairy town dotting the Southwestern plains. But instead, Roswell is on TV, the CW to be exact, in a sci-fi series borrowing the town’s name and scenery for what will soon be a third season. It’s the second time this century we’ve been presented a TV show set in Roswell, both based on a late 90s book series called Roswell High, a teen drama that follows the alien survivors of the 1947 incident as they adjust to an earthly adolescence. These foreign teens are decidedly unhuman, yet they assimilate into our society undetected. The secret to their deception is simple: they look just like us.

The real city of Roswell has profited off our interplanetary fantasies for decades. It is home to the International UFO Museum, a “UFO spacewalk”, and the Crash Down Café. But much like the aliens at Roswell High, the little green creatures scattered throughout town were drawn by human hands and designed to resonate with human minds—a fitting memorial to the events of 1947. It’s true; the reported alien landing and subsequent mania revealed little about the night sky. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t nuggets to be gleaned from the madness.

The Roswell Daily Record’s initial account of the crash revealed something puzzling for aspirant interstellar believers: apparently these highly sophisticated extra-terrestrials had set out for their journey in a rickety flying saucer made of tinfoil, rubber, and thick paper. They presumably travelled this way for several light years before finally barreling into New Mexico’s farmland. Local cattle rancher W. W. “Mac” Brazel found the odd remnants on his property and combed through the wreckage. Brazel reportedly recognized no words on the debris but saw “letters on some of the parts.” He found a paper fin adhered to the tinfoil with glue. There was a balloon involved. And he later shared that the aliens had used “considerable scotch tape and some tape with flowers upon it” to hold together their spacecraft.

You have read this correctly. These aliens traveled through the harrowing void of outer space, voyaging for many light years, in an extravagantly wrapped Christmas present.

As for the aliens themselves, their bodies were recovered by the government and brought in for an autopsy, the presumed protocol in such an episode. Somehow, footage of that autopsy later leaked to the public, and a documentary investigating its legitimacy was aired nationally on Fox three times—on one occasion pulling in as many as 11.7 million viewers. Of course it did! Americans were desperate to know the truth behind this supposed alien invasion.

But did we really think it was real?

The producers of this otherworldly postmortem would later admit it to be inauthentic. Surprise! Ten years removed, their brief bout in the spotlight now firmly behind them, they disclosed that the video was actually a re-creation of highly classified footage they had gotten their hands on years ago, film that had unfortunately decayed before they had a chance share it with the public.

It’s not a difficult con to unpack. As with Mac Brazel’s spaceship, the autopsied alien body was made from the same materials we have here on Earth. Roswell’s famous “alien invasion” was a simply a human invention. Strange but earthly materials turned up on a ranch with some proximity to the Air Force’s most secretive facility, generally known as Area 51. For their part, the military changed their story a few times on the subject. They were probably hiding something; militaries tend to do that. The idea that they were hiding aliens feels like a leap. That doesn’t disprove the fanatical E.T. theories that sprouted in Roswell, but it might make you wonder whether they are worth your time investigating.

In a way, that is sad. Aliens are cool! We want to know what is out there in our universe. We long for the day that our telescopes finally detect a living, breathing organism among the stars. We can’t fault those 11.7 million hopefuls for tuning in to watch a supposed alien autopsy, even if the premise itself required a rather daunting suspension of disbelief. Just ask any Hollywood financier: even our strongest disbelief can be overcome with a high-quality production.

And to that point, how exactly did the alien autopsy convince us to suspend our disbelief? It did the most important thing: it got the aliens exactly right. More specifically, it showed us an autopsy of an alien that looked exactly as we intuitively expected an alien to look. It was a humanoid: eyes, nose, mouth, ears, fingers. Two arms. Two legs. It wasn’t exactly human, of course. It had bulging eyes and a skull that broadened at the temples. But in general, it presented as a bald, rather misshapen human. It looked just as we have always imagined that aliens would look. Like us, with some minor modifications.

But since we have never actually seen an alien, our expectation for how a theoretical cosmic race could look doesn’t really say anything about that race’s potential appearance. Instead, it speaks volumes about us. And our tunnel vision when it comes to extraterrestrials inherently disputes one of the most common theories for what sets humans apart from the natural world: our creativity. You can see why we’d like that theory. Just look at all we can do with these opposable thumbs of ours! Wolves never sharpened rocks to cut and spear prey. Bears don’t survey forest topographies envisioning new interstates. Flounder don’t lay deep sea cables to connect telecommunications between continents.

But in a sense, this brand of “creativity” is mislabeled. The word “creativity” itself stems from the Latin “creo” (to “make”). It used to imply something being created from nothing—a skill reserved for the gods. Over time, we expanded the meaning to include that which is within our capabilities. You and I can take flour and mix it with water but could not otherwise make bread. And if the fusing of existing ingredients is creativity, then what is a wasp building its nest? The difference in our “creative” abilities is a matter of scale, not class. Just like the wasp, our creativity is not unbound.

Rather, our ability to “create” seems wedded to that which we can see and experience. Nowhere is this more evident than in our amalgamated notions of extraterrestrial life. The autopsied alien from Roswell was no greater than the sum of some very terrestrial parts. Make no mistake; that was a sci-fi alien made for Hollywood. But a physicist couldn’t have made it any more realistic. In 2014, Popular Mechanics asked various professors what they thought intelligent alien life could look like. Harry Keller, former professor of chemistry at Northeastern University and now Chief Science Officer at Smart Science Education, described our potential alien body part by body part. Eyes. Nose. Mouth. Legs. Skin Covering. Head. Arms. Fingers. Keller says these are requirements. The only major human feature he reasons it would be possible for a sophisticated alien race to do without is the neck. Everything else simply must exist. And Keller was not alone in blocking his view of the stars with a looking glass. Bernard Bates, physics professor at the University of Puget Sound, said that advanced alien creatures must live on land, since fire is necessary to “kick-start” technology. Just as it did with ours.

Aliens, Keller and Bates tell us, must be humanoids.

Our astrophysical search for life is similarly marred by an obsession with locating a humanoid planet. Look no further than The Astrophysical Journal’s recent publishing, which vaunts the probability of at least 36 intelligent civilizations living in our very own Milky Way. How did the authors, Tom Westby and Christopher Conselice, arrive at such a number without observing a single one of these purportedly intelligent civilizations? They ran a probability calculation. And then they looked for us.

Westby and Conselice based their finding on the assumption that it takes roughly five billion years for intelligent life to form on a given planet. Why? Because that is how it happened on Earth. Similarly, they assume that a technologically advanced society would send radio-like frequencies into outer space, as do we. They looked for stars like our Sun and planets like our Earth that are an Earth-like distance from their Sun-like stars. Just like Keller and Bates, they stared down the great possibilities of the cosmos, and then reached for a mirror instead.

To be fair, Westby and Conselice’s findings are useful and interesting. There is plenty of value in their calculation. But when we read The Astrophysical Journal and study at the universities of Northeastern and Puget Sound, we reinforce the notion that our own personal history is the only possible course life could chart.

And why should that be the case?

Though their shape is intuitive to us, the humanoid alien and the Earth-like planet are not the brainchildren of a particularly creative species. With all that empty space as our canvas, you’d think we could come up with something better. But this is not some excuse to assail our ingenuity. Rather, it is an opportunity to ask important questions about the efficacy of our astronomic pursuits of life. If “us” is what we are looking for, maybe it’s not so surprising that the universe looks empty through our telescopes.

And maybe it’s not empty at all. In fact, a reassessment of what we already know may suggest that there could be entire celestial worlds built from all that we cannot see.

Maybe our biggest human mistake is in trusting what we think we know, and not understanding the scope of our limitations. But we know those limitations exist. We know that humans can see less than 1% of the light spectrum. And anyone can watch little Fido cringe at my dog whistle, even though I can barely hear it. Following our intuition is an important human value. Trust your gut. As advice for your mundane life decisions—whether to eat that sixth slice of pizza, if you should let your daughter date that hairy senior from the lacrosse team—it may be useful. But when it comes to understanding the universe, shouldn’t we spend some time acknowledging how little we can see, and how much that must skew our intuition?

Specifically: if our intuition is based in our genes and experiences, and we know that we experience only a limited portion of the universe, might that intuition actually obstruct our comprehension of complex physical issues concerning reality?

There is an issue in quantum physics that has confounded and divided physicists for nearly a century: how can we establish an agreement between quantum and classical reality? In other words, when we look at what is happening on the subatomic level and try to balance it with what we see in daily life, we cannot establish a coherence. At the core of this is Erwin Schrödinger’s famous “cat”. Schrödinger’s cat is a thought experiment intended to reveal the absurdity of one of the most popular interpretations of quantum mechanics: the Copenhagen interpretation.

Schrödinger set up his thought experiment like this: there is a cat in a box with a small amount of a radioactive substance. If the radioactive substance decays, the cat will die. If the substance does not decay, the cat will live.

Now, whether a radioactive substance decays is governed by the laws of quantum physics. This is the tricky part. Studies of the interactions between subatomic particles are muddled by something called the measurement problem. Erwin Schrödinger’s own equation describing the functioning of a quantum-mechanical system (a landmark for which he won a Nobel Prize) shows that subatomic particles exist in a superposition of multiple different states at once. Yet upon measurement that superposition collapses into a single state. Thus, in Schrödinger’s thought experiment, the radioactive substance remains in a superposition of multiple states until the box is opened (or measured). Before you open the lid, the substance has done two mutually exclusive things simultaneously. It has decayed, and it has not decayed. Therefore, the cat is both alive and dead.

Schrödinger used this thought experiment to illustrate the issue with employing the lessons of quantum mechanics at the macroscopic level. Albert Einstein praised him for the illustration. He agreed: a cat simply cannot be alive and dead simultaneously. That would be at odds with our intuition.

Yet we can watch the measurement problem play out before our very own eyes with a beam of light. A test known as the “dual-slit experiment” allows us to observe how the role of measurement can dictate what occurs. In this experiment, two holes are cut in an opaque plate and a flashlight is shown through them. On the other side of the plate is a film which receives the light after it has passed through the holes in the plate. If photon detectors are placed at the film, the experiment’s result is unsurprising: every individual photon passes through either one slit or the other. The light would appear on the film as two distinct dots. This is because the photons are acting as particles.

But when the detector is removed, the result changes. No longer would there be two distinct dots on the screen. In their place is a pattern of stripes, alternating light and dark. This pattern can only occur if each individual photon is acting as a wave and entering through both slits at once. In summary, the mere existence of the photon detectors determines how each photon acts: will I act as a particle and choose one slit, or will I act as a wave and travel through both slits at the same time?

This same experiment can translate to a more macro level, with even more confounding results. As reported by Discover Magazine in 2002, the late John Wheeler, the astronomer who coined the term “black hole”, took the dual-slit experiment out to the universe. In his test, there is a young galaxy in a distant corner of the universe. That is our flashlight. There are two other galaxies in between that distant galaxy and us on Earth. Those two galaxies have the power to bend the light coming from our “flashlight” galaxy; they are our “slits”. Just as in the dual-slit experiment, each photon must decide whether to go past either one galaxy or the other, or both simultaneously.

Back on Earth, an astronomer could look at a beam of light coming from that distant galaxy with a telescope. This is our photon detector. The astronomer could point the telescope at either galaxy and see just the photons that were bent by that particular galaxy. The astronomer would see a point of light—a star—just like in the dual-slit experiment, because each photon would have chosen to travel through one galaxy or the other.

But then the astronomer could throw his telescope into the ocean, and instead set up a series of mirrors that redirected all the light that had come through either of the two galaxies towards a single piece of photographic film. The light and dark bands would appear on the film once again, meaning that each photon had now traveled through both galaxies. Even though just a few moments before, when the astronomer had been using the telescope, each photon went through only one.

So the instrument of measurement changed what each light particle actually did? This is confounding, especially considering that each photon could already have traveled for billions of years, having already chosen one path or the other, before the instrument of measurement had even been chosen. The astronomer throwing his telescope in the sea and gathering a series of mirrors altered something that could have already occurred way back when planet Earth was just a dingy hotel for single-celled organisms.

Or maybe not.

What if we instead considered whether our tools of measurement—our eyes, ears, noses, mouths, fingers—can only measure for certain things? Maybe destroying telescopes and arranging mirrors doesn’t change what a light particle did in the past. Maybe it just changes what we saw.

What if the radioactive substance truly both decays and doesn’t decay? What if we open the box and see a living cat, or a dead cat, not because a quantum superposition collapsed into a single state, but because that single state is all that our brains can perceive?

If a logically supported thought experiment defies reality, maybe it is reality that is defective.

We are forever limited by what our brains can comprehend, just as we are limited by our intuition. We can’t change how we evolved. But recognizing our limitations doesn’t have to be disheartening. It can open new possibilities. We already acknowledge the existence of things we cannot grasp. 85% of the matter in the universe is dark matter. It’s not made from the flour and water we have here on Earth. We can’t see it. But it’s there. And that’s just what we know that we can’t see.

Why waste our time looking for a humanoid alien in Roswell, New Mexico? Why search for other planets that look like ours? Looking for Earthly life elsewhere will tell us to look at planets a certain distance from their star. It tells us to search for celestial bodies of water. But it may never help us understand what kinds of life could exist in outer space. If the universe is really as vast as we think, maybe it’s teeming with life that we cannot detect. Or maybe not. Maybe an absence of life doesn’t imply emptiness. Is a river alive? A cloud? Magma? Does a planet need bacteria to justify its existence?

If we one day have a breakthrough regarding dark matter, should we hope to learn that inside it is indeed the place where all the purple aliens live? And if they aren’t there, should we bemoan the emptiness of our greater universal habitat?

We evolved on the planet Earth. Space is too cold for us. In no part of our evolutionary past was there an incentive to be able to experience extra-terrestrial matter. Our brain learned how to evade Earth-bound predators. It can help us understand why a tree reaches high in a quest for sunlight. But the universe is not Mother Earth. We didn’t cut our teeth out there. We never needed to understand the stars. We had no use for the microscopic quantum level. We can’t even see either without intense magnification.

How many more evolutionary mutations must we go through before we have a brain that can grasp these things?

If you allow it, rejecting your intuition can be freeing and exciting. It permits our cold dark universe to become vibrant in new ways. Think of the many hues of alien that could be revealed by the 99% of light we don’t see. Or maybe they don’t even exist in forms of mass. Maybe there are aliens that pass right through our planet without even feeling it.

What would it take for me to believe in those creatures?

Schrödinger’s cat shows us that even if the math suggests otherwise, we still defer to our gut. Maybe that’s fine. Math can be wrong. It’s no better than the people doing it. But our gut can be wrong too. And as long as we bet on something as limited as ourselves, we will always have gaps in our answers to big questions.

Which brings us to our final query. What about our creation? What about the idea of God? God is not an earthly creature. If God exists, would our senses have evolved in a manner that allow us to test for his presence? Or is God truly a being that man cannot comprehend?

French philosopher René Descartes’ Trademark Argument was his attempt to use such questions to prove the existence of God. Descartes’ idea was that “the mere fact that I exist and have within me an idea of a most perfect being, that is, God, provides a very clear proof that God indeed exists.” Further, “it is no surprise that God, in creating me, should have placed this idea in me to be, as it were, the mark of the craftsman stamped on his work.”

Descartes believes that he cannot imagine something that is not from his experience. And a perfect God is not something he has experienced; yet Descartes can imagine him. Thus, that perfect God must have “stamped” the idea of a flawless creator inside of Descartes. Descartes’ bet was that his idea of God was not from his earthly experience.

But can Descartes describe who that God really is, in detail? For the mere idea of a perfect God to prove itself through our ability to behold that perfection, we would need an extremely vivid picture of how that perfection looks firmly stamped inside our minds. And such a stamp could not have any features that resemble anything we’ve experienced on Planet Earth. Even if we lack one ounce of “creo” creativity, our idea of a unicorn would not prove the creature’s existence unless we’d never seen a horse and a horn.

Even a wasp can gather wood and make a nest.

But Descartes admits that the details of his God’s perfection elude him. Instead, Descartes’ God is the “possessor of all the perfections which I cannot grasp.” So, is the image stamped in there or not?

It is possible that the God that Descartes envisions, and that you or I may envision, is simply an amalgamation of earthly things. That God would be just another humanoid alien. That God may have created us (as did our parents), be beyond comprehension (as is the universe), and gift us life (as did the Sun). Or maybe Descartes’ God looked different than that. Everyone is entitled to a different image. Probably none are truly creative. And while none of this disproves the existence of God, it may clarify our image of him as a human guess at the qualities of a potentially perfect creator.

And if that image were made from the flour and water on this planet, it seems unlikely to rise into something that is transcendent from nature.

Defying your intuition can be disturbing. I don’t want to believe that my cat is both dead and alive. I see precious little Bootsie curled up in a sunny spot on the couch and delight in her aliveness. I know that she is thriving. Why would I want to accept the possibility of an unseen superposition of states in which Bootsie may be decomposing? I want to believe in one very factual reality, one that matches precisely with what I see. I want to bet on my brain. I want to bet that my eyes perceive my furry friend as she truly is. I want to listen when my intuition tells me that she is happy and alive, and that this means she cannot be dead inside Erwin Schrödinger’s box.

So reject everything you’ve read in this piece. Seriously. Close the tab and move on. If your intuition tells you that these words are bogus, useless, or disturbing—forget you ever read them. Our instincts may not be useful or informative when trying to ascertain the qualities of the universe, or quantum physics, or aliens, or God. But those things are not from our world.

What our intuition has evolved to understand are the things that exist within the human-comprehended domain. And you and I are among those things. My cat is among those things. Our entire lives are lived among those things. So let your intuition guide you as it always has, because it can tell us which reality we would like to exist within.

And if we deem the limits of our intuition to be a sign of ignorance, maybe we should be grateful.

Ignorance is bliss, they say. And that is as intuitive as it gets.