Harvester (Independence Day)


 * "Harvester" redirects here. For other species with the same name see Harvester (Prey) and Harvester (Skyline)

The Harvesters are a race of sapient, spacefaring aliens which travel from planet to planet like a galactic swarm of locusts, devouring each world's natural resources before moving to the next one, bringing their entire civilization in massive ships.

Biology
Physically, they're no more durable than a Human being, but compensate this by being enclosed within a biomechanical suit that gives them numerous advantages. They have a slender, quasi-humanoid body with three-jointed limbs and only two digits on their hands and feet. The head is enlarged and flattened. They have large, pupil-less eyes (or eye-like organs) and the suit armour includes a number of long, grasping tentacles protruding from their backs.

Lacking both ears and vocal chords, the aliens communicate using a sophisticated form of telepathy. They are also able to control other beings, at least partially, by attaching tentacles to their necks, and apparently do this in order to communicate with non-telepathic species. This species breathes oxygen and requires similar environmental conditions to Humans.

Their hive-like society is ruled by a massive Harvester Queen, who exerts complete control over all of her fleet's soldiers.

Culture and society
The Harvesters are little more than nomadic looters. They do possess far superior technology, including enormous fleets of ships; defence fields to prevent missiles from reaching their ships' hull; highly destructive weaponry and protective biomechanical suits.

When invading an inhabited planet, the aliens' military tactics consist of large-scale attacks, destroying the major cities around the globe simultaneously and then heading to the next largest, presumably going on until there is nothing left.

History
At an unknown point, the Harvesters left their homeworld and became a nomadic civilization, they went across the galaxy, consuming the cores of worlds they came across, one such planet was the home of The Spheres, a civilization who the Harvesters wared with for ages until the Harvesters defeated them.

In 1947 AD, a Harvester space craft crashed on the planet Earth, two of it's crew where killed in the crash, and the third died a week afterwards, following this event, the Harvesters abducted Humans throughout the 20th Century until they decided to commence their invasion.

In 1996, the Harvester mothership was detected near Earth's moon by a SETI satellite array and they shortly after took control of the planet's artificial satellites and prepared a coordinated attack on major cities, following the attacks, the surviving humans joined together and destroyed the mothership and the invading fleet.

For the following 10 years, the remaining Harvesters had a ground war with a rouge African nation, during this war, a distress signal was sent to the Harvester Homeworld and was received by a queen who would return many years later.

In 2016, Earth had integrated Harvester tech with their own, the Queen's ship arrived and completely covered the Atlantic Ocean, they nearly devoured the Earth's core but the Queen was destroyed and the ship and the fleet which came with it was destroyed.

Appearances

 * Independence Day (1996)
 * Independence Day: Resurgence (2016)