Hey, Anthony, thank you for taking the time to respond, and I think everything you said could very well be true. Honestly, I haven't been following the coverage as closely as I probably should, and wasn't aware of most of what you mentioned - the Disclosure Project, for example. I'll spend some time taking a look - it's fascinating.

To your points specifically, I think it's very easy to come up with many reasons that UFOs could crash. Or land and be captured. I think the biggest one would simply be that space travel would likely be extremely hard. You're flying a long distance (I presume), and then operating in an alien environment. It seems highly likely your safety record flying in a remote place like that would be risky. Our instinct, I think, is to assume they have a lower safety record than humans only because if they were advanced enough to reach us, they should be advanced enough to not crash more often than we do. That's why suggesting they crash a lot feel weird.

But put another way, if you told me I had to build a ship that would fly to Mars and back again 10,000 times, including flying into Mar's atmosphere and back out again... and then asked me if I thought I'd have a better safety rating than a 747 between the US and Europe... I mean, no. I'd tell you that my spaceship would be a lot more dangerous and risky.

So I don't feel you have to work very hard to come up with additional hypothesis that could justify a high crash rate.

In fact, my take away after getting some additional emails about the article is probably this: The only scenario that I have troubles believing is if you hold that aliens have an equal or better crash rating than humans, AND we have multiple crashed ships. Because if those two numbers are constant, then the number of ships flying in our atmosphere would have to be so great that I think we'd have to have noticed them over the last x number of years. So, I don't believe that.

But I'm ok with the alternative conclusion, which is compelling to me in a very different, almost more human way. The suggestion is that - just like any explorers far from home - being an alien visiting Earth is extremely dangerous. They are not all powerful or here without risk. They would have to have failure rates that we as humans would consider to be unacceptable in modern engineering. And that also says something to me about their nature that I find interesting. :)

Anyway, thank you again. I really appreciate someone enjoying the thought experiment, as well. :)