There is no Fermi paradox. The aliens are here, visiting Earth.

The evidence is blurry, but in a case of Occam’s Razor, alien presence is by far the simplest logical explanation for the evidence we have of unidentified flying objects and close encounters of various kinds.

I have never seen a ufo nor have I had any personal experience with aliens, but I would say that I have no doubts they are here.  To me, if we take an unbiased look at all the evidence, it tends to point in one direction: we have visitors. Because there is no other explanation that generally fits what we observe.  No where on Earth can humans today create (or even fake) what we see. There is no secret big enough for this to be a planetary-wide dark project.

The main counter-argument to accepting the fact of alien visitation is that the evidence is literally blurry, not crystal clear (why be furtive?), ambiguous, and too extraordinary and consequential not to require clean unambiguous levels of proof.

If aliens are present, why don’t they land on a lawn with a million cameras close up, walk out in the sunlight, and hand us some cool material we can hold?

Here is my theory, which is the story I tell myself;

The main story is that the aliens don’t want to be seen.  They want to visit, but not be seen. But in order to inspect us, in order to see anything, they must be visible themselves. In order to pick up photons (to see), their sensor has to be sensitive to photons, and thus seeable.  In other words they cannot see us unless we can see them. So they appear briefly to inspect and then disappear.

They may be traveling with some kind of cloak, or they may travel in another dimension,  or they might travel is some kind of channel that is invisible to us. To get brief moments of viewing, they become visible to some degree. It is possible that what we see is a projection of sorts, a hologram, an artifact that is immaterial in essence, which is why they appear blurry, even close up. I’d also be willing to bet there are no fleshy beings inside. These are machine probes, or maybe teleportation, or virtual presences. Why do otherwise if you could? A ufo is like a cursor, a roving eye that is not really present.

The repeated appearances may actually be different probes, rather than the same ones. If there a a billion advanced civilizations in the universe, then we could expect at least one visit per day.

So what do they want? I think they are looking for cool new stuff.  They are looking for the only scarcities in a galaxy where advanced civilizations can make any natural material found in the universe: they are looking for new ideas. They are on a quest to visit strange civilizations with uniquely evolved beings who build weird AIs and machines, who will come up with novel inventions that are found no where else in the universe.  My story is that so far, we have invented nothing that an truly advanced civilization would find interesting, so they leave once they surmise this, and their flying orb of light vanishes in a poof.