Let’s assume for the moment that these are not erroneous sensors or secret domestic/foreign tech. Two facts to build upon: 1) We have seen them on Earth 2) W

Let’s assume for the moment that these are not erroneous sensors or secret domestic/foreign tech. Two facts to build upon: 1) We have seen them on Earth 2) We have seen them nowhere else. This means that although they have sufficiently advanced technology and desire to hide from us across the entire universe, they do not have sufficiently advanced technology and/or desire to hide from us on Earth. So there’s the contradiction: either they want to hide from us but can’t, or they don’t want to hide from us but have. In either case, the contradiction suggests these hypothetical not-erroneous-and-not-secret-tech sightings are also not extraterrestrial. If not aliens, then what? I see two options that fulfill the condition of either not desiring to hide from us, or not being able to, while avoiding the question of why we see no evidence for intelligent life in the rest of the universe. Both rely on locality being fixed to Earth: - human time travelers - simulation experimenters In the first case, if time-travel is possible, then the only sightings of time-travelers would be those that do not cause grandfather paradoxes — i.e., they would only travel to the past with such a low-profile that they wouldn’t endanger their own future visits to us. Moreover, if time-travel is possible, it is plausible that future humans would be technologically advanced enough to develop time-travel without being sufficiently advanced to hide from us completely. As unlikely as this seems, it is still more likely than aliens having the power to hide from us everywhere except on earth. The second possibility is even more fascinating. Why would simulators of our universe need to virtually plug-in and take a joy ride? They wouldn’t, of course. But if they went through the trouble of simulating us, it isn’t hard to imagine them fiddling with their experiment to whatever end it is they have. Laws of physics wouldn’t apply to their fiddling. In this wild scenario, the experiment wouldn’t be generic, but specific: manipulating the simulation so that a lot of people end up talking and thinking about aliens visiting Earth. Beyond those basic conclusions, we’d have to peer into the motivations and goals of the gods, which seems as fruitful as it seemed thousands of years ago. When the only plausible non-explainable explanations resort to time-travel and gods, you know the initial hypothesis is incorrect. Beyond erroneous sensors, the real reason for these sightings is our existential angst as it becomes more and more obvious we are alone in this universe. We want to believe.