Ridley is pretty funny. He's so stuck in his ways, constant poker face. But when he's pressed on an issue he'll spill like in this interview:
EGE: So you are linking this directly with the Alien films?
RS: Not at all.
EGE: Not at all?
RS: No.
EGE: No?
RS: I mean, you could actually say, and there's a quote I did, a pretty good quote: By the end of the third act you start to realize there's a DNA of the very first alien, but none of the subsequent aliens. To tell you what that is is a pity, and I'm not going to tell you, because it's actually pretty good, pretty organic to the process and to the original. But we go back, we don't go forward.
EGE: The official synopsis from Fox says that this revolves around the "Alien Gods", the "Space Jockey" from the first film.
RS: Yeah, so there you have that. I was always amazed that, I mean, I've only done two science-fictions, but I was always amazed that no one asked who the hell the Space Jockey was. He wasn't even called the Space Jockey. During the film they started to call it the Space Jockey. I don't know who started that one off. I always thought it was amazing that no one ever asked who he was, and why was he there? What was all that about? I sat thinking about this for a while and thought, well, there's a story! And the other four [films] missed it! So, here it is.