“Show me one sane Chairman of the Department of ...”
Agendas agendas. Reality is what we have been told it is, everything else is easily dismissed as not credible and therefore no one investigates - especially Chairmen of a department - ones with the most vested interests in the status quo.
Investigation on an academic level means grants, funds of all sorts, not to mention reputations to protect - one does not get those funds by stepping on the toes (so to speak) of a Chairmen of a department. The list of things that were heralded as ‘impossible’, ‘false’, ‘snake oil’, and the like which later not only proved true, but revealed the agendas of those that controlled the discipline, are legion.
The comfort of the status quo is difficult to give up, but it has to happen, from time to time, or we would be corresponding by feather quill and ink, on making marks on clay tablets.
And many authors of science fiction write that because it is the only format which holds the possibility of escaping the seven forms of fiction, and because they are, in fact, scientists themselves writing what is scientifically possible and provable, but not necessarily observable in the world at large or common knowledge.
You are articulate and insightful. However you are very far out on a very thin limb if you are arguing that Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity is wrong. Until Einstein is proven wrong by a serious thinker or tinkerer in or out of the academic world, then the speed of light remains the limit. Until Einstein is proven wrong, it is delusion to believe that a biological or mechanical entity from another star has actually visited earth. Demonstrate the theory or the real hard evidence.