[tootie]

Of course, everything is just something boring. The chances of us espying extraterrestrials in our atmosphere by chance are essentially nil. People looking for secret photos and buried evidence will absolutely positively never find it. People inside the DoD are just as crazy and irrational as the general public if not moreso. If a flying saucer lands in your front yard and little green men come out and say "take me to your leader" it's still infinitesimally likely that it's actually aliens. Meeting aliens will be nothing like any movie or book ever written (except maybe Contact).

[api]

If we are being visited we would never see them unless they decided to show themselves, and if they did it would be absolutely unambiguous.

Someone with the tech to travel the stars (or something weirder like between dimensions) could make probes the size of bugs, sand, or dust. They could also image us at incredible resolution from afar, receive all our signals, and so on. They might be able to do even weirder and crazier forms of surveillance we don’t even understand yet, like high resolution imaging with neutrinos or gravity waves.

They could study us all they wanted and we’d never know.

Look into how advanced some of our spy tech is, and we have barely left our planet.

[tootie]

Or just manipulate our senses.

[cookiengineer]

I mean, there is still people who think that a UFO was sighted in Roswell at the radar testing site of Area 51.

Imagine that, 70ish years later there is people that cannot grasp how modern the A-12 prototype was. [1]

In my opinion the US has a real scientific education problem. So much so that people still think that alien life that built machines so advanced that they can bridge distances over lightyears travel time... just the belief that they will remotely resemble our appearance anyhow is statistically so close to 0 that I have no words to express how unlikely it is to happen. You have a greater chance getting hit every millisecond of your life by a lightning strike than this being the case.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_A-12