Alien Reality Check

Just because one goof committed perjury in front of congressional committee means nothing. The "U" in UFO/UFA stands for "unidentified". It stops being unidentified when you know what it is. It's nothing new. The U.S. air force investigations into UFOs from 1954 to 1969, called Project BLUE BOOK, are all publicly available from archive.gov, including the 700+ cases that actually remained unidentified. It's so fucking public that there has been more than one TV series about it and a shit-ton of documentaries. Nothing was "admitted." People just hear what they want to and can't remember last week.

If something is extraterrestrial it's necessarily extrasolar because we've had close-up looks at every decent-sized object in the solar system and even without those close-up looks any civilisation capable of interplanetary travel would be easily observable with equipment that anyone can get their hands on. No goverment could hide that. We, as a species, are barely able to get people to the moon safely, and getting to the next planet over is a thousand times harder than that. A civilisation that could pull off routine non-robotic interplanetary trips would already be way more advanced than us on a number of things, not the least of which would be energy generation. Politics and economics being what they are countries would be climbing over eachother to secure trading rights and millitary alliances. There'd be propaganda campaigns about how the aliens like "us" and don't like "them", blah, blah, blah. Not to mention that the country that put the first human in space is in a war right now where they are getting screwed up by having roads and railways blown up, getting their tanks blown up by toy helicopters and getting their ships fucked up by remote-control jet-skis. So no alien civilisations in the solar system for sure.

So what about interstellar aliens? It's literally billions of times harder to do interstellar travel than interplanetary travel. An interplanetary civilisation would already be way better at generating energy than we are. The energy required to accellerate a decent mass (say about the size of a cruise ship) to a relativistic speed exceeds the total energy production of the entire human race — and I mean TOTAL: every power plant; every car, truck, train and plane engine; every water-wheel and windmill; every camp-fire, candle, and blue-fart since modern humans evolved ~200,000 years ago. And that is using the *easiest* way to get from A to B at stellar distances. Sci-fi workarounds like bending space take *more* energy. If we actually had any technology from a civilisation capable of interstellar travel we wouldn't still be digging up rotted ferns from 300 million years ago to burn or using glowing rocks to boil water in places like Fukushima and Chernobyl. The energy required for the transmutation of elements (e.g. turning lead into gold) would be trivial. So would creating a fallout-free weapons that could flatten a city, or a country, or a continent for that matter, and we're still here. And the people "we" don't like are still here.

Nobody has alien tech.