An Enclosed Extraterrestrial is a kind of alien whose entire race seems to cover their bodies from head to toe, whether by clothing, attire, armors or even especially designed artifacts. Sometimes this is done because they have some biological need, others just don't want any stranger to see their real looks because of some sort of cultural taboo, or because they are Energy Beings or Starfish Aliens choosing A Form You Are Comfortable With.
Often done for budgetary reasons (as it saves you time and money from complex make-ups and/or body painting), or to create more memorable designs and give the creatures a truly alien look. When done for more specific purposes, this is often paired with Bizarre Alien Biology by making them aliens breathe some gas other than oxygen —ammonia, methane, and chlorine are popular choices— and thus need to carry around special gear when in Earthlike atmospheres to both provide themselves with a good air supply and to protect vulnerable parts such as the eyes and mucus membranes from toxic gases. A reverse of this may happen if human characters visit these aliens' worlds, in which case they'll be the ones carrying around the oxygen tanks, goggles, and pressure suits.
Sometimes combined with Uniformity Exception in order to save money on expensive makeup. Contrast with the exact opposite Exposed Extraterrestrials.
May overlap with Mobile Fishbowl, which is when aquatic beings survive on land by wearing or carrying water with them. Super-Trope to Little Green Man in a Can which is when aliens live inside a mechanical device. Uninhabitable to Aliens can be a reason for this if they wear their suits in environments humans can survive in.
Examples:
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Comic Books
- Judgment Day (EC Comics): Inverted. A human astronaut visits a planet of robots to determine their fitness to join the Galactic Federation and keeps his helmet on for the entire visit. He eventually decides that the robots are not ready to join because some robots discriminate against others because of the color of their casings. In the final panel he takes off his helmet, showing he is a black man.
- School For Extraterrestrial Girls: The first time we see Dr. Murphy's Extraterrestrial Civics class, she's giving a lecture about Jupitarians, gaseous aliens who rarely visit Earth because it's better suited to solid species. When they do have to interact with solids for diplomatic missions, they use "vacuum suits'' that contain their bodies in a humanoid shape.
- Superboy (1994): While most of the slaves on the alien Kossak's ship are wearing very minimal clothing in addition to their slave collars a handful are in full body covering suits with helmets presumably because they couldn't survive the ship's atmosphere without them.
- Tales of the Jedi: Master Ooroo's species breathes a gas called cyanogen, which is toxic to most humanoids; in turn, oxygen is deadly poison to them. As such, he lives inside a mobile, gas-filled crystalline tank.
- Tech Jacket has the Geldarians, who are always wearing their Tech Jackets as 24-Hour Armor due to their weak bodies, but their helmets are retractable.
Films — Animation
- Battle for Terra has the peaceful inhabitants of planet Terra raided by an alien Generation Ship. The invaders wear flight suits with full helmets, as they cannot breathe the heavy Terrian air. In fact, the Terrians actually swim around in their atmosphere. The aliens are revealed to be humans who have become Invading Refugees after a nuclear war left Venus, Earth, and Mars uninhabitable.
Films — Live-Action
- Star Wars:
- The Jawas and the Tusken Raiders cover their bodies with heavy clothing, hoods and masks, among other things. In the expanded universe is explained that, at least in the case of the Tusken, showing any kind of skin is an absolute taboo.
- While most species can exist in one another native environments with no issues whatsoever, some hail from worlds with unique environmental conditions and require protection elsewhere.
- Gands, Skakoans and Kel Dors are adapted to breathe their homeworlds' atmospheres — Gands breathe ammonia, Skakoans breathe methane, and Kel Dors breathe a unique gas — and need to wear breathing masks and protective goggles to guard themselves against air rich in toxic gases such as oxygen or carbon dioxide. The atmosphere of Skako Major is also much denser than other worlds, and Skakoans consequently also need to wear bulky pressure suits when offworld.
- The Ubese are in a similar situation due to the near-absolute environmental devastation of their homeworld millennia in the past, which left them unable to survive without the use of full-body suits and breath masks to support their damaged lungs. The actual appearance of the Ubese is something of a mystery as a result — beneath the masks they're actually near-humans — and in Return of the Jedi Leia is able to effectively disguise herself as the Ubese bounty hunter Boushh because, beneath the suit, mask, and vocal filter, nobody had any idea what he looked or sounded like.
- Ganks are almost never seen out of their armour, leading to a great deal of speculation over what they actually look like; thanks to their aggression, the few outsiders who get to see them unarmoured tend to be medical examiners and coroners. However, in Galaxy of Fear, Hoole and the Arranda siblings got to see a whole gang of them unarmoured: it's not pretty.
Literature
- Animorphs: Most aliens wear, at most, an armband and belts and holsters that can carry weapons and Tools of Sapience. The members of the Council of Thirteen in Animorphs: Visser are the only (non human) Controllers shown to wear more. They're wrapped in robes. Most can be identified as Hork-Bajir or Taxxon controllers but there are two fully shrouded members whose species Edriss can't discern.
- Known Space: The Trinocs are native to a world similar to Saturn's moon Titan, and evolved in an extremely cold atmosphere composed of a mixture of methane, ammonia, water vapor, and carbon dioxide, alongside notable amounts of other human-toxic gases; they themselves breathe methane. On those rare occasions when they visit human worlds, they need to wear protection against the relative extreme heat and tanks of methane for breathing.
- The Star Kings: The H'harn from Return to the Stars are completely covered with cloaks whenever interacting with humans. The reason becomes obvious when one undresses to mind-meld with the protagonist.
Live-Action TV
- Babylon 5:
- The Vorlons claim to use their strange-looking exo-suits to survive in other environments, although later it is revealed that the real reason is to hide their true Energy Beings-meet-Starfish Aliens look from outsiders.
- The Gaim are Insectoid Aliens; their ambassadors are the only humanoid ones according to background material (as they are all genetically designed by their queens), but still have insectoid features. They use a full body armor not so much to hide their look (other insectoid aliens walk without them) but because they can't breed in the environments that most races find comfortable. The name of the race is an homage from J. Michael Straczynski to Neil Gaiman, as the Gaim's helmet looks like the one use by The Sandman (1989).
- In the Lower-Deck Episode "A View from the Gallery", the station is attacked by alien Faceless Mooks who are completely enclosed in red armor
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- Doctor Who:
- The Daleks are actually Octopoid Aliens inside their iconic metallic armour.
- The race of Ice Warriors, originally native to ancient Mars, consider it the ultimate disgrace to remove their armored body-suits. Thus, the Eleventh Doctor knows the situation has become really dire when one resorts to doing this in "Cold War".
- The antagonist of "The Woman Who Fell to Earth" is a Stenza, who come from a planet much colder than Earth, with a body temperature low enough to freeze humans on skin contact. As a result, he wears a suit of armour. However, downplaying the trope, he can expose his hands and face briefly with no ill effects.
- The Shannara Chronicles: Trolls are fully covered in post-apocalyptic Steampunk-looking suits.
- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The Breen are entirely hidden behind suits and long-snouted helmets. Worf mentions that no one has ever seen a Breen without their suit and lived to speak of it. The suits are known to be refrigerated, regulating a cold environment for the wearer, and the Breen are known to have no blood. The most common belief among the races of the Alpha Quadrant is that the Breen homeworld is a frozen wasteland, which is why they need to wear refrigeration suits. However, Weyoun once refers to the Breen homeland as being quite comfortable, maintaining the mystery of the Breen and their suits. An Expanded Universe novel, Star Trek: Typhon Pact: Zero Sum Game, claims that the Breen wear the suits to promote equality between the different species of their Confederacy by forcing them all to have the same external appearance. Season 5 of Star Trek: Discovery provides the official canon: the Breen species has two forms, one solid and one gelatinous, and they all prefer the latter (with only one prominent exception). The cold temperatures of their refrigeration suits provide benefits to their biology, such as rapid healing.
- The Twilight Zone (1959): In "The Invaders", a woman living alone on a farm is menaced by two small aliens in form-concealing armor. At the end of the episode, we learn that the 'aliens' are actually human astronauts, and the woman is a giant alien.
Tabletop Games
- They Came From Beneath The Sea!: The Suspended are a weird mixture of this trope and Mobile Fishbowl. They get their name because they are always encased in enormous masses of psychoreactive slime, which they can control with their thoughts to make it function like a cross between a Blob Monster and exoarmor. They need this slimy shell because in their natural state they have no prehensile limbs and they can't breathe oxygen, so the slime-bubble keeps them alive and lets them use its pseudopods to interact with the world.
- Warhammer 40,000: The Tau's body armor tends to be a lot more enclosing than those of other factions (they still indulge in Helmets Are Hardly Heroic, just not to the extent of the others), including their basic troops. Their helmets' Cyber Cyclops appearance can also unnerve some of the humans they deal with.
Video Games
- Age of Wonders: Planetfall: The ancestors of the Dvar were forced to constantly wear their extreme environment exo-suits to survive the Death World that they were stranded on. About fifty thousand years later, their descendants cannot survive without them outside of Dvar dwellings.
- Dawn of War: The only Tau unit without a face-concealing helmet is the Ethereal, who wears robes anyway.
- Destiny:
- The Cabal are rhino-like humanoids with Space Marine troops, covered completely in armor because they come from a high-pressure planet, and with a few exceptions (headshots cause their helmets to fly off and reveal their face for normal troops, important characters like Dominus Ghaul, the Consul, Calus, and Caiatl), none of them show their faces.
- The Fallen are Space Pirates who have a lot of their units wear helmets or other headgear that only show their eyes, and at first glance, you'd be forgiven for thinking said eyes are just eyeholes or optics. The Dregs of House of Dusk are an exception, showing their face and hair in full, revealing the Scary Teeth they have.
- Averted for the Hive, who, while looking like they wear chitinous armor at first glance, are actually effectively nude, given that the armor is actually part of their bodies.
- Mass Effect:
- The Volus live in a high-pressure greenhouse atmosphere, forcing them to use full-body suits when dealing with other species.
- The Quarians are Space Nomads, and after centuries of living in sterilized environments aboard starships, they have lost most of their immune system's functionality. More specifically, because of how life evolved on their homeworld, the quarian immune system works very differently from most other species since it evolved to readily absorb beneficial microbes and had a very minor ability to repel harmful ones. Thus, they have always used enviro-suits to protect themselves from disease or infection when dealing with other races. However, since their immune systems have now mostly lost the ability to repel foreign contaminants, they've been forced into using their suits at all times, even when inside their own ships.
- The Raloi are an avian race that due to an outbreak of an alien flu virus on the Citadel are forced to wear environmental suits when dealing with other species, as they have only recently made First Contact with the greater galactic community.
- No Man's Sky has the Anomaly race that the player starts every standard game as, who are the only race in the game who exclusively have helmets for their head options. All the other race options abide by this save for the head, as no below-the-neck options reveal the wearer underneath.
- Unreal I: The Terraniux Mercenaries are enclosed inside their combat environment suits probably since they can't survive in the Earth-like environment.
- XCOM 2:
- The Andromedons are unable to breathe oxygen and the atmosphere of their own planet is toxic to humans. As a result, the ones encountered during the game all wear Powered Armor with samples of the gases they breathe sealed inside them. Depleting an Andromedon's health results in the suit's glass-like "helmet" shattering, with the alien inside briefly spasming as they quickly suffocate... leaving the player with the suit itself now operating autonomously.
- The Gatekeepers are largely shapeless tentacled blobs that always keep themselves within spherical metallic shells. That being said, while they spend most of their time in the closed-up state, they do open their shells and "expose" their bodies to the environment whenever they exercise their psionic powers, only to immediately close it up as a free reaction the moment they're struck with enemy fire.
Webcomics
- Walkyverse: The aliens are always clad in jumpsuits and biker-esque helmets, with no sign of how they look underneath.
Western Animation
- Ben 10: In Ultimate Alien, P'andor's body is completely covered by armored Containment Clothing to contain his unstable Energy Being body. It's unknown if this is the norm for his species, as he was sealed in the suit as punishment for previous crimes. However, in Omniverse, an artificial Half-Human Hybrid of this species wears something similar that also covers him from head to toe. Ben's NRG form, taken from scanning P'andor's DNA, keeps the suit and wears it most of the time, but (starting from Omniverse) is capable of exiting it at will and displaying his true form more often.
- He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983): Trollans, of which Orko is the most famous member, are all cover in heavy clothes except for their ears, eyes and hands, and in their culture showing their faces is so intimate that is the equivalent of kissing.