It's fine to say stuff about how everything's connected, etc - but none of it actually convinces me of anything. That's just my opinion.
I don't believe that aliens are visiting Earth. I've always believed UFO's to be man-made. I think it's the military testing prototype aircraft or propulsion systems, and sometimes things go wrong and people spot them at it. That's why they get so testy about the subject. It's also why these things are most often seen in remote areas, late at night. They choose remote areas to test this stuff, which makes perfect sense.
It's also worth mentioning that human cultures such as the ancient Egyptians are believed to have used hot-air balloons to have surveyed the areas where they built their cities, pyramids, etc. The same claim has been made for ancient cultures in South America (Nazca, etc). The history of air-travel might not be so brief, and we Westerners often underestimate ancient cultures in surprising ways. Just because they had engineering skills we cannot fathom or emulate doesn't mean they had help from aliens - it just means they were a
whole lot more sophisticated than we like to give them credit for.
The idea that human civilisations prior to our own possessed some form of heavier-than-air flight seems more likely to me than the whole Erich von Däniken thing, which presupposes the ignorance of any culture which didn't originate in Europe. Erich von Däniken was like a modern-day Antiquarian, attempting to somehow 'explain' artefacts from cultures he knew next to nothing about. His ideas were based on other people's theories, and Carl Sagan was scathing about how "sloppy" von Däniken's thinking was. Erich von Däniken was a convicted fraud and a convicted thief long before he became a successful author (in which role the fraud he perpetrated was completely legal).
I know it's tempting to look at stuff like the Avro Car or Stealth Bomber and think "they back engineered alien craft!", but I don't buy it.
The stuff von Däniken mentions - such as the Vimana which were the literal 'Chariots of the Gods' - needn't have been of 'alien' origin.
Applying Occam's razor (yes, I know everyone hates me for doing it, but here I go again), it seems much more believable to me that human cultures in ages past figured out how to build aircraft than the 'alien vistors' hypothesis does.
If the Wright brothers could figure it out, why couldn't someone else have done so? Leonardo da Vinci put a lot of thought into the concept and it wasn't even a new idea when he was working on it five hundred years before the Wright brothers did it. The perception that the people in the 'Flying Chariots' were 'Gods' isn't hard to explain, either. Look at the Cargo Cult phenomenon for example -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult
Now, if a more technologically sophisticated culture comes into contact with a less technologically sophisticated one we have evidence of what happens. You get something like a Cargo Cult. We know this has happened in the 20th Century. It's documented.
We have
some documentation which
suggests other cultures have been capable of some form of air travel in the distant past - if less advanced cultures encountered them, these people would likely be seen as supernatural or 'Godlike' to the less sophisticated observers. The Vimana of the ancient Vedic Texts are 'floating fortresses'...could they have been airships? It's certainly less far-fetched than alien visitation, for my money.
I'm more willing to believe that human beings in the past were much more inventive and sophisticated than we assume, than I am to think that aliens are visiting the Earth for some unknown reason.
If these aliens are so incredibly advanced, how could any human government possibly control their actions or keep their presence a secret? It doesn't make sense to me.
If they're coming here...what for? What would they want with us? I also find it unbelievable that they'd look anything like us; that only happens in Star Trek.
The 'abductee' thing is another odd one - people who describe being abducted by aliens relate experiences
very similar to the ones described by people in ancient cultures who were kidnapped by the faerie folk, or Gods, demons, gnomes, trolls, etc. People describe being taken to a strange place, where time works differently, and small odd-looking men scamper about doing all sorts of strange things to them, etc. If you read accounts by people who've been taken to some supernatural realm in the distant past, then read some accounts of alien abductees, you'll see the similarities pile up. It may be some form of response to trauma (the mind creates certain scenes based on archetypal images to mask a horrifying or psychologically painful event), or it might be an undiagnosed form of psychiatric illness, or a type of hallucination triggered by a range of factors we haven't yet identified. All of this is speculation...but it's less unlikely, by far, than the idea that aliens are kidnapping people and then performing medical experiments on them and putting them back in bed without anyone noticing, etc.
All in all, it all sounds so unlikely as to be unbelievable to me. That's just my personal opinion.
