You know how you look at those old maps of the world that would show Europe and, in the margins of the sea, there'd be dragons and sea monsters? Those were put there, more or less, to indicate that those were uncharted waters. Sort of a placeholder until the unknown becomes known.

Ancient people probably used the same rationale when they couldn't explain earthquakes, droughts, floods, storms, or hurricanes.

If aliens had visited, they might be seen as gods. I believe tht was the premise of the movie "Chariots of the Gods".

If such a thing ever happened, I think it woudl be more likely to be visited from the multiverse, than form distant part of our galaxy, mostly due to the problems of what would happen to body mass as a spaceship approach light speed. (This is part of Einstein's theory of relativity). However, if anyone did manage to do multiverse travel, I also doubt they woudl ever be able to return to the universe from which they originated, as there are virtually an infinite number of universes in the multiverse.

As most gods that men worshiped resembled earth animals or humans, I think that the ideas of god most likely originated with people from what they saw and observed, and the use of a lot of imagination in trying to explain the natural world they observed and could nto explain without imagining supernatural forces of some kind.

i don't buy into the whole dumb human evolution thing. we have had way nore advanced times as humans from before us. now the question being y were we stripped of all this information . what if once we r a big enough crop something comes scoops us up to work somewhere else. something happens that takes us from great to strating over

Just off the top of my head, so please excuse any fallacies.
Animals behave with superstition. So, back in the early days of human evolution, superstition was a key factor to survival, especially with disease, crop failures etc.. Humans (with a limited capacity for understanding) needed a reason for certain events and came up with the best 'theory'. Animals, such as pets, worship there owners like a god, so, I imagine early civilisation did the same with a visible god like the sun which was benevolent , providing heat, good climate, light/day. Later on that evolved into an invisible god with all the doubtful powers etc.

I think gods were invented purely as a means of explaining natural phenomena that those people at that time had no way of understanding.

I recently watched an interesting documentary about the discovery of one of dozens of ancient humanoids that fit somewhere in the evolutionary history of homo sapiens. This particular discovery was made in a practically inaccessible cave system in South Africa and consists of dozens of individuals of a previously undescribed species. It has a brain case about 1/3 the size of modern humans. Unlike any other discovery of hominid fossils there are no accompanying fossils of any other species, no predators, no vermin, nothing. The only set of circumstances that could account for such a find is that the remains were purposely placed in the cave in a kind of burial ritual. Were they put there so that their bodies would be intact in some after life? The species has the hands and feet of humans but is otherwise more ape-like and is at least 2 million years old. Did the yearning for some kind of eternal life even among hominids as primitive as these bring about the creation of gods?