It would be similar to when Columbus discovered the new world. Earth shattering at first and ho hum after.

It could be humans that were sucked into a wormhole decades ago. Like the land bridge around Alaska and Russia, but higher dimensional travel.

Pretty much zero.

All the images and videos I’ve seen have mundane explanations and are pretty much just misinterpretations of lens, lighting, and visual effects.

If actual strong evidence was disclosed, that it really would be unreasonable to dismiss alien visitations to Earth—I think we’d see a mix of mass hysteria, mass incredulity, and even more conspiracism.

I’d probably want the aliens to share some technological insights into how we can produce vast amounts of cheap and sustainable energy, or at least for them to give us some tangible and significant contribution to solve our major social and ecological problems. Otherwise they might as well just fuck off back whence they came.

--@reddeerguy2....the land bridge was not around Russia and Alaska. It was between them, allowing for human migration to the new world._

The impact on sex with astronomers would be astronomical.

Some of the military witness accounts seem not to have mundane explanations, to me.

@Zaku – I certainly hope so ;p
@RedDeerGuy1 – Interesting comparisons. But not sure Native people think the consequences after Columbus have been “ho hum”.
@Kropotkin – Maybe, maybe not. I think the problem up to now has been that much of the evidence collected hasn’t been publicly disclosed, or subject to serious investigation & analysis.
@Dutchess_III – That’s still some pretty high dimensional travel ;)

Just because they drive flashy vehicles doesn’t mean they will be advanced. They could be primitive knuckle dragging specimens who barely know how to open the doors of their spaceships which were probably bought for them by their parents anyway.

@flutherother – You could be right… dammit.
When am I gonna get abducted by an alien who really cares?!!

As soon as one of those objects sets down (for whatever reason in a populated location the lid will be off. But I think more attention should be dedicated to things beyond objects in the sky. For example focus on the deciphering the physical implications for anything exhibiting such fantastic capabilities as the objects thus far documented. We understand how to project the “appearance” that an object executes 90 degree turns at hypersonic speed. You can do it with something of zero mass, a beam from a light source for instance. I also believe there may be dimensional and time discoveries awaiting us which will alter our understanding of “extra terrestrial”.

@stanleybmanly – Intriguing.

I think the possibility that these objects could be from another time dimension – instead of some other planet – is worth more thought.

And there is the additional fact that what we see and track in the sky like everything else, is our brain’s best interpretation of what is there. It is increasingly being recognized that it is the function of our brains to provide explanations of reality which conform with what we know and expect.

They would never declassify documents that did.

ScyFy fan here, I would be surprised if they admitted to hiding it. Unless it got ugly quick.
But I watched Skywalker Ranch and love it, so personally I’d be interested.
Can we wait until Covid is done though?! Now is not a good time.

@ragingloli – No. But you would ;p

@KNOWITALL – Yeah, finding any government that gives people the whole truth is like looking for a unicorn.

BUT, if you follow the links I included with this question it leads to some pretty interesting statements from current & former officials.

I’m with close to zero.

My magic 8-ball says “very doubtful.”

@Everyone – And if you think that disclosure of any evidence is unlikely, do you feel that it may in fact exist?

Zero.

Here you go

I think the videos we’ve seen are either video/lense artifacts, or may in fact be classified experimental aircraft/drones (possibly foreign). Imagine this thing flying over your house in the late 70’s before it was revealed to the public…

I’d say that the odds are nanoscopically small.
Even If they had a craft that could travel at 26,784,000 mph, it would take them about 100 years to travel here from the nearest star.

I’d say the odds are considerably higher, for them to send or to have sent an unattended probe.
However, if some terrestrials retrieved one of them, that in itself would be huge news.

If an ET probe landed in one of my yards, then the personal impact would be major. I bet even the cast of The Big Bong Theory would drop by for Buxom Bri’s Probe Party! ;-D
Of course I’d invite you, JLoo, but on one condition: you’d have to work security for my doors to repel any Chuckies surnamed Lorre or Sheen, looking to crash our blast. ;-p
Go JLo, GO- dunk those dorks! ;-D

Alas, Bri’s blast would be the end of human civilization. ;-0

@Brian1946 – Probability is one thing – probing is something else ;)

I’m gonna keep watching the skies…

I understand. I myself have probably been probed.

Let’s hope that they don’t become Dark Skies!

The other way to think about it is if advanced aliens do exist out there (likely so IMO) then there are 4 possibilities:

1. They’ve never bothered to visit because we’re not particularly interesting (likely).
2. They have visited (in person or via probe) and didn’t reveal themselves.
3. When they do visit they will make themselves known (either via a massive attack, or just being totally conspicuous). Or
4. They visited and tried to be stealthy about it, but they were no match for our advanced human technology and we got them on camera (possible but least likely).

5. They visit and don’t reveal themselves entirely, but occasionally interact in limited ways for whatever reasons. Perhaps like when someone teases a bug out of curiosity to see what it will do.

@Zaku In all likelihood, they could do that and not be seen, if they were trying to be sneaky about it. I would argue that 5 is really 2.

We can’t read the Washington Post article in Europe and Brennan isn’t saying much except that he’s keeping an open mind on the subject. All he acknowledges is that objects have been seen that haven’t been identified and he isn’t ruling any explanation out, which is only sensible.

In the interview, Brennan didn’t sound like someone who had evidence of alien visitations and I don’t believe there is any. There isn’t any proof that aliens haven’t visited the Earth either but that is something different.

But who know, they may arrive tomorrow.

@flutherother – You mean you can’t read the Washington Post article because…YOU’RE ALIENS??!

I rest my case.

We can read it but have to pay 5 euros every four weeks to do so which isn’t happening.

@gorillapaws They could do that and not be seen, in which case that would be 2. Or they could do 5, where they do intentionally reveal something but not everything, for whatever reasons they might choose to do that.

@JLoon Asked “And if you think that disclosure of any evidence is unlikely, do you feel that it may in fact exist?” I do think disclosure is unlikely, even assuming that the powers that be really know anything to disclose, in the first place. That said, yes, I believe they exist. Not necessarily E.T. Call Home types buzzing around in 50s era “B” movie type saucers, but yes, I believe that life exists elsewhere out in space some somewhere. I mean, if life could evolve here, why couldn’t it have happened elsewhere? Otherwise, that is one hell of a waste of space. No pun intended. And in fact, the idea that we are the ONLY planet in the Cosmos with intelligent life (Or life at any rate, it is up for debate how intelligent we are) scares the crap out of me for some reason. It’s just eerie and spooky. So, I WANT to believe there is something else out there, let’s put it like that. Humor me.

@Nomore_lockout That some life may exist in the vast cosmos is more likely than super intelligent beings travelling from star systems many light years away, just to be caught flitting about on grainy video with such ambiguity that they’re interpretable as some artifact of lighting, the lens, or some other instrument.

Though I’m not personally convinced that there is technologically advanced life anywhere else. I’m leaning more toward the Rare Earth hypothesis recently.

@Kropotkin I hope you are right. Even knuckle dragging ape men, lizards or freaking worms, would be a more comforting thought than a big – Nothing. To me anyway.

@Everyone – As most of you replying on this post have understood, the point of my question was to invite opinions and hopefully to encourage intelligent discussion. For those who may feel that they still lack enough info to make any comment, here’s a download link to the actual report from the Director of National Intelligence titled “Preliminary Assessment – Unidentified Aerial Phenomena”:

https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Prelimary-Assessment-UAP-20210625.pdf

Unclassified and released on June 25, 2021, it’s just 9 pages long. There are no solid conclusions that either confirm or disprove extraterrestrial origin for the objects referenced in the report. But it is clear that the number of recorded sightings by military and other government sources has been increasing since 2004.

And that report could be smoke and mirrors, to throw the public off from sightings of classified military toys. Who knows what kind of crap they are hiding from us. And I mean earthly, military grade human stuff, not Plan 9 From Outer Space.

@JLoon I think the probability of interstellar travel is rather low.

There are vast energy requirements, and feasibility issues. We’re talking decades of travel at close to the speed of light.

Maybe there are aliens than can manipulate spacetime and just warp anywhere they like without experiencing relativistic effects, but now we’re in the realms of speculation and unknown or maybe impossible physics, and so this is even less likely.

And whatever method of getting here, why would they go to all the effort just to randomly flit around airforce pilots? It stretches plausibility.

We’ve also not found any astronomical evidence of advanced alien civilisations. If they’re out there, then they don’t seem to be particularly near.

@Zaku ”…Or they could do 5, where they do intentionally reveal something but not everything, for whatever reasons they might choose to do that.”

It’s certainly not impossible, but it really begs belief. Any hypotheses for what those reasons might be?

@JLoon I would want to exhaust all reasonable terrestrial explanations before involving interstellar visitors. Experimental aircraft/drone seems a lot more probable.

@gorillapaws I can imagine many, most having to do with curiosity. When I used to play with ants as a kid, they seemed to be essentially unaware that I was there, but I would tease them with various stimulation that was way beyond their abilities, but I was curious to see how they’d react, so I’d poke them or relocate them or do other things they didn’t understand.

Star Trek pulls similar stunts pretty often, showing up at lower-tech planets where their own doctrine tells them not to reveal themselves, but they end up interacting anyway, sometimes incidentally causing the locals to see some inexplicable stuff. There’s even a TOS episode where a USAF pilot spots The Enterprise when it goes back in time.

Those are of course at least partly just science fiction imitating UFO/alien scenarios, but it seems to me they do make some sense.

And it seems to me that anthropologists often take a somewhat similar approach when they visit much lower-tech people to study them. They might show them a thing or two that aren’t part of their experience, but I don’t think they break out world maps or televisions or try to educate them about their modern global perspectives, because that would tend to mess with the culture they’re interested in studying and not wanting to disrupt.

Why wouldn’t it make sense that a visitor might not have some probes that they partly reveal, either intentionally or accidentally? I expect they might have some challenge to understand our behavior and way of thinking, and might want to study how we react to things.

I just read the question again and was wondering that if extraterrestrials visited us in our distant past, should we now have to refer to them as primitive instead of advanced?

@Zaku My issue with what I’ll call the ‘deliberately elusive alien hypothesis’ is that interstellar travel necessarily requires vasts amount of energy, and that would very likely leave a detectable signal to us with our current technology.

Such aliens wouldn’t just need to get here using whatever exotic fuel and propulsion systems that let them reach and slow down from near lightspeeds, or somehow warp spacetime itself, they’d also need to hide the fact they’re doing so, which just adds another layer of improbability.

@Kropotkin “That would very likely leave a detectable signal to us with our current technology.”

I would think it’s more likely that if a civilization had the advanced technology to travel vast interstellar distances, they would also have the technology to remain hidden—if that was their intention.

It’s the ‘deliberately elusive-yet sloppily executed-alien hypothesis” that I find to be exceedingly unlikely. It might make for a good Star Trek episode with interesting conflicts and tension, but even those aren’t particularly believable.

You need to look at something in order to see it.
Even if aliens could not mask their approach, and the spacetime distortions generated some sort of warp drive were detectable, 1: you would only see that through the refraction of star light (if at all. And I doubt a distortion of may a few hundred metres would even be detectable), 2: you would already need to be looking at that region of space, 3: you would only have a very small window of time where you would be able to see it, and 4: you would then have to first exclude all other natural explanations for what you are seeing.

If there are aliens who can practically travel from star to star, then:

1) They probably developed that ability at least thousands, or quite possibly hundreds of thousands, or even millions, possibly billions of years ago. Our industrial technology is only a few hundred years old, and we’re idiotically acting like we know practically everything and deceiving ourselves that we’re not liable to kill ourselves off with our own stupidity.
.... So their technology is going to be not only vastly more advanced than our is – it’s also likely to be something we haven’t even thought of, using principles of the universe that we don’t understand. Avoiding easily-recognized electromagnetic emissions is probably not a huge hurdle.

2) The sloppy part, however, seems plausible to me because I can easily imagine that such visitors might not entirely care enough to make their complete concealment infallible (particularly at close range), and/or they might actually choose to show us some signs, perhaps because if they’re curious enough to visit us, they may be curious enough to think to show us something to observe how we react. For whatever reasons. They’re aliens, so we’re not going to be able to accurately understand their thinking and behavior just by speculating and projecting, nor reason that they don’t exist because we can’t think of an explanation ourselves for why they’d cause a UFO.

Sorry to be late on this. Before you go taking this seriously read or listen to these
https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4787
https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4788