While reading this thread I am reminded of the short story by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic, which posits the notion that we would have about as much of an understanding about the significance of stuff left behind by visiting aliens, as animals would understand what was going on with the junk left behind by people who stop by the side of the road, in a wood, for a picnic.

The odds of us being able to reverse engineer it into something even vaguely useful seems slim at best.