[importantbrian]

You just nailed the number one reason I'm always skeptical of these claims.

With our current level of technology we have not lost a major airframe in the US since 2001. Yet these beings advanced enough to fly across interstellar space get to earth and suddenly can't keep their ships in the air?

[alchemist1e9]

I’ll just point out you are making an assumption that the craft which crashed are what traveled interstellar, however that clearly isn’t necessarily true. Isn’t it more likely those are local probes and therefore might have lower specs and high tolerance for loss for example.

I also encourage those who are very skeptical to think about how we as human would likely try to explore other star systems, in fact we already have started such projects. Our first step is to send a craft that with subliminal speed takes 100s of years, but even us we think about sending a craft with smaller probes inside it.

My point is those probes inside the transport craft, we would likely have a pretty high loss tolerance, so is it really that surprising they might crash sometimes?

[hrunt]

Yet, when we send our spacecraft from one planet to another, we lose a surprisingly high percentage of them (~7% since 2000, not counting the ones we purposefully crashed).

Look, I'm beyond skeptical of the claims, but it's not because the spacecraft shouldn't crash. The most likely time to lose an airframe is on takeoff or landing, not in between, so why wouldn't the aliens have problems once they reach their destination?

[shrimpx]

I'm a hardcore UFO skeptic but to your question, maybe it's like, trivial to travel through empty space for a billion years, and much more complex to travel in high gravity navigating all kinds of spiky terrain?