The aliens do have advanced technology such that they could remain hidden from us, but choose to appear to us in patterns consistent with human mythological sightings -- fleeting/mysterious/ambiguous/infrequently -- due to their own inscrutable alien social norms.
That is, they are friendly, and this is the strange way they show it...
I think it's so as not to "rudely" impinge too strongly on our sense of reality. Especially our place within the universe, since we believe we are at the top.
If you dig into the UFO reports out there - most of which are much less detailed and documented, but also more various and flat out weird than the ones the Pentagon is giving the thumbs up to - then you start to see parallels and linkage with reports of cryptids, with ghosts and spirits, and with fairies and other historical folklore critters. The "ETs in nuts-and-bolts spaceships with a Prime Directive" hypothesis doesn't really hold up as a general explanation for a number of reasons. But that leaves a much stranger and more confusing phenomenon.
Maybe they're just trolling us for pure entertainment. I imagine it would get boring up there for them, silently watching an intellectually inferior lifeform day after day.
The aliens do have advanced technology such that they could remain hidden from us, but choose to appear to us in patterns consistent with human mythological sightings -- fleeting/mysterious/ambiguous/infrequently -- due to their own inscrutable alien social norms.
That is, they are friendly, and this is the strange way they show it...
I think it's so as not to "rudely" impinge too strongly on our sense of reality. Especially our place within the universe, since we believe we are at the top.
(just having fun with this)