Star Trek: 10 Times Aliens Influenced Human History

In the Star Trek: Enterprise episode Carbon Creek, T'Pol told a story to Archer and Tucker about the real first contact between Humans and Vulcans that happened more than 100 years ago in Carbon Creek, Pennsylvania.

In 1957, one of T'Pol's ancestors, T'Mir, along with three other Vulcans, were secretly observing the launch of Sputnik 1, humanity's first ever satellite, when their ship was forced to crash land in Carbon Creek, killing their Captain and stranding the remaining three on Earth.

They waited for a passing Vulcan ship to rescue them, but after a few days they began to starve. Strongly opposed to killing animals to eat, they decided to head into town where they posed as Humans and started working jobs like plumbing and mining to buy food.

Eventually, their distress signal was picked up and a Vulcan ship set course to rescue them. They would've been able to escape with zero cultural contamination, but right as they were about to leave, a gifted child named Jack that T'Mir formed a bond with during her stay told her that he wasn't going to be able to afford to go to college as he planned. Frustrated by this unfairness, T'Mir took a velcro bag from her ship and sold it to a company called Big Creek Sales And Manufacturing so they could reverse engineer it, introducing humanity to velcro for the first time.

With the money, Jack was able to go to school and T'Mir and another Vulcan named Stron left Earth, but the other, Mestral, decided to stay. T'Mir claimed to the Vulcan authorities that he died during the crash, but he went on to live a full life with his new Human family without ever being exposed as an alien.