In terms of scientific evidence, there really isn't any. There's a lot of personal accounts and anecdotal evidence, but nothing that can be independently verified or tested.

It may be the nature of the beast, or it may be mass delusion. Either way, until there is independent verification, it's going to remain fringe.

These kinds of "sightings" are reported to my department all the time. The problem is, there is no way for me to say what exactly you saw or what anyone saw unless it was a green flash or some other naturally understood phenomena that fits the description. There are any number of natural and manmade phenomena that can explain a "pair of lights" and "fast acute-angle maneuvers". I'm sorry I cannot offer you anything better than that.

What I can say is that there is an entire community of professional and amateur astronomers that watch the skies on a daily basis: both daytime and nighttime. If this phenomena were as supposedly ubiquitous as is claimed, it could only mean that we were all in a massive cover-up conspiracy sponsored for some reason I can only guess at.

I look at the sky for hours nearly every night and oftentimes for hours during the day. I have yet to see something that was truly puzzling.

This is, of course, the so-called "Zoo Hypothesis" resolution to Fermi's Paradox.

One thing that should be realized is that we don't have a good objective measure for "life" let alone "intelligent" life. The only attempt to do that was made by the Drake Equation, and that little bit of flight-of-fancy basically has no scientific value whatsoever. There's no way to tell what "life" would look like, whether it would consider "communication" important, or whether it would develop "technology" in the anthropomorphic sense we developed technology. Basically, all you can say is that we only have one datapoint, and extrapolation beyond this is highly prone to error.

I have a friend who is a sociologist who studies this phenomenon. It is a fact that the interest in UFOs increased when human beings began spaceflight. Suddenly, people spent more time looking at the sky, but in our modern world the "sky" was an unfamiliar place. People who weren't used to looking at the sky were suddenly forced to try to explain phenomena and observed flying objects that they had no expertise in identifying. It's no wonder that these objects were "unidentified".

I wouldn't say that as of yet. Spectral data can indicate the presence of a dusty disk, but that hardly indicated an Earth-like planet.

Of course, everyone is entitled to their opinion. However, this particular opinion is not based on scientific evidence but rather on incredulity and a jumping to conclusions that can only be described as wishful at best.

Evolution of "intelligent" life is something that has only occupied our particular ecological niche for a brief instant in biological time. There's nothing to indicate that it should be anywhere else except for idle speculation.

Actually, ours is a fairly middle-aged system.

Can you see how this is basically just going way out on a limb here? You've decided that the biology of elsewhere takes on taxonomic structure like out own (species) that there are "several" of them, that there was plenty of "time" (which is limited by the immense distances between stars), that there is a predertermined goal of "survey" for these "species", that more than one of these "species" had the same goal, that "development" of planets had to occur as a result of this, that they would have an ethos of prevention of violence, and that they would have an interaction cross-section for other supposed "intelligent life". This is just too far out on a limb -- it's fun to speculate about but there's no more reason to assume that this idea is true than an idea that all the aliens killed each other in a massive galactic war. I could name thousands of equally unsubstantiated scenarios and there would be no way for you or myself to prove the veracity of the points.

When you cannot decide based on lack of evidence, all you can say is we don't know. But one thing we do know is that if aliens are contacting human beings, they are chosing to do it in a way that carefully avoids the scientists that would be the most excited to find them.

Again, way out on a limb here.

Depends on who you talk to. There's a large contingent of MUFON folk that believe the aliens are malevolent. I'll let you argue it out with them, though.

I think it's very presumptive of you to put yourself into the shoes of something for which you have no descriptive category. You don't know what an "advance alien intelligence" is like. It's all well-and-good that you have used circular logic to declare your position sound, but make sure you are clear about it being a very personal opinion and not one easily verifiable.

Actually, I'd settle for a signal.

Of course, there are those MUFON folks that think they have left the impossible technology in the form of bits of metal in people's buttocks, for example. Who are you to claim that they are wrong?

Where'd you get the number "hundred thousand years"?

If that's the case, then I'll be more than willing to admit you're right when the time comes. Until then, the rational thing to do is point out the incredible inconsistencies.

Sorry, no dice here. I'm not going to trust eye-witness accounts because I know just how fallible an "eye-witness" testimony can be. I had a good friend of mine convicted of a crime he was later proven not to have committed because a jury decided to believe "eye witness" testimony. It's a notoriously bad source of evidence.

Well, you can kiss first contact goodbye, in this case, because blind trust has never been a move that has benefited the progress of intellectual progress.

I'm not inclined to think a "qualified" observer exists with respect to determing what, if anything, a bit of alien technology looks like.

So many forgeries, so many fakes, and so many photos that are just plain crummy makes me not accept it as evidence -- especially regarding the fact that there were apparently "photos" that have convinced people that Planet X was in our skies last year.

No. There are just too many people out there with pet ideas that are completely unverified for science to be about keeping an open mind about everything. You're going to have to content yourself with staying on the fringe. If and when scientific evidence shows up, you can have the "I told you so". But I've studied science enough to be willing to bet my entire lifesavings that scientific evidence that aliens are visiting us will not be found.