Why Might Aliens Visit Earth?

I did a web search on the above phrase, in prep for a podcast, and in ten pages of results didn’t find anything I thought reasonable. Which promotes me to write this, hoping it can show up for others when they so search. This content isn’t new, just restated, maybe better. When considering purported evidence for meteors or ball lightning, we are much more forgiving than when considering purported evidence of telepathy or ghosts, as reasonable priors for the former are much higher than for the latter. That is, we more easily believe that former cases happened. The assumptions we’d have to make to let us think that we’d seen examples of the latter seem far more extreme.When considering purported evidence for aliens-on-Earth, we should similarly ask how extreme are the assumptions we’d need to make to make sense of it. Many have dismissed and ridiculed such sightings, even when many independent sober folks all say they saw roughly the same amazing things, largely on the basis of claiming…