What 👽 means
A visitor from space, or shorthand for “strange.” In UFO and sci-fi chat the grey alien stays literal: sightings, night-sky photos, Area 51 jokes. Fictional space invaders are far older than emoji: H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, about Martians attacking England, came out as a book in 1898. The 1961 story of Betty and Barney Hill, an American couple who said they were abducted, became a template for later abduction tales.
What does it mean when someone sends you 👽?
Alone, it's a raised eyebrow: “that's out there.” Under a wild story or screenshot it teases without stinging. Add 🛸 and it turns into literal sky-watch talk. The sharper edge: in US law “alien” means any non-citizen, and by 2018 some people in immigration debates aimed the emoji at undocumented immigrants as an insult, while some immigrants adopted it for themselves. Let people choose to be the alien; don't assign it.
Playful for weirdness and sci-fi; loaded when used to label a person as foreign.
Never use it to label an immigrant; it has served as a slur.
What it means when someone sends it to you
4 readingsDon't confuse it with
1Combination ideas
2Worth knowing
- 👽 is a single code point, so it survives copying through almost anything — old databases, SMS gateways, printer drivers.
Questions people ask
2Is the alien emoji rude?
Usually not. Among friends it's light teasing about weirdness. It turns rude when used to call an immigrant an “alien,” and it reads dismissive as a reaction to serious bad news.
Why is there an alien in a box on my iPhone?
It was a placeholder. On iOS 8.2, an iPhone that couldn't display a newer emoji showed a small alien in a box instead; it wasn't a different alien design.
How to type 👽
:alien:the common shortcode; support varies by platform.👽Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.