Quote image editor
“From the perspective of a class C, an alien method is one whose behavior is not fully specified by C. This includes methods in other classes as well as overrideable methods (neither private nor final) in C itself. Passing an object to an alien method must also be considered publishing that object. Since you can’t know what code will actually be invoked, you don’t know that the alien method won’t publish the object or retain a reference to it that might later be used from another thread.” — Brian Goetz
From the perspective of a class C, an alien method is one whose behavior is not fully specified by C. This includes methods in other classes as well as overrideable methods (neither private nor final) in C itself. Passing an object to an alien method must also be considered publishing that object. Since you can’t know what code will actually be invoked, you don’t know that the alien method won’t publish the object or retain a reference to it that might later be used from another thread.