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camwynOkay, so.
The aliens have been kidnapping people for at least six hundred years. We know this because Toshiro Kago wears Oda clan armor and markings, and the Oda clan's last battle of any note was in 1582, but he's also wearing a mon, which didn't spread outside the aristocratic families until the 1600s. There's also the cowboy, Paulson, although we don't know his exact time frame. The aliens have also been kidnapping people relatively recently; Ellen found a dead Enclave soldier and Somah on board the ship. (In-game you can also find a live Rivet City security guard who wanders in circles babbling about this not being real. I left that encounter out of Millicanon because Ellen would've tried to bring that person along anyway and I didn't feel like doing that.)
Despite these examples, the majority of the kidnapping subjects we know about are pre-War Americans from a very narrow time frame. The player character can find twenty-five recordings on board the ship. One is Toshiro Kago speaking, one is a cow mooing, and one is of a resident of Salem Village in 1697. All the others are of pre-War Americans, either twentieth or twenty-first century, and all the stuff the player character finds in the ship's cargo areas is of American manufacture.
(There are a few other things that can be thawed out in-game- feral ghouls and supermutants. I do not count them. They level up with the player, so that an early-game character will just run into ordinary feral ghouls and basic supermutants whereas a late-game character will be dealing with mutant overlords and feral ghoul reavers. I consider this a sign that they're there purely to give the player something to shoot at that isn't aliens, rather than indicative of what would actually be in the cryo tubes. I did have Ellen encounter at least one frozen ghoul, but that one could have been taken from Bakersfield or the Mojave for all I know.)
The ship is supposed to have thousands of frozen humans on board. The aliens were clearly capable of taking their victims from pretty much anywhere they chose, but give the appearance of having concentrated on North America. Either that, or- and I think this is more likely- they arrange their victims' storage areas according to where they were obtained. Since they have automated devices for plucking people out of holding cells and schlepping them around, I'm going with the geographical arrangement assumption, and that the aliens preferred to take their specimens for study from a particular geographical region for longitudinal study over time. Toshiro Kago was either accidentally lined up for thawing and study along with Paulson, the late Colonel Hartigan, and Elliott Tercorien, or was pulled out of his specific sector of storage for comparison to a selection of North American samples.
I'm also inclined to think that the presence of the part-human, part-alien abominations aboard the ship represents something relatively new, possibly the result of a change in mission leadership. ("Kaxar, our funding's never going to get renewed if all we go back to Planet Blonk with after our thousand-year mission is a bunch of anatomical and anthropological data. Can we, I don't know, try weaponizing the Earth creatures or something? They'll pay through the nonexistent nose for intelligent foot soldiers nobody will care about killing, right? Or we could use them as lab animals for growing organs for transplantation, the medical community would like that, right?") That's about as far as I'm willing to speculate on the aliens' motivation, though. I don't intend to do anything with any aliens other than the ones left alive on the ship, who're the former slaves, engineers, and support staff rather than any kind of decision-makers.
... wait, no. Better excuse for Toshiro: he was sent over from the other ship. Zeta was one of two vessels in orbit. The other ship looked very similar to Zeta's general design and does not overpower Zeta in combat unless you're really bad at that scene, so I'm assuming it was the same make and model of ship as Zeta rather than an armed escort. Zeta's crew probably concentrated on studying humans taken from the Americas, or at least North America, whereas the other one could very well have been taking people from Asia. Toshiro could've been sent over as a sample for comparison, maybe. I'm not sure. It makes as much sense as anything else about the situation, and explains the demographics a little bit.
Except that that comes out looking really bad because that means Ellen blew up a ship with a whole bunch of frozen foreigners on board. Even if she didn't know about it, it still looks bad. Forget I said anything. Toshiro was pulled out of storage for comparison to the Americans by mistake, or for some other reason which I do not care to speculate on. The other ship... I don't know. I've already said Zeta was in a low Earth orbit rather than anything geostationary or a Molniya-type orbit. Let's assume the other ship was as well and that they switched up the areas they liked to collect from every hundred years or so and just leave it at that; Zeta's probably got a bunch of Tokugawa-era Japanese people, a bunch of 1970s-2070s Americans, and then a couple of other sample sets from other countries in other centuries. Just for the hell of it I'm going to go through Badass of the Week later and pick areas for each of the centuries based on which ones catch my eye. (This still doesn't explain Andrew Endicott of Salem's recording. I'll handwave that it was transmitted over from the other ship, which was sampling North America or something during that time.)
... aaagh, that doesn't account for the cowboy either...
Okay. New plan. The aliens were in fact really bad at science. They were not maintaining any particularly well-kept scientific discipline, but instead were basically grabbing people wherever they felt like it and calling it science, kind of like old museums and such used to basically be composed of 'whatever the ship captains who came into port brought home as souvenirs'. The reason there's so many Americans from vaguely the same time frame is because at some point the aliens got lazy and stopped going very far afield. Either that, or sometime between Andrew Endicott's sample and now, a human managed to hurt one of the alien scientists and they went "okay you know what, you and all your kin will pay for that for the next couple of centuries- what land mass did that jerk come from?". Kind of like Moby-Dick, if the whale had been an ant and Ahab had decided his vengeance would take the form of periodically poking the hill with a poison-covered stick.
Look, we're talking about little green men in flying saucers here. I have already given this more serious thought than it deserves. I'm going with "alien scientists are long-lived and curious but they are also petty horrible people".
