Just you, a bottle of wine

and your partner

drifting through the cosmos in a UFO.

As your caress their green skin,

you know that tonight's the night

you're mating with an alien.

OK, so maybe an intimate alien encounter

wouldn't work out that way.

But if you believe the statistics,

According to these victims,

the experiences were intrusive

and horrifying.

Why would an alien want to mate with a human?

Well, if these aliens wanted

to settle on Earth,

interbreeding could speed up the process.

Yeah, the child would have the best of both worlds.

Combining our DNA could create a hybrid being that could survive

in the hottest climates.

And maybe your kids

would get the intelligence of an alien.

They flew across the Universe in a tin plate,

they have to be a little bright.

But even if your offspring became a genius,

Hybridization occurs when two different species breed.

And it's more common than you might think.

We cross-breed fruits

and animals all the time.

But this isn't like your mom's Labradoodle.

You would be mating with a being from another galaxy,

Well, first, forget the wine and dine scenario from before.

The only way you could mate with E.T.

would be through artificial insemination.

After all, all of our parts may not be compatible.

So whether your seed was placed

in an alien or vice-versa,

medical procedures would be the only way

to bring your child into this world.

Unfortunately, the real threat to this kid's health could lie within you.

Sometimes a mother's blood can produce

antibodies that destroy their baby's blood cells.

In humans, we call this condition rhesus disease.

Introducing a completely different

blood type and DNA into a human mother

could trigger their immune system to reject

this perceived alien intruder.

And if their body kept the baby alive long enough to fully form,

the next challenge would be getting it out.

A childbirth with human babies

can be difficult enough.

A hybrid birth would definitely cause complications.

To keep the baby hybrid

and its mother safe during labor,

doctors would have to perform a caesarian section.

Yeah, those big grey heads aren't getting through a birth canal.

Provided those are some of the physical features your baby would have.

The first generation of hybrids would still

look like their alien side of the family.

But the second generation could look

so close to humans you may not

even tell the difference.

They might be able to blend into a crowd,

although our entire society could change

with aliens walking among us.

And this may not be the first time humans

have mated outside our species in modern history.

Yeah, rumors still float around about

Florida scientists who artificially inseminated a chimpanzee

with human DNA in the 1920s.

While we may never know the truth behind this experiment,

were it true,

this humanzee would have been an ethical nightmare.

Cool name, though.

A human-alien hybrid could hold

the answer to our survival on

a changing Earth or even beyond the stars.

The cultural and physical differences might

be too much to accept at first.

Remember, we all still carry the genes

of Neanderthals in our DNA,

the last traces of this long-extinct species

that lived alongside humans

tens of thousands of years ago.

But hey, we got over that problem.

So what if you mated with a Neanderthal instead?

Well, pop a breath mint and freshen up

because that's a story for another WHAT IF.