I don’t believe aliens have been to earth so there’s nothing to cover up. I’m personally pessimistic that we’ll ever encounter alien life, intelligent or not. The universe is so vast and the time scale so deep that there’s certainly something else out there but the odds of us running into one another are next to impossible.

But I like to think that somewhere out there there’s another species just as alone as we are, howling into the void. And I wonder what would happen if we did finally meet, if they found us after groping around in the darkness for who knows how long and rather than attacking us or lecturing us they just rejoiced that they weren’t alone anymore.And we’d ask them about the vast galaxy-spanning metacivilization of countless other sophonts that most sci-fi seems to take for granted and they’d shrug and say “Nope it’s just you and us, lonely together.”