Anything's possible, even an invisible species with undetectable technology. That said, the idea is comparable to ghosts, spirits, luck and "God moves in mysterious ways." What I mean is the undetectable aliens are reportedly known (declared) by intuition rather than evidence that can be shared e.g. SOL, AAWSAP.

It's not impossible that highly advanced alien tech is here and "indistinguishable from magic (Clark)." The thing is the premise is indistinguishable from superstitious thinking because invisible aliens and non-existent aliens leave equal amounts of evidence.

That is really the reason for the cover up. Because, they all use telepathy. It's how they navigate. And, how they communicate with us and everything else. Most of the life on this planet uses it as well. We haven't been here long enough to develop this skill. But, we are about to.

I apply something like the Copernican principal to base level speculation. Meaning there's likely nothing particularly special or unique about this time and space and humanity by extension. By that metric there are almost certainly ETs just like us with similar science and tech somewhere in the vastness of the universe. That said they are probably so far away in time and space that we will never contact or observe them.

Beyond that though the speculation gets a little more woo imo but I think we can use some intellectual tools to not lose ourselves completely. The likelihood that we are the most intelligent species to exist is low. The likelihood that we are near the end of science and our understanding of reality is nearly complete also seems unlikely.

What has done the most to convince me of the possibility of the existence of ETs is the work done in the "theory of everything space." People in science and academia have presented questions about what we know about perception and reality and posited some interesting answers. They don't ever approach the ET issue but it's an extrapolation that is easy to make. The nutshell explanation is that the brain works like a desktop interface that constructs reality around us to enable us to interact with the larger reality around us. Everything we see is manufactured within the brain and is just an evolutionary affectation of our primitive purpose in life to eat and reproduce. Evolution does not afford us anything more than we need to complete these tasks. The likelihood that we observe reality at anything beyond the most basic level is unlikely.

At this point it's unprovable but it's interesting to observe that every world religion has told us that there is a larger reality beyond the observable and that there are intelligences that exist there.

We’re only somewhat evolved animals and to things that mostly matter to us. In actuality our eyes only see a small spectrum of all light waves, our ears only hear a portion of sound waves. etc.

And according the highly regarded String Theory there are 13 dimensions. We understand 4.

Our sensors and technology only cover a fraction of what’s even in our bedroom while being in it. We’re Jon Snow. We know nothing, even if we think know a lot.

>Higher forms of intelligence might operate in ways that are completely alien to us. 

No really?

They may likely be undetectable or inconceivable based on our assumptions. I think in order to begin to conceive of what alien intelligence is like, we need to remove all projection. That’s not easy.

This is essentially my school of thought. And I think it fits nicely with other aspects of UFO stuff that gets labeled as “woo.” I think it’s just different science.

You seem to already understand.

Saying that life may be different without citing specifically how, makes it difficult to evaluate your idea. There are limits to what can exist.

There's an 80's movie about aliens manipulating water ...

Ok, so yea "life" may exist in ways that we don't look for because we didn't know about certain "life" signatures. That does not then mean that said possible lifeforms could ever evolve to develop technology, nor does it mean that that lifeform could ever evolve a "higher form of intelligence/conciousness". That would be equal to saying that undersea Earth seaslugs could evolve a political system amongst themselves and collectively build weapons of self defence to prevent internet sea cables from destroying their homes and habitats, and they did so without ever leaving the water or perhaps by sending a convoy of delegates to spark negotiations with the surface dwellers. There is no logical, rational, evolutionary or science respective way(beyond mind control of matter magic being proven real) that that scenario would ever play out or be "real" as in possible. It's a unicorn, we can think that its real and that we may be able to genetically modify an animal to be that way but there is no guarantee that nature can produce that same result independently of there being a preexisting intelligent lifeform to influence it. There are 'rules' to the universe and it's existence, physics and math help us understand them while science studies them experimentally. We don't know it all and could be wrong but we are still trying to understand the rules.

You postulate that maybe their technology would be different? Like not metal or solid structures but held together by consciousness was that the idea? Those are all guesses or hypotheticals, and far at the ends of the bell curve of life possibilities, the curve where a technological species will evolve out of "goldilocks zones" around stable stars, on planets with an atmosphere/magnetism that shields cosmic rays, with gravity that does not excede levels that prohibit complex molecule creation and function and has an abundance of the most abundant elements in the universe and they can exist in solid, liquid, gas and plasma forms on said planet. Atomic structures essentially dictate the functionality of an atom with respect to its "maleableness" like metals will not be as maleable as carbons so making tiny "micro machines" like our biological ones but out of metals would be sub optimal if it worked at all, evolution is derived as remenant outcomes deemed as success from survival due to resource abundance/scarcity and timing of coexistent concurrences over long periods of time.

One example may be that Cosmic Radiation destroys, fact, no biology could evolve to survive Cosmic Radiation of a planet without an atmosphere so our evolution wouldn't work on a planet with no atmosphere, we don't know how life could evolve in these circumstances so we conclude that it cannot until we see otherwise. But then you say what about underground on that planet but that would be to assume that planets with no life on the surface can have life under ground but we have never seen that either, how could evolution start underground under stress of weight and darkness, what wavelengths, fields or other sensory things could push that life to evolve, what could it use to advance and progress?

These kinds of questions make me think people are just hoping for magic matter to discovered that makes things anti gravity or suddenly super intelligent. Aliens that can build spaceships will resemble humans more than they do not.

If they are traveling the cosmos I think it is likely they have different technology.

Our base of knowledge to engage in speculation is very limited. 

All we have to go on is the idea that fundamental physics is the same throughout the universe, which then leads to informed guesses about the chemistry and biology that would flow from that in different scenarios. Hence how people have speculated about non-carbon life based on e.g silicon, or that uses alternatives to water as a solvent e.g ammonia or methane.

Impossible to know what that sort of life might look like, and completely impossible to know if something we would understand as intelligence or technology could emerge from it.

We might not even recognise it as life. There's this hypothesis called the shadow biosphere, which says there may have been multiple origins of life on Earth, each based on different chemistry. One branch of this is what we understand to be life. Other branches may have gone extinct, but some might survive and we wouldn't even notice, because we are not looking for them and it wouldn't be immediately obvious they were alive unless we studied them in depth. There is a possible candidate for this called desert varnish, which is this orange coating on some rock formations. Analysis suggests it's not life, but there might well be others under our noses that we just don't see because we don't know what we're looking at. 

This also all means that some basic assumptions we make about alien life might be way off. For example, SETI usually looks for signals in the water hole range of frequencies because this is a quiet part of the spectrum. We can't know if aliens would have anything like a similar thought process to consider this natural, if radio would be the form of communication they'd use, or even if the kinds of signal we'd look for (repeating patterns) would be what communication looks like for another species.

Even if we assume life like us and just use analogies from Earth history it's easy to see we could be way off. The Inca knew about the wheel, but they didn't widely use it as a technology (partly because of their mountainous environment). And yet they built a sophisticated civilisation. 

So it's very possible that there are fundamental technologies we assume any civilisation would use that just wouldn't occur to them, and there may be obvious technologies for them that we never thought of even though we might have the means to create them. And that's even assuming that the concept of technology would make sense to them, and that they don't have equally fundamental concepts that we never thought of.

Lots of maybes and ifs in here. More indication that these types of fantastical exercises are not very insightful. Sorry!

I’ve thought this for a long time. We look at ants, we see a remarkable society they build but we have no idea how they do this. We don’t communicate with them,we don’t know how. They are just some sideshow for most people. We could be the ants to other civilizations, not worth communicating with.

I have had a similar thought. It seems as though we have romanticized aliens in pop culture some much that people naturally assume alien life is something similar to star trek or star wars when in all reality its possible that if alien life does exist elsewhere in our galaxy it could be something similar to animals on earth and no species on the planet might actually use technology. Considering we are the only species on the planet that uses technology i don't think that its that far fetched of an idea, but idk im just a random person saying things.

UFO / Paranormal / Magick/ Mind. Dudes in Tin Canes, probably not that much.  Star Trek the Cage and beings like Q or the folks from Contact. They probably set this hole fishbowl we call earth up like a giant mind driven simulation. Look at the work of Charles Fort and many others, the classical approach to this topic is a joke and is obviously a limited hang out. The Movie Dark City probably comes closest to the truth. Mind Technology to create and manipulate matter. It‘s also clear to me that there are multible faction‘s, the hole Enki and Enlil thing, one faction would maybe like to give this place a update, others obviously want exactly the opposite, more wars more control etc. Lucid dreaming also seem to be important to understand

a question for you-assuming you believe in heaven when you die and go there is heaven a planet and if not what is it? could some aliens exist not on planets?

A species that can achieve the collaboration necessary to travel across time and space at scale would value themselves and their own so greatly that they wouldn't be out here desperately seeking new resources or new codependencies 🤣 If they were capable of it, they would be radically different and probably stay clear of our current form of self governance.

Wouldn't it be kinda weird if it turned out that we're relatively advanced technologically, but only in the areas we've prioritized/understand? Like, maybe some alien species mastered interstellar travel, through means totally unknown to us, but we're ahead with... I dunno. Screen displays?

There are 852 species of aliens breeding in outer space. Think prime arch of war hammer 40,000. Rebel spirits have adult male and female bodies made for them to inhabit and start breeding. Waiting for their numbers to get high before enslaving the human race.

I remember reading a fun short sci-fi story about a group of swashbucklers on a sailing vessel that also happens to have an FTL drive. They go planet to planet conquering but then come across the Earth in the late 20th century and get destroyed, giving the earthlings FTL in the process and dooming the rest of the galaxy.

Generally, the idea is that technology developed a certain way on Earth but that wasn't all encompassing for everything humans COULD have figured out with the same level of development.

Entire chains of technologies may have never been discovered because we figured out different ways to do things. Hell, we may have hit a technological dead-end with our understanding of physics because we got something wrong two hundred years ago.

Also, to dive in more with what you're saying, I could imagine an extremely intelligent species that lives on a panthalassic world, a planet entirely covered in ocean. Could a species without dry land ever even develop technology? Maybe we are equally handicapped by a lack of a certain sixth sense that would help us observe the universe in different ways.

You should look into dennis mckennas views on dmt. He speaks of how it could be a form of extra terrestrial communication

Ex-NASA engineer claims trillions of shape-shifting, cloaked devices are hidden across Earth

https://www.msn.com/en-nz/news/other/ex-nasa-engineer-claims-trillions-of-shape-shifting-cloaked-devices-are-hidden-across-earth/ar-AA1JxnhG