Ha ha.........

Anyway, I'm pleased to see a few posts.

As I said in my OP, on the balance of probabilities, there's other Planets with life. Taking in to consideration the billions of Stars we can see and forgetting for a moment that there are probably billions and billions more that we can't see (yet), there's BOUND to be many, many other Stars with a Planet in the Goldilocks zone and of those, it's beyond credibility that we're the only intelligent (???) form of life in the known Universe.

That said, the vast distances involved means that we (or they) need a much faster speed of travel than the speed of light, to get anywhere in a reasonable time, the speed of light is too slow.

OK, so we've no idea how to do that YET, or if it's possible and I know the argument will be put forward that we've no idea what impossible things will be possible in the future but to travel beyond the speed of light we'd have to invent many other things like, perhaps "shields"....... Startrek, "Shields up"?????

Again, OK, so if 100 years ago someone had produced a futuristic drawing of a jumbo jet and claimed that within the next century, hundreds of people would be travelling through the skies in it, they'd most likely have been carted off to the local assylum..... BUT, be that as it may, we're talking (We are aren't we?) about UFOs in our skies right now.

If some advanced beings from somewhere "out there" were capable of vast distance space exploration, they'd also be capable of vast distance space investigation.

At the moment, we have satellites capable of viewing the Earth in great detail, even the crude google satellite images are an indication of what a life form with some intelligence can produce and we've only had a technological capability for a short time so imagine what could be seen by a life form just 100 years in advance of us?

Soooooo, if you're one of these advanced life forms and have the above capability, why would you need to travel to view this Planet whether you're "on holiday" or part of a scientific/investigative program? You could see or find out all you wanted to see from way, way out, there'd be no need to come close at all.

Now we humans are curious, I guess other intelligent life forms are the same otherwise they wouldn't be "advanced" enough to venture this way so having found their way here, long, long before they "came in to view" they'd make contact and would want to meet us.

They've not made contact and they've not met us. We've no concrete evidence that they've been in our neck of the woods and we've no concrete evidence that they ever have been here.

OK, so there's been some very strange things done on this Earth, things which we'd have difficulty doing even today but that's no reason to say whoever did those things "must have had alien help"?

I was thinking there about the massive stones at Baalbek. How were they shifted?

Now old-hand RTers will know of my interest in Sumer and the writings they left. They said people from "out there" came here but that's all we have = what they wrote. I've asked many times, "Why did they write such stuff if it wasn't true? Where did they get the idea from?"

The thing is, we have the Sumerian writings but nothing else. There's no artifacts left by people from "out there".

Another argument I'd put forward is that if some advanced people came here, why would they build with huge stones? Do we build massive structures today? YES. Do we use massive stones? NO.

We use metal and a conglomerate formed by mixing aggregates with a binder (cement) and provoking a chemical reaction. Don't you think that any advanced life form would produce something similar? Where's the metal remnants? Where's any reconstituted ceramics?

Sooooo, it's back to you for discussion.