“I agree, its more likely they’d be from this solar system and were part of some civilization from the distant past.”
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Aside from the fact that I don’t trust most of the accounts anyway, if there truth to the phenomenon being observed, I prefer occams razor. The most probable is that what is being observed is man-made technology, of various types. What appear to be crafts moving extremely fast and changing direction have no mass at all. They are projections or illusions.
But to me, what you just mentioned would be the second most likely. They are not extra-terrestrial at all. If we are going to use the evolutionary model, primates have been around for millions and millions of years, then in several thousand years stood up, and a much much shorter period of time grew huge craniums. The span of that time compared to the history of life on earth is virtually instantaneous. So why should we assume that never happened before, in hundreds of millions of years? If that did happen though, why did they seem to bug out from the surface of the planet?
There are other possibilities of course, but the least likely, to me, is they just zing on over from distant systems whenever they want. Even if any intelligence became advanced enough to know how to traverse interstellar distances (wormholes, folding, whatever) the investment to repeat this process would mean it is not something you would do regularly. Hence, it is more likely they would ‘station’ or stage here, or near here.
Its a fascinating issue with even more fascinating possibilities.
“occams razor”
This has been used to cut the cognitive throats of creative humans for many centuries.
It is the weird data that is the key to future scientific revolutions.