[The Duke]

I find it difficult to believe that interstellar aliens with massive spacecraft can overcome the barriers of time and space.

I also find it just as difficult to believe that professional observers - military-trained pilots (and others) - would hallucinate such things.

For me the answer is obvious - there there is an intelligent species that is native to Earth.

What do civilized people do when barbarians move into their neighborhoods? They move elsewhere and keep their distance.

It's a big world, and there are plenty of places where a species advanced enough to produce such craft could sequester themselves.

This would also explain the behavior of governments vis-a-vis UFOs in recent decades.

[crosdaddy]

Well, I for one want to find out where they live, they’ve got all the cool toys.

[Jamestown1630]

They could also simply be invisible to us, except under occasional, unusual conditions; or appear to act peculiarly because we’re only getting a sort of ‘Flatland’ view of them - which would align somewhat with some of Vallee’s conjectures.

[cgbg]

What do civilized people do when barbarians move into their neighborhoods? They move elsewhere and keep their distance.

Agreed.

Next up--AI becomes self-aware and adopts the same tactics.

We are the cows you see when you drive down a country road...no clue about what is going on but a lot of mooing....

[PIF]

I find it difficult to believe that interstellar aliens with massive spacecraft can overcome the barriers of time and space.

—

I’m sure our relatives back before the dawn of the 20th century would find it difficult to believe that humans could make massive pieces of metal fly, overcoming the barriers of time and space ...

[GingisK]

I find it difficult to believe that interstellar aliens with massive spacecraft can overcome the barriers of time and space.

Our working technology is actually only 150 years old. Prior to the mid 1800s, scientists dabbled with a number of things, yet loads were all pulled by horses. Great theoretical advancements started happening in the 1600s; however, practical applications began in 1845 with the telegraph. Electronics came to be only in the very late 1880s, but long-wave radio was not commercially on a large scale until the 1920s.

So, what we know is "young". I just cannot bring myself to hear the accounts of thousands of credible witnesses and dismiss them out of hand just because those objects defy the physics WE know. That would be snobbish at the least. The folks of Micronesia didn't know how our airplanes worked when they spotted them during WWII; but, they didn't assume them to be imaginary, either.

[The Duke]

Please ignore .. changing my rogue tag line!