If it's a side step, then so was your question. You took away the one obviously-much-more-alive-and-capable-of-interacting-with-the-plot alien. This is a semantic argument, and you're using a different sense of the word than the titles of the films were using, so it's not even a valid semantic argument. A reasonable person wouldn't expect to be able to drive a herse in a carpool lane just because there was an occupied coffin in the back and a sign said vehicles could only use the lane if they contained two people because they'd have to use a definition of person other than the one the sign obviously meant, just like how they couldn't claim that the sign was talking about a nearby swimming pool or running track and therefore irrelevant to drivers because lanes separate competitors in races.