Bluffing the Advance Scout: Difference between revisions

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It used to be a common trope in the Golden Age of Science Fiction, but not so much these days. Even then, it was frequently [[Played for Laughs]].

== [[Comic Books]] ==

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* A fairly recent ''[[Mickey Mouse]]'' story had the mouse and his sidekick, Goofy, visiting an archaeologist-friend at Abu Simpel in Egypt, when they're abducted by [[Ancient Astronauts]] - specifically, the old egyptian gods and pharaohs, who left Earth back in the day after being insulted (and nearly accidentally fed to the crocodiles) by one of Goofy's ancestors. Now they've returned with an invasion-fleet to wipe out humanity in repayment! Mickey tricks them into believing that humanity has developed [[Psychic Powers]] in the meantime, by taking advantage of the knowledge that Abu Simpel contains their landing-beacon, and claiming that he was using his powers to affect their advanced navigation-equipment. Sure enough, the UFO crashes on approach, and the aliens are scared off. How did it work? Well, Abu Simpel was moved - in a massive engineering undertaking - back in the 1980s, to protect it from a flooding. The new location obviously screwed up the navigational calculations, but the aliens obviously didn't imagine that anyone would tear down something that huge, stone for stone, and then rebuild it exactly identically somewhere nearby.

* ''[[Donald Duck]]'': One story has Scrooge McDuck make a bunch of money by producing and selling semi-sentient 'growing' cars to people. Things are already falling appart, however, when an alien race arrives and hits the planet with a shrink-ray, designed to leave the people of the planet helpless when the invasion-fleet shows up later... but since said aliens happens to be a race of sentient cars, they mistook the growing cars for the dominant species of Earth, and shrunk ''those'' instead of the people. Since there's [[Negative Continuity]], however, we never get to see the invasion-fleet show up, but presumably, they'd be in for a nasty surprise...

* In the ''[[~~XX Xenophile~~]]'' story "My Favorite Oitling", the human explorer convinces the Martian warrior women that the huge suit of power armour that arrives to rescue him is a typical Earth female and so Earth will be too tough to invade.

* In the ''[[XXXenophile]]'' story "My Favorite Oitling", the human explorer convinces the Martian warrior women that the huge suit of power armour that arrives to rescue him is a typical Earth female and so Earth will be too tough to invade.

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* An inversion of sorts occurs in "Victory Unintentional" by [[Isaac Asimov]]: Humans send a team of highly advanced robots to negotiate with hostile aliens living on Jupiter. In order to be able to survive in the extremely high gravity, the robots have been built to be extremely strong and durable (the aliens themselves function more like deep sea fish and maintain their internal pressure the same as the outside in order to avoid being crushed). By the end of the story, the aliens surrender to humans, and after some confusion it's realised the humans never told them they were sending robots, leading them to assume that humans are a race of super-powered indestructible metallic beings.

* A short story called "Master Race" had the conquistadorial aliens' mighty armada of miles-long starships flee the Solar System in terror after their scout swiped some comic books from a boy's treehouse and the aliens concluded these were historical records of the awesome powers of humanity.

* In the short story ''Iron Inferno'' from the [[Warhammer 40000]] anthology ''Fear the Alien'', a Lord General, of the [[Redshirt Army|PDF]] of a [[Fantasy Counterpart Culture|conspicuously Japanese system]], made a ploy against the [[Our Orcs Are Different|Waaagh!]] that had just made planetfall. The plan was an elaborate deception to convince a vanguard force that a poorly defended hive was a veritable fortress with many more defenses and men guarding it than there actually were. After a brief battle, the deception had indeed worked, but the Lord General [[My God What Have I Done|was horrified]] that his goal [[Gone Horribly Right|met failure]]. Because of his inexperience with Orks, he didn't foresee that not only would they ''not'' avoid a costly and hard-fought battle, but they would ''[[Blood Knight|jump right at it]]''.

* In the short story ''Iron Inferno'' from the [[Warhammer 40000]] anthology ''Fear the Alien'', a Lord General, of the [[Redshirt Army|PDF]] of a [[Fantasy Counterpart Culture|conspicuously Japanese system]], made a ploy against the [[Our Orcs Are Different|Waaagh!]] that had just made planetfall. The plan was an elaborate deception to convince a vanguard force that a poorly defended hive was a veritable fortress with many more defenses and men guarding it than there actually were. After a brief battle, the deception had indeed worked, but the Lord General [[My God, What Have I Done?|was horrified]] that his goal [[Gone Horribly Right|met failure]]. Because of his inexperience with Orks, he didn't foresee that not only would they ''not'' avoid a costly and hard-fought battle, but they would ''[[Blood Knight|jump right at it]]''.

* A story from an old issue of ''Boys' Life'' has a young boy doing this to a team of Martian scouts completely by accident. He's just moved into the neighborhood and thinks the scouts are neighbor kids playing spaceman, and decides to play along. Through a series of [[Contrived Coincidence|contrived coincidences]] he ends accidentally convincing the Martians that that all of humanity is fearless and morally incorruptible, and that humans far outmatch the Martians technologically. In the end the Martians decide to invade another planet.