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If these incidents were aliens, I would expect a lot more reactions from the military, politic, and financial markets. All reactions seem muted.

Secondly, why would aliens reveal themselves in such a way? Either land on the White House lawn or stay out of sight. This 50 year UFO appearances, with some but not really a lot of witnesses, don't make sense for me.

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You're trying to reason about 'alien' intelligence in terms of human traits. What makes you think they are even interested in us at all? Maybe they just came here to re-up on potassium.

You really can't reason about alien intelligence at all. Look at how hard it is for, say, a typical American to reason about a devout Muslim in Iran or vice versa. In that case we are talking about two beings of the same damn species with a lot of common history.

If aliens are coming here their motives could be anything including irrational or just non-rational.

I've speculated for a while that a "post-singularity" post-scarcity intelligence would get... bizarre... due to lack of hard scarcity constraints. It would just fan out across state space. It would be less Star Trek and more Lexx. Maybe they do make crop circles as interactive art. Maybe they do strange stuff to us to slowly convert us to their religion. Who knows? We can't know.

The planet could have been seeded with life to free bound oxygen or concentrate certain elements on the surface for easy retrieval at a later date. Semi intelligent life could have been an accident. It is probably not the case but fun to think about.

> Secondly, why would aliens reveal themselves in such a way?

It is a possibility if those “aliens” are biological humans in possession of technology far superior to anything we have now. Then you’d want to keep it a secret.

Why keep it a secret? If we somehow where able to meet humans with a technology level below ours, wouldn't it make sense to give them technology to better themselves?

Why would you give powerful and highly advanced technology to a race that is constantly fighting itself and doesn't value its native environment enough to protect it?

At least we recognize it? If there are other sentient races like ours, who's to say we aren't the best off? There's a lot of ways that races like ours can fall off the deep end (such as an actual all-out nuclear war), but it could also be possible that we're the worst off, too. Some people care about the environment, but it's hard to get started and become civilized without pollution and deforestation and all the other things that come with needing fuel- England could very well have run out of trees at some point had they not gone "oh, this is bad, let's fix this". One cannot expect the first version of an air conditioner to be 100% efficient and not leak refrigerant into the atmosphere, but over time, because of it, we have the basis for being able to send food across the entire world and populate it (at a cost [1]). We, as a race, also have the basis for very efficient power generation, in the form of nuclear reactors (my favorite kind, uranium salt, can run for a long time and are much more efficient than light water ones are, not to mention less polluting, and its failure mode is much less spectacular- they just didn’t get developed, unfortunately). As far as it goes, we’ve done pretty well, but there is, as always, room for improvement.

[1] Such as Hawaii, where everything is slightly more expensive.

When has the human instinct ever been to give away an advantage over others?

Judging by the number of times people have tried and failed to prevent knowledge of "advanced weapons" from leaking... pretty much all of human history.

leaking != giving away

No, that doesn't make sense at all. When we discover a hidden tribe in the Amazon, we don't give them iPhones and Camrys.

It could be the alien equivalent of anthropology or zoological grad students trying to study indigenous life on our planet. Encounters could be explained as them pulling drunk pranks on the natives.

I think we have so many expert people with professional equipment looking at the sky daily yet we never get any sight from them with verifiable data. It's always personal anecdotes from amateurs.

> we never get any sight from them with verifiable data

This is false. In the above example of the Nimitz, we have sighting by two professional pilots, and radar/scanner readings. This is not a lone example.

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