One of the reasons you can't understand why, "smart people have fallen for this," is because you are not well researched in the area. The extraterrestrial hypothesis is one in a 'forest of hypothesis', which is no longer favored by researchers. Arguing against the reality of "little men from outer space" is about as useful as arguing against evil spirits as the cause of disease!
People understand now that the vast size of the universe across time and space makes it almost a certainty that we are one of many intelligent civilizations in our universe. What people miss is that same grand scale makes it vanishingly unlikely we will ever meet one. In 3.5 billion years of life on earth, we have had a civilization that could use radio waves only for the last 150. A similar civilization on a planet near enough that we could plausibly even detect them could have achieved radio transmission 3 million years ago and died out 1 million years ago, or may not arise for another 3 million. The odds that two intelligent space traveling civilizations will arise in geographical and temporal proximity such that they can be aware of each other are probably extremely small.
The simple reason why we are being inundated with pro-UFO content now is that
a) America is certainly experimenting with drones and top secret aircraft that are easier than ever for people to observe (we all have cameras now)
b) other nations — and particularly our opponents on the global stage — have the power to deploy small aircraft, drones balloons, etc. in our airspace (let us not forget the 2023 Chinese balloon incident) that would be better attributed to aliens
If (when?) we find aliens, they will most likely be microbial beings on the surfaces of neighboring planets. It’s fun to speculate about this, more fun to entertain crackpots, but it’s only fun.
Came here to mention the Chinese balloon thing. I actually know someone whose hobbyist weather balloon was shot down with a missile during that time. Woulda been so much cooler if the balloon were an alien space probe
One of the reasons you can't understand why, "smart people have fallen for this," is because you are not well researched in the area. The extraterrestrial hypothesis is one in a 'forest of hypothesis', which is no longer favored by researchers. Arguing against the reality of "little men from outer space" is about as useful as arguing against evil spirits as the cause of disease!
People understand now that the vast size of the universe across time and space makes it almost a certainty that we are one of many intelligent civilizations in our universe. What people miss is that same grand scale makes it vanishingly unlikely we will ever meet one. In 3.5 billion years of life on earth, we have had a civilization that could use radio waves only for the last 150. A similar civilization on a planet near enough that we could plausibly even detect them could have achieved radio transmission 3 million years ago and died out 1 million years ago, or may not arise for another 3 million. The odds that two intelligent space traveling civilizations will arise in geographical and temporal proximity such that they can be aware of each other are probably extremely small.
The simple reason why we are being inundated with pro-UFO content now is that
a) America is certainly experimenting with drones and top secret aircraft that are easier than ever for people to observe (we all have cameras now)
b) other nations — and particularly our opponents on the global stage — have the power to deploy small aircraft, drones balloons, etc. in our airspace (let us not forget the 2023 Chinese balloon incident) that would be better attributed to aliens
If (when?) we find aliens, they will most likely be microbial beings on the surfaces of neighboring planets. It’s fun to speculate about this, more fun to entertain crackpots, but it’s only fun.
Came here to mention the Chinese balloon thing. I actually know someone whose hobbyist weather balloon was shot down with a missile during that time. Woulda been so much cooler if the balloon were an alien space probe
A poor ending for balloon and missile alike.
Or, you know, it's just regarded slop being fed to a world that lives in uninteresting times.
I wouldn’t call these times uninteresting…