Great links, thanks—although it was indeed a bad example on my part, it’s a great example of the kind of good science we need to sift the wheat from the chaff. Unfortunately, at this point, it takes international recognition to get footage put through a thorough analysis like this. But if the people who claim to have extraordinary experiences, and the scientific community, could come to a cease-fire, then we’re going to learn some interesting things. We’ll learn a lot more about atmospheric effects, and we may even learn that some of these sightings are of truly extraordinary origin. Derision and dismissal aren’t going to teach us anything new, but investigation is profitable.

First of all, there have been loads of naked eye observations, and some fraction of the thousands of captured images offer something of real interest.

And consider this—if there are, say, one to six craft visiting our planet for a few minutes per year, the odds are witheringly small that we’re going to observe them with professional telescopes or cameras. A fast-moving object between say 10 and 30 meters across is going to be really tough to spot.

Night sightings are fairly easy to dismiss for reasons like those you discovered—even if someone did see an object of alien origin at night, it would be essentially impossible to prove. What I saw occurred at 3pm on a bright cloudless day—those events are much harder to explain, because the object either has to be reflective or emitting a lot of light, to be seen so brightly in mid-day. Add to that, a seeming disregard for momentum, and it’s a beguiling puzzle.

I always feel like an ancient Greek when considering issues like this—think of how steeply our perspectives on travel have changed in just two thousand years. I don’t think we even know how to ask the right questions regarding interstellar travel yet. We’ve only reached space now for a few decades. We can’t even fathom how we’ll think about this issue in a thousand years. But for argument’s sake, what if they have great medicine, and can live for several hundred years or longer? Also, doesn’t GR predict that if you travel close to C, time will pass more slowly on board your craft, so that from your POV, you can reach a star a few light years away with only a few hours of subjective travel time? If your home base ages a few hundred years while your away, maybe that matters less to a civilization that’s tens of thousands of years old and where the people live several hundred or thousands of years. And that’s all assuming that we don’t make some radical revisions to our physics along the way, which isn’t a bet I’d want to make, given our recent scientific history—today’s ‘impossibility’ is tomorrow’s toy.

Pretty high if ‘they’ have been traipsing around the galaxy for quite some time, and higher if they’ve had a scout ship within about fifty light years anytime recently, given the endless stream of radiowaves trickling away from our planet.

We still keep tabs on remote aboriginal tribes—why wouldn’t they do the same? Especially if they know we’re going to be heading into the big city sometime soon ;)

Funny. But poignant too—I really wonder how much of our resistance to the idea that we’re being visited is attributable to our egos—I don’t think many people like the idea of coming this far, only to find that we still haven’t crawled out of the cradle. I wouldn’t mind it though—if humanity is the shining jewel of the Milky Way, it would be a very disappointing state of affairs.