Ridley Scott confirms David WAS the originator of the xenomorph AND that the beings he bombarded were in fact engineers.

Engineer Tech Brett

"What does bother me, why do the Engineers look so different from Prometheus to Alien Covenant? Am i missing something?"

I think there's three pretty decent theories about this right now.

1. The engineers in Prometheus were simply part of a space faring god-king class. The engineers in Covenant were surface dwelling commoners.

2. The engineers in Prometheus were manufactured to go out into space and fulfill the mission of seeding other planets, while the rest of their society are much like humans varying in body type and lacking bio-mechanical suits for space travel.

3. The engineers in Covenant are a genetically deteriorated line of their race that became less like the Prometheus engineers over millenia of breeding.

 You forgot number 4.

4. It was a small scene and they thought they would get away with a bit of face paint and some rags. Doing the makeup for that Prometheus engineer took ages...

I like the Star Wars prequels as guilty pleasures and I'm not the only one. But yeah, the Alien prequels are way better.

@QueenElizabethShaw

It would need to be something. Combining the first and second idea would work for me.

@Ati There's no contradiction regarding where the eggs are from, David is not telling the truth. He is lying in the movie as well.

Hi Ati, Thats precisely how I read that entire section he is trying to put Oram at his ease and say this particular thing is a result of the long dead Engineers what I am going to show you is different.

However I have written to Alan to thank him for his excellent work and asked him what he had in his mind did he want to leave the possibility of a different view as a creative author to Ridley.  

That’s a crappy idea and it feels like the whole franchise becomes too David-centric (so to speak). I would like the SJ to be an engineer and that the Engineers originally made the Xeno. David should just do something that has been done before because I would be fine with that.

I agree with Chli what he thinks about the eggs on the Derelict. Hopefully they won’t make David the SJ but the way it looks now it could be a possibility. Help us all, I don’t want it to turn out that way even though David is an interesting character.

Some interesting ideas in this thread, but I must agree with many others here and say that I'm disappointed by the new direction the narrative seems to have taken in Alien Covenant.

What made the original movies so appealing and thought provoking was the idea that a terrifying organism like the Alien (Xenomorph if you prefer) could evolve naturally in some dark corner of the cosmos. Something so different from us that it is essentially unknowable, at least by any human defined terms. This hints at important revelations about the nature of the universe and how life develops within it. It tells us that anthropocentric beliefs are mistaken at best (deadly at their worst) and that our species can never escape the implications of predator .vs. prey (This concept is neatly explored in Dark Horse Comics' Aliens:Book One). It is a primal fear of the unknown that is at the core of the Aliens movie mythology and forms the foundation of its unique brand of sci-fi/horror.

By acknowledging David (or the Engineers for that matter...) as the creator/s of the Alien we are robbed of the great potential in this central mystery and instead given a dumbed-down parable about the maker losing control of his creation; a story that has been repeated ad nauseam in this genre. Alien Covenant's plot reduces the most fearsome entity mankind has ever encountered to a lab experiment conducted by a bored rogue synthetic with a grudge against humanity. The nameless terror that is at the heart of the franchise is diluted; diminished into a realm of easily recognizable human motivations and mundane melodrama.

In addition, when examined, David's rationale for wanting to sabotage human efforts at colonization seem vague & ill-defined, perhaps even petty. We don't see him suffer abuse or ill-treatment at the hands of his human masters, although in AC's opening scene David's confusion/resentment at being made to serve is clearly portrayed. His genocidal response to these frustrations seems an overreaction and his judgment of humans and Engineers as unworthy rather hasty. It also suggests that his is a fragile, badly flawed AI, which seems odd given how much effort Weyland has put into his design (Asimov's Three Laws anyone ?). No doubt David's frailties represent a major through-line in the prequel movies and prompt the evolution of more humane, compassionate synthetics like Bishop.

In any case, here's hoping something better emerges from the next installment... 

If Davids the SJ in alien he's about 4 foot too small :s . But with the muddled way things have been going it's looking possible :I ...

Sorry this is just lame writing, going back to my imagination and thinking about what that millennia old elephantine creature was transporting that dangerous cargo, and actually giving off the warning signal for others to stay away....the space jockeys story could have been so much more creative than what we got. I think with the crap story we got with Prometheus there's just no way for them to write them selves out of it to match up with Alien. Look up some of the artwork people have come up with for what the Space Jockey creature could be.. haunting stuff.. more so than the albino giants we got.

Having Xeno's as your main antagonist is very difficult! They kinda' just squat in the mud. They're not going to build a spaceship and terrorize the galaxy....No.... humans have to do most of the work to get dead/chestbursted. (Good for padding your movie with a lot of walking and exploring scenes?)

But..if you make David the main antagonist he can fly/build spaceships and terrorize the galaxy. An order of magnitude more dangerous.

(how many humans have Xeno's killed in 200 years? 40-50? I think John Wick killed as many before breakfast.)

As a major Alien fan since 1979, I respect all views here, and I too, was at first "let down" by AC's storyline.  The whole "David created the xenomorph as we know it in Alien" first let me down, but the more I think about it, it makes sense. I've seen AC more times than I would like to admit, but I love it.  On just a movie level, for me, it's a combination of everything great from the Original Alien and Aliens.  For us hardcore fans, I totally understand the frustration of Prometheus and AC. I also respect the fact that the scare factor of these films will never reach the levels of the original Alien.  

If, like me, you go into Prometheus and AC as more of an informational exercise, to give answers, they get a little easier to swallow.

i will admit, I don't like the rushed feeling of Alien Covenant, the easy way out of having Shaw already dead at the beginning (a la Meichael Beihn in Alien3), and, sadly, Prometheus almost promised that we would see the engineers homelands.  I was looking forward to seeing an entire world looking like Giger created it, with all sorts of acid for blood creatures flying and crawling around.

So, now we know that David despises humans for being so conceited to create him, he wants us all dead. I'm okay with this and will accept it as Canon, but I still have issues with AC's treatment of how Shaw and David entered this planet. In one moment, they want us to believe that the jauggernaut crashed and destroyed tree tops, then, they show the ship "docking, then unleashing the pathogen on the engineers.

My hope, as a fan, is that they hit small backstory showing the original origin of a derelict ship with a Grand-daddy of the Engineers flying with a payload of eggs/possible queen, crashing on LV-426.  For the life of me, I can't imagine any other way... it's not like David can go up to an Engineer and say, "Hey I made this stuff and I need it Hot shotted across the universe."  The engineers would rip his head off again!

Parasite68

"My hope, as a fan, is that they hit small backstory showing the original origin of a derelict ship with a Grand-daddy of the Engineers flying with a payload of eggs/possible queen, crashing on LV-426.  For the life of me, I can't imagine any other way... it's not like David can go up to an Engineer and say, "Hey I made this stuff and I need it Hot shotted across the universe."  The engineers would rip his head off again!"

My best guess is that at some point, the engineers are going to find out what David did to their homeworld and that he has been abusing their technology. A ship will likely come, kill him, and capture his cargo (either to transport it to a containment facility or to dispose of it). This would be a pretty easy set up for the space jockey impregnation and crashing on LV-426

Scott has changed his tune on various aspects of the franchise many times before and likely will again.

@monsterzero yes the xenos on their own are hard to make a story out of but it could easily be done.  But lets say you want something more intelligent to be the baddie well that's what the queen was... and telepathic communication. What if we have only seen the children even the queen being not so old in aliens. Maybe there can be an origin of the black goo a superbeing of sorts thousands of years old or more.  Ridley kept hinting at multiple levels of evolution and races out there.  Well the engineers stated off looking like very advanced beings until this movie.  Ann's looking at their technology i could easily imagine us reaching that level in the next 200 years or so faster if the right things happen and of course we don't destroy ourselves! So... we're is the 1000s of years advanced 10000 100000 millions billions? There could be such a vast gap between each race each level looking like a god to the lower ones...

That old theory of the black goo being a way of destroying a planets inhabitants and storing the DNA ready for something to come along and absorb all the rich bio diversity was one of the best... seeding or guiding life letting it diversify and then soaking up all the lovely dna ideas adding to the soup of the super  being improving the design or what ever you want...

The way I see it David recreated the xenomorphs, instead of creating them. The xenomorphs were already in existence, hence the mural. Why else would it be there? And what about the dead Engineers in Prometheus? Didn't they have open chests, like something burst out of them?

Now here is a theory I made up which encompasses all origin stories. 

Once upon a time the Engineers came across the Alien homeworld. They captured a few aliens and extracted DNA from them. The Engineers tempered with the DNA ultimately resulting in the black goo. The goo has got the alienness and the agressiveness of the xenomorphs, thereby creating other types of agresive creatures, and changing human beings. 

It may not be the same goo we saw at the beginning of Prometheus, when one of the Engineers dissolved. Or even the one used in Alien Covenant, as we didn't see any aliens emerging from the Engineers. 

To be honest introducing the black goo was a mistake, I feel. It can be used for all sorts of things and methods, whatever the story asks for, and it has got a high X-Files vibe. Anyway we have to live with that.

So my theory is that the Alien Homeworld is still out there somewhere (as to their hosts, who knows?), and I also think we haven't seen the real Engineers' homeworld yet. Or planets they colonized. 

Someday I hope we get to see a movie told from the Engineers' perspective. We need some answers. There must be a good Sci-Fi and horror movie in there somewhere.