Biography for
Ellen Ripley (Character)
from Aliens (1986)

Ripley was born in 2092 in Olympia, Luna. She had a daughter, Amanda Ripley MacLaren, and no other descendants (not counting her clone in Alien: Resurrection).

In 2122, Ripley was employed as Warrant Officer (Ident Number W5645022460H) for the Weyland-Yutani corporation, working on the USCSS Nostromo, which was towing massive quantities of raw ore to Earth from Thedus.

Along with the rest of the crew, she was awakened 10 months prematurely from hypersleep by Mother, the ship's computer, to answer a curious transmission received from moon LV-426.[1] Upon landing, Executive Officer Kane, Captain Dallas, and Navigator Lambert disembarked and investigated the source of the transmission a derelict alien space craft. While investigating the derelict craft, an alien parasite attached itself to Executive Officer Kane.

Ripley initially refused to allow the landing party back onto the ship after they were injured, citing quarantine regulations. Her order was ignored by Science Officer Ash, whom she began to distrust more and more as time went on. The bypassing of quarantine had serious consequences when an extraterrestrial larva or embryo of some kind deposited by the "facehugger" that attacked Kane matured and erupted from his chest. Kane was killed by this alien birth, and the creature quickly took to preying upon the rest of the crew.

Following the presumed death of Dallas, Ripley became the Nostromo's commanding officer, and learned from Mother the final piece of the puzzle: Special Order 937, a secret Company policy to study the very creature that was stalking them at the expense of their lives. With the crew around her dwindling just as quickly as the creature seemed to be growing, Ripley began the vessel's self-destruct sequence. The Nostromo, the cooling rods removed from its reactor, melted down and exploded violently, moments after Ripley (in the escape ship Narcissus) reached safety. She was expecting to be rescued within a few weeks, but she and her cat Jones would drift "right through the core systems" and spend the next 57 years in hypersleep. Ripley's only daughter, Amanda, died at the age of 66, just two years before Ripley would be found and awoken from hypersleep. A photograph shown in a brief clip in the special edition of Aliens has her date of death listed as "12.23.20", but a later line from Carter Burke places the events of the same film 57 years later (2179).

After a bureaucratic inquest was conducted by Weyland Yutani to sum up whether Ripley's actions aboard the Nostromo were warranted, her flight license was subsequently revoked and she was sent for treatment for a period of psychometric probation to avoid criminal charges. Shortly thereafter, all communication was lost with the Company's new Hadley's Hope colony on LV-426 and Carter Burke, along with the assistance of the United States Colonial Marine Corp, came to Ripley with an offer of her reinstatement as a flight officer if she would aid them as an adviser on a trip to recover the colonists. Begrudgingly, she accepted the offer and they set out to salvage the colony on a USCM vessel called the Sulaco. There, Ripley came face to face with her fears of alien impregnation with the aid of an act of sabotage conducted by Burke. He released two alien facehuggers, the only remaining live specimens from the colony's med lab, into a locked room with both Ripley and a little girl, Rebecca Jorden, known to be the last Hadley's Hope survivor so that the aliens could escape through quarantine undetected inside of their human hosts. Though the attempt was thwarted by the marines, the Company's goal had become clear to all--protect the Alien species--all other priorities and life were secondary. After an alien assault on the med lab, most of the marines and Carter Burke, himself, were killed. Rebecca was kidnapped shortly thereafter by an alien soldier. Corp. Hicks and Ripley were in agreement, a rescue attempt to recover her would be immediate and they would take off and nuke the site from orbit. Ripley succeeded, and Rebecca (or Newt as she was fondly called),an injured Hicks, and a badly damaged android named Bishop escaped and set back out into space in deep hypersleep.

Unfortunately, her sleep would be interrupted by a fire on the ship and the lifeboat vessel was jettisoned off of the ship and crash-landed onto a former refinery turned maximum security prison planet, Fiorna "Fury" 161. Newt and Hicks died in the crash and somehow, by fate, Ripley had been impregnated by a facehugger with a queen alien embryo. Attempts by the Company were made to recover the specimen but Ripley chose to die with it and keep it out of their destructive grasp.

Long after the days of Weyland-Yutani, the United States military launched a secret scientific operation onto a vessel, the USM Auriga, to clone Ripley and extract the species from her. After 7 unsuccessful tries, the 8th clone survived the extraction with alien-human hybrid qualities and a battle ensued between the smuggling crew that confiscated a ship of unsuspecting sleeping human hosts and the aliens that were the result of the hosts' impregnation. The ship, noting an evident problem, rerouted itself back toward home base: Earth. Ripley, or rather her clone, a smuggler named Johnner, and a new generation of android, an Auton (robot designed by a robot) were the only known "survivors" of this encounter.