Leaving aside the relativistic starship model, which hardly fits the
alleged ensemble of strange phenomena, I've never understood why the
default provenance of UFOs-as-artifacts is thought to be an alien ET
civilisation using some faster than light drive or wormhole. Since any
superluminal transport also requires time travel in some frames, it's more
parsimonious to posit that these alleged craft are from a future Earth.
That's *why* the drivers look sort of Homo sap - they're our evolved and/or
posthumanly morphed offspring. And that's why you can't nab the buggers -
any encounter sufficiently egregious to cause a lethal time loop (landing
on the White House lawns to say hi and pass over the zero point energy
equations) will either pinch out or be aborted by the meta-Time Patrol.
Sightings by `trailer trash' and timid astronomers, or even anally-obsessed
abductions, presumably have no long-term impact on the future history in
question, and can clear themselves up by attenuation.
On the other hand, maybe they're visitors from adjacent Many Worlds
cultures. Since there are an infnite number of these (by hypothesis),
there's plenty of sources and machine models. If such craft break down, it
might be harder to retrieve them to the home plenum. But then you'd expect
to see a far greater proportion of intelligent dinosaurs, etc.
As for Roswell, and to be serious for a moment - my problem with the Mogul
explanation is that nobody in the US defense establishment expected Soviet
nuclear weappns success until the mid-fifties (or so I'm told by my brother
Mick, the nuclear-movie specialist), so I can't see why they'd be running
weapons detection apparatus in 1947. Sure, there's always trial
lead-time... but it sounds implausible to me.
Damien Broderick