I'm going to start with the sensible explanation. Imagine it is the nineteen fifties or there about. You are visited by strange things with odd powers. How do you interpret this phenomena? Some vehicle traveled between the stars and arrived on Earth. Said vehicle has unknown propulsion methods that allow it to accelerate without reaction mass or G-forces. These physics defying craft are traveling at night to interact with humans. Some of the time they are witnessed because they glow. Some of the time they abduct people and small grey humanoids personally conduct medical examinations and other stranger actions. People are restrained by inexplicable psychic means. All of this is part of a grand conspiracy by extraterrestrials to do something to humanity while remaining secret until they do that thing. Occasionally, a space ship crashes and the government covers it up for some reason. All of this is the standard explanation of the entire ET UFO phenomena. X-files has this as the overarching plot. Lots of other media uses it. It's bordering on cliche at this point in history.

When this whole thing started humans were going down in submersibles to look at the deep sea. People went places to do things. If you needed to reach a location you got in a car or an aircraft. The state of the art was about rockets and speed of travel. A more advance civilization would naturally have vehicles orders of magnitude better. If they wanted to understand something they would be going to get samples.

We're at the point technologically where this whole narrative breaks down. While we've seen improvements in vehicular speed and power they have been fairly piecemeal compared to the transitions from the nineteen forties to the nineteen seventies. What we've managed in spades is miniaturization and data storage and transmission. Submersibles are unmanned and operate way longer. Same for bombers. While we have no idea how far down we can go with miniaturization living organisms show that molecular scale mechanisms are possible. It's conceivable that a technological species could end up traveling down very different pathways and missing options but the degree of negligence implied by manned craft crashing and being recovered strains credulity. In a thousand years I expect humans will be able to create house fly sized drones perfectly capable of gathering tissue samples. Extraterrestrials should be able to disperse trillions of tissue sampling devices without ever entering Earth's atmosphere. From our position on the tech ladder if aliens are undertaking a global conspiracy they are doing it while hobbling themselves or they have missed an entire swath of obvious technology for what has to be centuries of development while also accomplishing interstellar travel.

All of this is coming at the problem from the standard narrative outlined above. The assumptions made sense from the paradigm of a person living in the last century. Acknowledging this does nothing to explain whether UFO phenomena are hallucinations, some variant of ball lightening, ultraterrestrial, time travelers, or even just alien teenager hazing rites and I have no good explanations for which of those are plausible. Everything we know about physics would seem to indicate that advanced aliens will be coating stars in Dyson spheres but our past light cone seems very sparsely populated at best. Since UFOs routinely ignore physics that's not actually that informative. All of this leads me to one firm conclusion: the scouts from a technologically advance extraterrestrial civilization prepping for an invasion or introduction hypothesis is certainly wrong. All other bets are still on.

IRON NODER XVII: ALL'S FERROUS IN LOVE AND NODING