Somewhere I'd read a story about an island in the Pacific Ocean where the US Government (Naval Intelligence) had arranged a rendezvous with an advanced ET Civilization/Race, and it appeared credible (need to go back and do more research, and perhaps someone here might help shed light on that story), and of course there's all the rumors about Area 51, Majestic 12, Apex of the Trilateral Commission, etc, and all of this got me to thinking about how I'd handle that kind of "op" if I were the secret government involved in alien contact..

First thing that would come to my mind would be an exchange of some kind to get some of our people aboard their spacecraft for a "tour", to then be debriefed in secret upon return, with an agreed upon 2nd meeting scheduled for some time in the future.

Which leads me to suspect that even now, as we speak, human beings are living on alien worlds either in this galaxy or any another, since if they're getting here, the Spacetime Continuum doesn't have the same kind of meaning that we think it does and thus, they could be coming from anywhere just as easily as they could within a sphere of 100 lights years.

Could you imagine?

Would you volunteer for such an assignment?

Leave it all behind and risk getting killed if/when you ever return?

Perhaps the aliens, knowing full well that the returning humans would be killed because of their knowledge, made the deal that people could come along on the caveat that they would not be returned, yet they still volunteered to go along for the ride.

If we've made contact, then I think it's fair to assume that this is in fact the case in some form or another.

Which is why I think that if/when we ever take to the stars that by the time we get to other inhabitable worlds, we'll already be there in one form or another to greet us, from world to world even in the same sequence that we make the discoveries of each new habitable world.

Such a scenario would give new meaning to the saying "the first shall be last and the last, first".

If they are out there, then they've organized according to some sort of interplanetary legal framework about what they can and cannot do, or this Earth as we know it, would already be colonized and we would not be here as we are.

We are either alone, or, on the threshold of an interplanetary and intergalactic society, the implications of which would cook our noodle, and even still there would be dishes to do and a job to go to in the morning.

Life would go on, but nothing would be the same if ever we come into this domain of what might be called a "long Earth" with iterations and variations strewn across the cosmos, and with the means to get there from here, so it would be from there to here, to everywhere.

The UFO phenomenon, if of those that are of the "unexplainable" variety, some really are ET spacecraft, suggests in no uncertain terms that FTL travel is possible, and even happening.

The implications of this are utterly astounding.

Do people just like you and me look up at a different POV of the heavens with something other than the Milky Way Galaxy arcing across the sky like a river?

And if not like us, how do "they" see the world and themselves and even us, if they've discovered us already?

And wouldn't it be funny if they all turned out to be true Christian believers/brothers ie: understanding that an indomitable love rules the roost, with it's own implied mutual commitments and obligations and even the reason that they didn't invade or colonize our world.

Would we abide by the same rules when we get there, and will there perhaps already be teachers waiting for us when we do?

That would really freak people out, if everywhere we went we were greeted by humanoid forms ready to teach us about the root and source of all our character defects so that we cannot become a destructive force as we move to the stars. I mean just look at what we did to Iraq..

Can we be trusted, human beings. That I think is the question that the aliens ask themselves as they "man" the quarantine while giving a handful of people the ride of their lives..