But on the exobiology angle, if we agree that aliens could be quite strange looking, how can decide what “in the image of God” means? If strange aliens are children of God, what about animals? Insects? Plants? I know I am taking it to an absurd level, but how could we distinguish between children of God and animals?

I am asking this, because I had a post on my own bloghttp://strangerthanfic.blogspot.com/
that was stuck on that very question.

Of course, depending on your sources, anywhere from a majority to a minority of UFO sightings involve ‘Nordics’ – people quite indistinguishable from us – for what it is worth.

First off, I had to chuckle in disbelief upon seeing your use of the term “prosthetic foreheads,” which I never expected to see outside the lyrics of They Might Be Giants.

Yep, that was a deliberate (if obscure) homage. “Flood” remains one of my all-time favorite albums. ..bruce..

Now, I think it was a quote by Joseph Smith–which I’m trying to find again, so I apologize if I’m very off base–that says something to the effect that the human-like skeletons that were being discovered in the author’s (Joseph’s?) day were of a people who were once enlightened with the gospel but who had become degenerate. If what I remember of this quote retains any resemblance to the actual quote, this statement seems to back up not only selection or evolution in humans but also the possibility of human speciation. We know our divine parentage, “the origin of man,” but the effects of apostasy one could include affecting one’s (and likely others’) spiritual condition as well as one’s physical condition. P. P. Pratt’s quote about the effects of the gift of the Holy Ghost on its possessor seem to apply to this condition in reverse. While, Pratt says, the Holy Ghost:

“quickens all the intellectual faculties, increases, enlarges, expands, and purifies all the natural passions and affections; and adapts them, by the gift of wisdom, to their lawful use. It inspires, develops, cultivates and matures all the fine-toned sympathies, joys, tastes, kindred feelings and affections of our nature. . . . It develops beauty of person, form and features. . . . It develops and invigorates all the faculties of the physical and intellectual man.” (Key to the Science of Theology, 101-102)

the effects of apostasy do the opposite, taking away that which was had, causing one’s God-like traits to digress into the natural man’s, also called an animal nature, which is so often inferred from the fossil record of man’s so-called “relatives,” which may have been (or were) simply another species–but whether a another species from the beginning or later, who can tell.