Initially I did a spit take because it just seems so silly, just preposterous. But on second thought Seth Abramson is not a jokester he's a pretty serious researcher so let's wait and see but could this be the beginning of alien apocalypse dystopia blah blah blah.....??
So this would mean:
1.: Aliens exist, aliens that travel through space at either faster than light speeds or, if they travel slower than light, with significantly longer lifespans than us
2.: Nobody saw any indication of a spacefaring species through any telescopes, ever, no radio signals were recorded
3.: Out of the hundreds of thousands of star systems in the milky way that have existed for billions of years, this species found themselves right here, right at this time during the few thousand years humanity exists on Earth
4.: They were able to enter Earth's atmosphere, their spaceship didn't burn up with them inside and the aliens themselves didn't die within the atmosphere either (oxygen is very bad for a lot of stuff)
5.: Nobody noticed them enter our atmosphere or land anywhere, spaceships are really loud
6.: The US government found them first and managed to apprehend them and everybody involved managed to shut up about what would literally be the most significant event any of us would ever experience
No
Edit: If an alien civilization is advanced enough that they can a) travel here, b) not burn up in their ship and not have their organs torn apart by oxygen reacting with every chemical in their body and c) land a fucking spaceship stealthily without anyone noticing, then the US government doesn't stand a snowflake's chance in hell to capture them lmao
i feel like the more obvious thing is the US government is using this to find loose lips
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I would love for China/Russia to do a little trolling and confirm it, ask for the US to do information sharing and watch the Yanks pull the whole thing back quietly.
imo aliens are likely to breathe oxygen themselves, if they haven't messed with their own biology too much. it's just way better than basically any other substance for powering metabolism in an organism, especially a big organism that thinks and moves around.
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