My mother and grandmother both saw a UFO in West Virginia when my mother was very small, and they both still remember it. They were walking down the street one afternoon and a bright light seemed to follow them, and when they stopped at the corner and turned onto another street the light did a 90 degree turn as well. They started to get scared and run, and the light followed them, apparently disappearing before they reached home. Neither of them has any idea what it could have been.
I think there’s some compelling evidence that alien life has visited this planet, yet the sheer number of faked sightings and simple public incredulity is enough to lead most people to conclude that it hasn’t happened. Many governments have half-admitted that strange things are going on in the skies, but nobody wants to put their reputation on the line or provide the extraordinary amount of evidence required to back up such an extraordinary claim. It is often covered-up, compartmentalized, and eventually forgotten.
Now I don’t necessarily think that alien life traversed the cosmos and just so happened to land on Earth. There’s a lot about science and consciousness that we don’t know. I expect that most sightings are caused by natural atmospheric phenomena, hallucinations, and human technology. For the few that remain, I suspect that they may be alien in origin.
Of course, SETI and other programs have had very little success in this department. There has to be a reason that we haven’t received any response to our messages, and my theory is that life doesn’t exist for very long in any form resembling that of humans. If it did, and sentient life forms such as humans existed in large quantities and for long periods of time, one would expect the cosmos to be filled with alien spaceships and civilizations contacting each other with radio and visible light radiation.
Furthermore, this should be taken into account. In short, it is more likely that we are, by number, a common type of alien on an uncommonly large world. The analogy used is one of countries on Earth. If we were to randomly be assigned a country of origin, we would likely be born in China or India, since they have high populations. Moreover, since most people on Earth originate on those two countries, these countries must be large enough to support such a large population. Thus, our planet is likely to be larger and more populous than average, with most planets supporting intelligent life being smaller and less populous. Earth is essentially the China of the cosmos, with most planets being like Denmark or Sweden. Since the gravity of those planets is lessened, the intelligent life would on average be larger. Also, and this is only my speculation, since there is decreased gravity, any smaller planet with an atmosphere would have more particulate matter in that atmosphere, leading to much greater cloud cover. Such species wouldn’t be able to search the heavens as easily as we do, so most of the galactic exploration is done by a relatively small number of large planets with much smaller than average aliens. There may be a reason why the popular conception of an alien is of a small humanoid with a large braincase.
Anyway, those are my rambling and speculative thoughts on the subject. 😃