What do you think these sightings are, or the craft disabling nuclear missile sites is? An advanced civilization of any kind isn't going to repeatedly forget to hit the "Cloaking" button or race fighter jets if they are flying around and WANT to be unnoticed. The logical conclusion is that they want to be seen, either as direct military intimidation or as a general statement of "We will do whatever we want and you can't stop us".
Who says they don't have passive control? Not to get too conspiratorial, but our exploration and colonization as a species has stagnated since we went to the moon. The moon is basically off limits now, as is Antarctica and the deep seas, which are bound up in UN treaties and regulations to "protect resources". Seems a little strange, doesn't it?
Underwater, underground, in Antarctica, etc. The Earth is a massive, still mostly unexplored world. Underwater in particular is the best place for them to hide because water will block EMF, the only means we have to detect things remotely. The ocean alone is basically unexplored - lots of places to hide. And the craft, which have transmedium capabilities, always seem to be around bodies of water that connect to the ocean.
But if they are still biological humans, who is to say they aren't among us in secret? Spies have existed for centuries and most go undetected, so "Secrets can't be kept, someone would find out" is really not an argument. And even the ones who come forward willingly or are found and interrogated don't spill all the beans.
Beyond that, if you were in a technologically advanced society which seems to be capable of wonders, would you risk access to that to leave and "go native" with people still dependent on rotten dinosaur juice for transportation? How often did settlers just abandon everything and go live with Native Americans on their own, barring some life-or-death catastrophe?
They could be post-scarcity, which honestly seems most likely given the tech they show. Maybe they uploaded themselves into computers as well. All they would have to do is tap into deep-sea geothermal vents and they can power themselves with ease.
Aliens require a few extraordinarily unlikely things:
- They have to have found us - our EMF signature is barely 100 lightyears at this point, versus the 100,000 lightyear-diameter Milky Way and the substantially larger universe. Unless someone has been monitoring Earth since its formation, detection is unlikely, and randomly stumbling upon us is even more unlikely.
- They have to want to communicate with us - as I said before, Zorblat from Zeta Reticuli forgetting to turn on cloaking thousands of times is a ludicrous notion, so they clearly WANT us to see them. Why? If they somehow found us, their tech is even more insane than a breakaway civilization's tech would be. So why do they care about us, or would they want to intimidate us? A breakaway civilization is still tied to Earth - if we go crazy and nuke the planet, they have something to lose. Extraterrestrials have no such interdependence. The only solution to this problem is that we are some sort of science experiment, and that is too anthropocentric for me to accept.
An advanced breakaway civilization requires some group of people to have decided to keep to themselves after some sort of breakthrough. Obviously, this is much more likely than aliens - secrets are kept all the time, and we have some indication through the airship sightings of the 1800s that relatively advanced tech may existed in parallel for at least a few centuries.
