I firmly believe that ours is not the only living planet in the Universe. In fact, and I'm dead serious, I truly hope to see the definitive discovery of extraterrestrial life within my lifetime. However, I expect it will be microbial or fossil. Don't matter...that'll be the single most momentous day in human history.
I also believe that there is most probably intelligent life other than ours.
I do not believe that we have reliable recordings of any kind of 'visits'. I think everything we have seen in our lives is junk. I'm not sure, but I tend to think the 'abduction' phenomena is merely some form of hysteria or 'mental metaphor', if you will.
I do believe that if 1) there is life elsewhere, and 2) it is intelligent, and 3) it is capable of interplanetary travel (the plausibility of which is still highly debatable for humans), and 4) that such life cares to actually travel here (of all places! Remember, we're a backwater planet in a remote galaxy) ..then I must believe that the would be able to conceal themselves from us with little effort, and we would certainly not have all this half-baked material to hypothesize with. If one can travel the stars faster than light, one can probably manage to hide in the bushes without being spotted.
Here's an idea...what if the truth is somewhere in between (as it so often is)? Maybe there is other life in the Universe...but not a lot. Maybe the chances of life developing are so staggeringly low that, while not impossible, it is still a very rare thing. Like a desert vs. a rainforest. So there are only a few other species of life extant, and a very, very, VERY few that even approach sentience.
One other note...Dred, I gotta question one statement you made "...spotted as far back as man has recorded things". No doubt that phenomena have been observed in the heavens throughout history which could not then be explained...but were later. I think there is pretty strong evidence that the classically defined idea of the UFO (i.e., aliens come to visit) really only got off the ground post-WW2. Some have proposed that this time period really engendered and nurtured these ideas as a function of the paranoia of the days. People had just begun to have to try and grasp the new immediacy of imminent instant nuclear destruction, and began seeing ghosts in the machine. We're used to it, but they were not.
I certainly don't have the answers, but I do have a feeling that most of what we encounter routinely is just hysteria and attention-seeking...while the reality is a much quieter, much subtler thing.
