[anyoneamous]

Years ago, I remember reading a suggestion that when the government needed to release information about alien life, they would start by "leaking" hints to gradually acclimatize people to the idea.

I now wish I hadn't seen that, as it makes it really hard to dismiss this topic when it starts to appear all over the sites I regularly browse.

[cthalupa]

Just remember that the technology to travel across interstellar space safely is much more demanding than the technology required not to crash into the planet or avoid being seen by cameras that are always inexplicably taking photos or videos that are 10+ years out of date compared to what the average consumer has available to them.

Also a lack of multiple angles on just about every single photo/video, too, despite everyone having cameras in their phones now for two decades.

[Timon3]

There are a couple of explanations for crashed vehicles, I'll ignore any videos here:

- could be Von Neumann-style probes that don't care about collisions

- could be willingly "crashed" to speed development up

- could have been attacked by other species to prevent intervention

- could be inexperienced (e.g. young) pilots

I'd 100% assume that any kind of FTL vehicle also has some kind of cloaking functionality, so I wouldn't trust any photos or videos without a lot of further evidence. Just wanted to mention possible reasons - it's not 0% possible, more like 0.000[some more zeros]001%.

[anyoneamous]

Also, the fact that these observations are overwhelmingly made in the US, as if aliens only care about 1 continent.

[DaSHacka]

Well clearly we're just so great