How long has Ridley held this notion of who the Space Jockey really is?

[The1PerfectOrganism]

Good article.

[Immortan Jonesy]

Well according to some things he said it would be at least 20-30 years after ALIEN. I suspect seeing ID4 had something to do with it; Ridley came up with the suit idea. Spaihts concluded that it would be an ancient human under the suit. Clickity for some quotes

First Godzilla...and now the Space Jockey? 

[The Old One]

More like... Jon Spaihts!!!

[Immortan Jonesy]

Yes, you're right. So...

[Valaquen]

"The giant [in Alien] was conceived as a skeleton.I kept staring at the skeleton ... then I thought, twenty, thirty, actually twenty six years on, 'what if this is not a skeleton, but we only see it as a skeleton because of our own indoctrination?' and I thought, 'what happens if it's another form of protection, or a suit? If it's a suit, then what's inside the suit?'"

https://alienseries.wordpress.com/2013/07/21/gods-monsters/

[SM]

^Took a couple of pages, but we got there. 

[Valaquen]

^Took a couple of pages, but we got there. 

I'm here to serve

IIRC Ridley first spoke about this and caused a panic in the fan base was at Geoff Boucher's Hero Complex Film Fest in 2010, where he said: "I think beneath that carcass... it's not a carcass, it's a suit. Inside the suit is a being." It was reported by the likes of Ain't It Cool News.

[Perfect-Organism]

Well there we go.  So its not the original plan after all.  I was kind of hoping that was the vision all along, but its just another idea tacked on.

[Kimarhi]

I giant bipedal skeleton elephant is such a better idea than a giant albino white man.

[Local Trouble]

I wouldn't even mind if the Space Jockeys were distantly related to humanity by seeding our planet with the building blocks of life derived from their own.  Humanity would simply be the result of natural evolution on Earth whether we ended up looking like them or not.

[Perfect-Organism]

I wouldn't even mind if the Space Jockeys were distantly related to humanity by seeding our planet with the building blocks of life derived from their own.  Humanity would simply be the result of natural evolution on Earth whether we ended up looking like them or not.

Well, we are related to elephants after all so...

I giant bipedal skeleton elephant is such a better idea than a giant albino white man.

There is a rational explanation for all this you know...

Here is how they could explain it.  The Space Jockeys were an actual race and they had the Juggernaut ships.  So they created the Engineers who in turn wiped them out.  But the juggernaut ships were designed to fit a space jockey morphologically.  As you can imagine, it is silly for the space suits to be the way they are.  But the space suits were made in the shape of the space jockeys to fit into the drivers' seat of the juggernauts.

The space jockeys were created by ancient robots I say.  Who were created by something else as well...

[Darwinsgirl]

In one of the early ALIEN issues of "Famous Monsters of Filmland". Forrest Ackerman thought the elephant like ALIEN was so it could house a large brain. IIRC

[Voodoo Magic]

I really do wish we can go back and leave the Space Jockey a mystery.

[Immortan Jonesy]

You can have both; a prequel and the mystery almost intact. I mean, a prequel that establishes new characters and creatures, but doesn't reveal too much about the most sacred mysteries. There was never a need to reveal in detail what a Space Jockey is. You can just have them doing things without revealing too much about them, like the black monoliths in "2001: A Space Odyssey".

In one of the early ALIEN issues of "Famous Monsters of Filmland". Forrest Ackerman thought the elephant like ALIEN was so it could house a large brain. IIRC

That sounds genuinely interesting.

I giant bipedal skeleton elephant is such a better idea than a giant albino white man.

I don't know, I think I'd prefer something like the liquid metal guy from Terminator. Maybe I'm going too far with Giger's surrealism and  biomechanoids (what works in a painting, it might not work in a movie). But in all honesty, I never saw the Space Jockey as a bipedal skeleton elephant. I always thought that the thing didn't have legs or that it was a shapeshifting being. In fact, I liked a fake Prometheus premise where the giant stone head was a bio-brain (and kinda the real Space Jockey) who can control the whole installation and the Juggernaut as well. The pilot was more like an avatars to so speak. But ultimately much like Zardoz taking itself too seriously

[Valaquen]

I don't know, I think I'd prefer something like the liquid metal guy from Terminator. Maybe I'm going too far with Giger's surrealism and  biomechanoids (what works in a painting, it might not work in a movie). But in all honesty, I never saw the Space Jockey as a bipedal skeleton elephant. I always thought that the thing didn't have legs or that it was a shapeshifting being.

Giger's own conception was that the Jockey was probably 'grown' to pilot the ship and nothing else. The creature had no other function (nor legs, because it never needed them). It's not analogous to human civilisation like the Engineers are. It was something we couldn't get our heads around. There were probably biomechanic platoons grown simply to fight, biomechanic navigators, pilots, god knows what. Maybe the ship had its own brain. Maybe in 'life' the derelict looked alabaster and translucent like some of Giger's other monsters and landscapes, instead of a dark metallic construct. Maybe the ship was an organism unto itself. Maybe instead of wiring and computer chips it had its own nervous system. There were a lot of cool ideas and themes in Giger's art about transcending biological limitations. His biomechanoids were sometimes warped and twisted in appearance but they had adapted to their environment and survived. Back in the 50's and 60's when Giger was young, there was a lot of fears about radiation and nuclear war. The biomechanoids were in part a response to all that.

I just find all of that far more interesting.