I don't think tenants of the ET hypothesis all assume a MIB-style government cover-up. We don't have to believe your 1) or 2) either. Here are a few more likely

I don't think tenants of the ET hypothesis all assume a MIB-style government cover-up. We don't have to believe your 1) or 2) either. Here are a few more likely explanations: 1) ET doesn't know how to communicate with us. We don't know how to communicate with most animals on the planet, yet they share most of our DNA. How would you communicate with a being that has no notion of sound, has a sense of smell based on silicon biology, can't touch you without dying or killing you, and has a vision only in deep infrared? 2) Interstellar travel, while possible, is very expensive, so scientific expeditions behave like our own expensive scientific expeditions say, to the moon: touch, collect samples, and go. 3) There's a sort of prime directive or at least an attempt at letting us evolve in our own way. As for the faking argument, it's like saying that because there's been a few Titanic movies, the Titanic didn't exist... It's the opposite: there's interest in faking it only because there is something. Otherwise, we'd also routinely see fake witches, fake angels and daemons, fake faeries, fake invisible people and fake ghosts.