During a remarkable congressional hearing, former American intelligence official David Grusch revealed that the US government conducted a "multi-decade" programme aimed at collecting and reverse-engineering crashed unidentified flying objects (UFOs).
Grusch, who was in charge of investigating unexplained anomalous phenomena within a US Department of Defence agency until 2023, spoke before the House oversight committee in Washington, shedding light on the issue of alien life and technology, as reported by the Guardian.
I’ve always liked the theory, well more interested as it’s a pretty terrifying concept. I just don’t believe interstellar and lightspeed travel is common/easy enough for aliens to devote so much effort into seeking out life, travelling for hundreds/thousands of years just to destroy any other lifeforms it detects. There’s no benefit to either party really, any resource you could get on a habited planet you could find on a number of uninhabited ones without the massive expense of an intergalactic “war”.
Plus we’ve been sending out signals for years, we should already be dead - unless the aliens are going to take 1000 years to get here. And I don’t see how it’s worth it.
There’s a short story by Harry Turtledove titled “The Road not Taken.”
You should read it.
Basic synopsis: The secret to faster-than-light travel is trivial. It’s incredibly easy. So easy, in fact, that most species become spacefaring pretty early in their technological development. But, for one reason or another, we just never noticed it, and never developed the technology. So where other species’ development stagnated as they put all their resources into interstellar conquest, we just… kept developing. So when aliens find us and launch their invasion, we kick the complete and total ever-loving dogshit out of them and steal their technology. Look at me. I am the captain now.
It’s relatively short, available online, and you could probably read it in 20 minutes. It’s definitely worth a read.
Yeah it’s just a theory and one that’s not likely true, but I recently read the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy and the dark forest theory plays a central role in those books so it was fresh in my mind. Fascinating and terrifying to think about.