Zetans: the Aliens of Fallout, from Mothership Zeta to the TV Show

The Zetans are the aliens of the Fallout series: small, big-headed grey beings who have been abducting people and animals from Earth for centuries. They are the villains of Fallout 3's Mothership Zeta add-on, which has the Lone Wanderer beamed aboard their ship. They also turn up in Fallout 4 and in Fallout 76's Invaders from Beyond event, and an alien body is found at Area 51 in season 2 of the TV show. (Fallout 3: Mothership Zeta; Fallout 4; Fallout 76: Invaders from Beyond; Fallout, "The Golden Rule")

Who are the Zetans?#

They are an alien species with a long interest in Earth. They abduct humans and animals, keep them frozen, experiment on them and record them, and they have been doing it for a very long time: the prisoners aboard their mothership in Fallout 3 include a Japanese samurai and a cowboy from the American West. (Fallout 3: Mothership Zeta)

The name comes from the people who believed in them. A Fallout 4 loading screen says: "If the conspiracy theorists are to be believed, Earth has been visited by an alien species on several occasions." It calls them "Zetans" and says they carry energy weapons that can disintegrate their enemies. (Fallout 4)

What they want is never explained. They don't talk to their captives in any human language, only in shrieks, and they seem more interested in collecting and studying than in conquest. (Fallout 3: Mothership Zeta)

Mothership Zeta: the Zetans in Fallout 3#

Mothership Zeta, the last Fallout 3 add-on, is the Zetans' main story. The Lone Wanderer picks up an unintelligible radio signal and follows it to a crashed alien recon craft in the Capital Wasteland. On approach they are beamed up into the mothership, called Zeta, and wake up after an experiment in a cell. (Fallout 3: Mothership Zeta)

Their cellmate is Somah, a wastelander taken earlier, who stages a fight to lure in the guards. They find more prisoners as they go. (Fallout 3: Mothership Zeta)

• Sally, a young girl who knows her way around the ship. (Fallout 3: Mothership Zeta)
• Elliott Tercorien, a US Army medic abducted with his unit in Alaska before the Great War. (Fallout 3: Mothership Zeta)
• Toshiro Kago, a samurai taken centuries earlier. (Fallout 3: Mothership Zeta)
• Paulson, a cowboy from the Old West. (Fallout 3: Mothership Zeta)

Not everyone survives the freezers. To get a spacesuit for a walk across the hull, the Lone Wanderer thaws a frozen astronaut, who dies when he comes out. (Fallout 3: Mothership Zeta)

The prisoners split up to destroy the ship's generators, then teleport to the upper decks. There the aliens show off the ship's death ray to scare them into giving up. It doesn't work. They fight through the weapons and biology labs, take the bridge, hold it against a counter-attack and use the mothership's own guns to destroy a second alien ship. (Fallout 3: Mothership Zeta)

Afterwards a homing device dropped near the crash site lets the Lone Wanderer teleport back to Zeta, which now belongs to its former prisoners. (Fallout 3: Mothership Zeta)

Zetans in the other Fallout games#

The aliens were around long before the add-on. In the original Fallout, a rare encounter in the desert turns up a crashed flying saucer with strange skeletons and an alien blaster, and in Fallout 3 the crashed craft that starts Mothership Zeta lies in the wasteland with its dead pilot. (Fallout; Fallout 3)

• Fallout 4 (2287): A small alien craft crashes in the Commonwealth, not far from Vault 81. Its pilot survives and hides in a nearby cave, armed with an alien blaster. (Fallout 4)
• Fallout 76: The Invaders from Beyond event, added in 2022, has the Zetans invade Appalachia. A UFO hovers over the battlefield and beams down soldiers to guard brainwave siphons, devices collecting data on the people of Appalachia, while a recluse called Homer Saperstein helps the Vault Dwellers fight back. Its commanders include General Zeta. (Fallout 76: Invaders from Beyond)

Is there a Zetan in the Fallout TV show?#

Sort of. In season 2 episode 2, "The Golden Rule", Maximus's chapter of the Brotherhood of Steel moves into Area 51. A soldier opens an old fridge and finds a frozen grey alien inside, and is far more excited about the working icebox than about proof of life on other worlds. (Fallout, "The Golden Rule")

The show doesn't call the alien a Zetan or explain it, though it looks like the games' aliens. Co-showrunner Geneva Robertson-Dworet told Den of Geek, "We just wanted to tease it, that's all!" She said the season didn't have many aliens, and that she found the idea of alien life being discovered before the war interesting and hoped to explore it later. Nothing about aliens has been announced for season 3. (Geneva Robertson-Dworet on the alien in season 2; Fallout, "The Golden Rule")