MCU Film Theory: Nick Fury Has Been An Alien ALL ALONG
To answer that - and to explore all of those other questions just mentioned, we have to go back to the 90s. Hurray, pogs, Nine Inch Nails and no supremely powerful politicians Tweeting threats of war from the toilet!
In Captain Marvel, we meet Nick Fury for the "first" time. He's relatively young, an experienced field agent and, most surprisingly of all, a fairly cheerful guy with deep affection for cats that would seem completely alien to anyone comparing him to the older, balder Fury who turns up at the end of Iron Man.
In the wake of Talos revealing the Skrull secret and Captain Marvel heading out into space to effectively find his people a new home, Fury returned to Earth, complete with his new eye-patch and set about establishing the Avengers.
From what we know of the timeline - according to the films and SHIELD official history at least - at that point, Fury spent around 13 years financing his Initiative and tracking exceptional individuals. Given the fact that he managed to recruit a grand total of none, you have to wonder what exactly he was doing. That sort of record looks like someone was sleeping on the job. Particularly when that someone was basically SHIELD's best agent.
It took until 2009 for Fury to approach any of these individuals, despite him telling Tony Stark in their first meeting that he was far from the only exceptional hero out there. That's 14 years after he renamed The Protector Initiative in Carol Danvers' honour and set about his grand idea for an incredible response team for incredible threats. It was, after all, only at that point that The World Security Council were willing to accept the Initiative - though they insisted on The Abomination joining the team in light of Hulk's destruction of Harlem. So, finally, Fury was able to get his baby off the ground, having kicked his heels for over a decade achieving very little.
But what if that wasn't the case?