Where Are All the ET First Responders?

[pontificator]

It might be worthwhile looking more closely at the party losing equipment in the "known" stories. Usually it seems to be the Greys, and I suspect it is purposeful on occasion.
If you consider operation Mincemeat, a true Alien intelligence could do very similar things with very Alien purposes.

Lets suppose the following, our Aliens are looking to acquire all analysis and research site locations. They are operating from an alternative time or dimension, and can only place systems and assets into our local space in a generic manner.
One way that would work is a shotgun approach, you crash a series of tracible objects that fall into the category of "shiny", and the pieces are distributed according to size to various important Human locations.
As an Alien, you now have the places of interest fully "triangulated", this allows you to use the advanced techniques inherent to your species and technological prowess to "do things".
Some of those things may involve tagging people who interact with objects, using the objects themselves as some form of interdimensional portal, etc.

Another stranger alternative is that a lost asset causes a glitch in time, which creates future conditions where the group sending the device does not send the device, and they don't know they need to retrieve it, because the timeline that would retrieve it has ceased to exist. Very weird stuff would happen under those conditions. I mean, you could end up with a Grey invasion force, which does the invading, but then finds their Masters don't exist to complete the takeover... quite what would happen there is entirely up for debate.

[calikid]

It might be worthwhile looking more closely at the party losing equipment in the "known" stories. Usually it seems to be the Greys, and I suspect it is purposeful on occasion.
If you consider operation Mincemeat, a true Alien intelligence could do very similar things with very Alien purposes.

Lets suppose the following, our Aliens are looking to acquire all analysis and research site locations. They are operating from an alternative time or dimension, and can only place systems and assets into our local space in a generic manner.
One way that would work is a shotgun approach, you crash a series of tracible objects that fall into the category of "shiny", and the pieces are distributed according to size to various important Human locations.
As an Alien, you now have the places of interest fully "triangulated", this allows you to use the advanced techniques inherent to your species and technological prowess to "do things".
Some of those things may involve tagging people who interact with objects, using the objects themselves as some form of interdimensional portal, etc.

Another stranger alternative is that a lost asset causes a glitch in time, which creates future conditions where the group sending the device does not send the device, and they don't know they need to retrieve it, because the timeline that would retrieve it has ceased to exist. Very weird stuff would happen under those conditions. I mean, you could end up with a Grey invasion force, which does the invading, but then finds their Masters don't exist to complete the takeover... quite what would happen there is entirely up for debate.

Interesting hypothesis. Seems a bit harsh to intentionally crash a shiny craft, killing the crew during the process when a drone would do just as nicely. But then if the crew were "only" biological machines they may also be considered disposable. Or, like operation "mincemeat", the crew were DOA plants used to sell the scenario.

Alternated time lines... makes me dizzy thinking about it. LoL.

[Shere Khaan]

It's a topic I have thought about before and one that has not had a great deal of discussion.

The theories presented closely mirror my own thoughts. The greys have been depicted as biomechanical machines with telepathy. I think the telepathy would be the equivalent of quantum communication with everything they know already uploaded to the higher consciousness. If these small aircraft are glorified weather balloons for day trips and the technology is more or less in the fabrication which we can't understand, then I can understand avoiding messy retrieval situations. Not to forget the fact that the crashes may be done on purpose to either seed technology, or as a kind of disinformation to distract reverse engineering efforts.

Other species are possibly/probably alive which would perhaps provide more impetus to rescue recover crafts or aliens involved in incidents. This may be their reason why the only bodies supposedly found have been the greys.

Anyway, a very interesting topic, thanks!

[calikid]

It's a topic I have thought about before and one that has not had a great deal of discussion.

The theories presented closely mirror my own thoughts. The greys have been depicted as biomechanical machines with telepathy. I would think the telepathy would be the equivalent of quantum communication with everything they know already uploaded to the higher consciousness. If these small aircraft are glorified weather balloons for day trips and the technology is more or less in the fabrication which we can't understand, then I can understand avoiding messy retrieval situations. Not to forget the fact that the crashes may be done on purpose to either seed technology, or as a kind of disinformation to distract reverse engineering efforts.

Other species are possibly/probably alive which would perhaps provide more impetus to rescue recover crafts or aliens involved in incidents. This may be their reason why the only bodies supposedly found have been the greys.

Anyway, a very interesting topic, thanks!

Yes, the seeding of technology is an interesting angle. Still, if that was the goal I have to wonder why they didn't just crash an empty craft.

[epo333]

The seeding of technology is a very likely event, given some rivalry between many of the ETs. Also possible is temporal capabilities of a few of the ETs. If there were troubled craft, retrieval could simply be avoided or aborted altogether with this type of technology.

Have we ever actually shot any down? How would we know if they simply lets us think so?

[pontificator]

Honestly, I don't think anything shot down by us would have been in good condition, or for that matter, incapable of defending itself.
Looking at described technologies, the operational aspects of the ships themselves, and some of the capabilities displayed during encounters, there's no reason why our weapons would not simply pass through them.

I'll also point out an aspect of observed acceleration, that ship is pushing its way through the atmosphere at what appears to be almost light-speed. At the pressures involved, the very air itself would be similar to ramming your car into solid concrete. So, this offers that the ship concerned must have something to mitigate this effect, and something which can do this can handle rather a lot of physical effects.

Let's take a look at what we have:
1) Kinetic weapons, like sabot rounds, artillery and bullets.

Mitigated by phasing, or simply dodging. The system allowing high-speed atmospheric travel would probably laugh at kinetic weapons.

2) High-explosives, various.

Mitigated by phasing, gravitational envelopes, outrunning the sphere of force. The system described in 1 would come into play as well.

3) Focussed photons, radiation.

Mitigated by phasing, reflective surfaces, "standard" anti-radiation shielding. I really see nothing involving high-energy particles or radiation as being a problem, it's likely the beings concerned would encounter far worse during normal space-flight.

4) Magnetrons: I don't expect people to see the importance of this one, but combining traditional magnetron technology with lasers results in very high-energy microwave systems. The sort which are very good for satellite transmission systems, direct energy transmission, and more unusual weapons.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-02284-0 <--- public progress.

There is also this:
B.A.S.S. Bulk Avalanche Semiconductor Switch Array

[COLOR=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.9)]1991[/COLOR]
Project description
Design, Prototyping, and Development of a Photonic Energized, multi-mega-watt Bulk Avalanche Semiconductor Switching weapons system in a phase steered array capable of both anti-personnel (almost instantaneous death, due to massive vascular rupture, devastating instant tissue damage, destruction of the lungs, and several centimeters into the cranial vault), destruction of aircraft skin materials (vaporization of outer metallic skin), thin skinned missiles, and non-EMP hardened communications gear.

The initial, light vehicle movable 1615 square foot phase steered array exploited the extremely high power density of the waveguides and the B.A.S.S. emitters to create a very tightly confined beam of a single sub 30 picosecond high energy pulse, in the multi-mega-watt range, and over vast sections of the spectrum.

Not actually regarded as an EMP device, but rather as a high directional, extremely high energy, high gain microwave weapon system.

Capable of vaporizing a tantalum or copper plate or foil to silently create an electronically formed penetrator and then to move it at hypersonic speeds towards a target, and to increase the speed and form the penetrator by way of a train of pulses. The only sound was the transonic boom as the liquified metal crossed the sound barrier.

Currently in use by the U.S. government as an electronic anti-personal weapon system as a completely silent option and by the the addition of a copper or tantalum sheet or copper the systems can bee used to form hyper-sonic molten metal penetrators to attack armored vehicles.

See: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesmatkinson/ The Accomplishments section. He also covers operation SCARAB, which was a pretty cool project he worked on.

Overall, we have weapons which moves things from one place to another, create waves of physical pressure with objects thrown about the place, and various systems which spit out beams in the visible and non-visible spectrum. If you can already mitigate that, then nothing we have will hurt.