If the aliens are already here, it’s probably in the form of autonomous robotic interstellar space probes with a high level of artificial intelligence.
These new ideas are now percolating in the news lately. And both UFO enthusiasts and SETI scientists agree on this idea. Both camps, the two fields in practice, have had almost nothing to do with one another.
SETI often requires a graduate degree in astronomy. Its scientists tend to ignore UFO believers for requiring nothing more than a camera that takes blurry photos.
But recently, the two camps may be moving closer together. This idea stems from the hypothesis that aliens would be better served by sending robotic probes.
Relatively simple probes might intermittently surveil nascent solar systems. Solar systems with biogenic planets might be surveilled more often.
Alien probes with advanced AI’s might be placed permanently in the vicinity of planets that have reached multicellularity indicated by their oxygen-rich atmospheres or other biosignatures.
And once a permanently placed alien probe had detected artificial electromagnetic signs, indicating that one multicellular species had become technologically intelligent, it would try to decode the species.
But even if granted its immense onboard AI capabilities, it would still take time for the aliens to decode Homo sapiens’ languages, science, and culture.
Then the local probe needs to send data back to its home base for deeper analysis and instructions on how to proceed.
When we hear from a local alien probe, its transmissions may be in a familiar terrestrial language after it has decoded us.
The dialogue will occur in near real-time, as opposed to the painstakingly slow dialogue between us and an alien civilization transmitting from a star at thousands of light-years distance.
A fully autonomous AI probe would be able to communicate between the aliens and us.
The solution for this communication would be to string communication nodes in close proximity to one another, maybe one in orbit around every star, and located at a sufficient distance from the star to use the gravity lens.
The store of information would grow with time regardless of whether the contributing alien civilizations persist or have gone extinct.
ET may wish to recruit us so that we might manufacture probes and nodes and take obligation for the maintenance of the interstellar communication system within our immediate stellar alien friends.
SETI scientists now recognize with UFOers that the first alien detection plausibly could occur within our own solar system.
They both also agree that if some UFO sightings are genuine sightings of aliens, then they must be of robotic AI probes rather than crafts crewed by biological beings.