Extraterrestrials, Anybody?

An old friend is a big believer that the Earth has been visited by alien civilizations, and I’m flattered that he occasionally reaches out to me to get my perspective on articles like the one linked above.  I have two observations:

1) I have no way to authenticate the content of this or the hundreds of other papers that have been published on the subject over the past 75 years or so.  Especially in today’s world of disinformation, QAnon, etc., I’m suspicious.

2) Over the past 40 years, and especially the periods when I was an extremely frequent flier, I have asked, say, 50 gray-haired airplane pilots if they’d ever seen a UFO.  So far, I’ve gotten 49 “definitely nots” and 1 “I saw something I couldn’t explain, but I wouldn’t call it proof of an extraterrestrial aircraft.”

It’s interesting, and extremely sad, that humankind is just now arriving at the point where it’s starting to identify exoplanets that may support intelligent life–just when we’re baking our own planet, and destroying our civilization with hate and ignorance.