we would be in the same position as the guys in dugout canoes trying to sell baskets of fruit to the air craft carrier ie screwed royally. their tech advantage would just be overwhelming.

My sentiments, as well. One nasty alternative I also thought of is ET & Co. using biowar to do away with higher primates (i.e., us plus J. Fred Muggs and his kin), while leaving the rest of the biosphere usable. (Let's hope they haven't read "Rainbow Six" by Clancy or seen the movie version of "Moonraker"....).

There are more than a few hints that this is already happening, and more than one of us lanlubbering humans have "seen things", but the most consistently noticeable phenomenon is the emergence of a huge body of ET-invasion related mythology, especially right here on the Web. No smoke without a fire, as they say! I am also keenly interested in the anthropology of the various conspiracy theories accusing the US government of a cover-up. After all, the US gov't is the most transparent such body in the history of mankind, and I should know, being a frequent freeloading user of the US civil servant's work, that is posted by the FDA, the USDA, NOAA or NASA, ABSOLUTELY FOR FREE, on the Web. Extreme military secrecy on behalf of all the forces concerned is, however, to be expected if indeed there is a threat from The Outside: the anxiety created by the prematurate disclosure of such a situation would surely send all the major stock-exchanges crashing, and the consequences to the World's economy would certainly be no less than cataclysmic, even before the first ET shot is even fired.

Baloney. In the middle ages people related stories of demons and angels that are suspiciously similar to today's stories of aliens. No, these stories are deeply rooted to the fears and desires deep within our psyche, not an alien invasion. The absence of proof is not proof.

I agree with you here. Also there would be a vast number of vested interests willing to exploit an alien invasion scare; e.g.. high tech arms manufacturers, internationalist political movements. The truth would be "out there" pronto. Regards

Roger on that one. In my mis-spent youth, I spent quite a bit of time on this subject, some of it on the taxpayer's nickel. And in the process gained access to some records on the subject that you probably can't obtain via' the FOIA. (I name no names, but some of them came from, let's say, that wonderful lot AKA "No Such Agency".) What they boiled down to was this- if the U.S. Government ever had its hands on any ET hardware and/or "software" (i.e., the formerly-breathing type), the news never got to; the Air Force, the Army, the FBI, the CIA, or the NSA. As for the "Roswell" business, if it was an actual ET "crash-recovery", it was buried so deep even the CIA never found out about it. Of course, I must (in the interest of fair shares) admit I was surprised to learn that the primary U.S. military responsibility for the "UFO problem" was never given to the U.S. Air Force. It actually was the responsibility of the U.S. Navy's Office of Naval Intelligence, aka "ONI". As to why this was, I can only assume it had something to do with CIA's first director, the former head of ONI, RADM Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, who apparently considered it a naval problem due to the frequency of the objects being seen over oceans or entering or leaving the water. As to what ONI knew then (the 1970s), or knows now, your guess is as good as mine- probably better, in fact. As to the reality (or otherwise) of ETs, I don't know, the CIA didn't know thirty years ago, and if anyone claims they do know, I'll have to insist on seeing the corpus delicti- which in this case, had better be a genuine "corpus"..

You are free to decide to relate to all this as baloney. I on my part prefer to avoid being dismissive of mythologies, precisely because they have so much to tell us about human psyche, or, who knows, who we are and where we're heading.

it's the saddest thing but when i got to the end of rainbow six and was watching the debriefing on what the bad guy's plan was i couldn't help thinking that had i known that at the start i would have been on their side. just too damn many humans around now.

They dont have to be too advanced, dont you think a couple nukes in their flightpath would really hurt them?

If by "they" you mean my hypothetical inbound ET colonizers, at the present time we'd have exactly as much capability to stop them as we do to stop an inbound "extinction-level" asteroid, ie., none at all. (Sort of like what happened in "The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy" when the Vogon Constructor Fleet arrived. Anyone for six pints of bitters and several packets of peanuts?).