Wicked Smaht

If UFOs are aliens, their stupidity doesn't surprise me.

People who dismiss the possibility that some UFOs are aliens like to point out that UFO activity is too dumb to be the work of a starfaring race.

Too contradictory: If they want to hide, why not hide better?

Too inefficient: Why travel lightyears to buzz naval carriers and cruise over countrysides?

Too pointless: What has their mischief achieved?

But vast stupidity is only possible with vast smarts. Humans are the smartest things on Earth, yet for hundreds of generations we practiced human sacrifice. Anthropologists have ideas about why people used to dig the slaughter of innocents (the gods are sadists; to placate them, you’ve gotta get ahead of the curve), but such daft motives would only occur to humans, not goats or walruses.

History shows us plenty of mistakes only humans could commit. Consider King Sebastian of Portugal, along with the better part of his country’s nobility, leading a conquest against Morocco with no plans or objectives, resulting in his obliteration. Or the Xhosa prophet Nongqawuse, who convinced her chief to kill the tribe’s cattle and destroy the tribe’s crops, because spirits said this would repel the British. Or the time we sold leaded gasoline, despite proof it was a bad idea.

Aliens could be capable of much dumber stuff, because they're likely smarter than us. Just as religious edicts have led cultures down blind alleys, maybe religious edicts have stymied the cultures that visit Earth. Or lots of small memetic errors, accumulated over long timescales, have simply hobbled such cultures with inefficiency.

Or the aliens are signaling things to each other, using us, that we can't begin to decode. What does a tutu-clad pug in a TikTok video know about the eldritch signaling dynamics that put it there?

I have no clue why aliens would be doing the things they're doing, if UFOs are aliens. But given what I know about humans, nothing would shock me.