The problem with alien spacecraft isn’t the possibility of aliens but the extreme unlikelihood of interstellar space travel. It isn’t crazy or irrational to believe that intelligent species could evolve on other planets, but it shows a lack of knowledge of physics and the enormity of the distance between stars to believe that any life form would be capable of travelling to other inhabited planets or even being able to locate them at all.
Sadly, no.
lekatt, whom I believed to a be a Doper-Long-Gone™, is “interesting”.
Almost certainly not true?
You have absolutely nothing to back up your “almost certain” belief.
I’ll concede only this. Until such time as a narrowly focused survey is done on news media types on this particular topic we’ll never know for sure.
Until and unless that happens, the validity of the calculations and the estimates I made stand as solid as the Rock of Gibralter. 
Agree.
A friend of mine is a devotee of Alex Jones. As a consequence, he seriously believes George Bush orchestrated 9/11. He also believes contrails contain mind-altering chemicals manufactured by the CIA. Thing is, he’s an otherwise bright person, and definitely not crazy by any definition.
The problem with physics is that it’s not fully and definitely defined. There is certainly no way, given what we currently know about physics, to travel those distances given our own personal physical limitations. What we don’t know is what physical limitations other lifeforms might have and what possibilities physics might present, as we learn more about physics. That said, it’s statistically unlikely that anything we can communicate with can or has travelled from somewhere outside of our own planetary system.
“Knew in advance” can be interpreted in many different ways. Bush definitely was made aware that there was a threat in the August 6th (IIRC) national security briefing entitled “Bin Ladin Determined to Attack Inside U.S.” Did he specifically know that 19 hijackers, 15 of which were from Saudi Arabia were going to fly planes into the WTC and Pentagon? No. But it appears that he pretty much ignored the issue of terrorism pre 9/11. But I’m not going to attribute malice when intellectual laziness is an equally plausible explanation.
What is probably impossible is for aliens to flit among the stars like on Star Trek. But we are already able to identify small planets - if a race could identify small habitable planets with oxygen atmospheres (which can only occur due to life) they would narrow down the possibilities a lot.
Our short lived species couldn’t make it, but they might be able to live longer, download themselves into computers, and pick up hydrogen on the way in order to be able to accelerate to reasonable relativistic velocities. We can’t figure out how to plan more than a few years out today, but 1,000 years ago Europeans embarked on centuries long building projects. I don’t think we’ve been doing technology long enough to call anything physically possible infeasible.
Your rock stands on the shifting sands of an untenable assumption. How can any occupational group be a statistically valid representative sample of the general population?
“Crazy” is all relative. 500 years ago if you had said that:
- The universe is billions of years old and began with a single “big bang”
- Life evolved from the primordial ooze to become human
- Islamic warriors would control huge ships through the air to destroy towers that were a thousand feet high
- Humans would travel to the moon and bring back rocks to prove that the earth and the moon were formed in similar ways
you’d be considered to be as wacko as they come, and probably burned at the stake to prevent such lunacy from spreading. (You could probably convince people back then of Nos. 4 and 5.) Hard to say what we’ll learn in the next 500 years - these folks may just be ahead of the curve.
If your definition of craziness is based on people believing things “contrary to all reason and evidence”, then you don’t have a clear definition. For some issues including some of those listed above, the amount of evidence runs to incredible lengths, so there’s no way that any one person could know what “all” the evidence is. In such a case, the evidence that you use must be filtered by somebody, be it the media, academics, or the government.
Now all of those organizations have lied at some point. One obvious example: about four years ago, those of us who refused to believe that Saddam had large caches of WMDs were frequently told that we were crazy, because all the evidence said that he did. But in fact Saddam had no WMDs; the government and the media had chosen to lie about that in order to justify the invasion of Iraq.
That’s hardly a lone example; the same basic process has taken place countless times. So it’s very reasonable for people to distrust the authorities, and to believe that the most commonly accepted narrative on some issue is one manufactured by powerful parties to deceive the public.
Furthermore definitions of “reason” vary. I find it reasonable to believe in God, given the enormous number of humans who have observed Him, including many people who are fully sane, intelligent, and not prone to delusion. To other people, this merely indicates that mass hallucination has set in.