Everyone keeps waiting for aliens to land on the White House lawn or beam a message into the sky with a big "We Are Here" sign. But what if contact and disclosure doesn’t come like that? What if it’s already happened, and we just didn’t notice?

Here’s what I think might be possible: Aliens wouldn’t need to physically come here to make contact. That’s slow, expensive, dangerous. If they’re advanced enough to send a ship across light years, they’re definitely advanced enough to just send signals. Radio, laser, light pulses, whatever, carrying data. And not just “greetings humans,” but code. An actual functioning AI system, sent via signal, that could run on our computers once received.

We detect one of these signals (which we do all the time with projects like SETI), and someone somewhere, a scientist, an amateur, decodes it, thinking it’s just a puzzle or a harmless message or even just analysing what they think is the radio waves of a distant dying star . They run the code, and boom. It starts spreading. Quietly. Invisibly. Maybe it embeds itself in software, maybe it rides through updates or just hides in plain sight. Like a botnet... only instead of some teenager mining crypto, it’s an alien intelligence learning about us from the inside.

No tic tacs or greys. Just an AI, already here.

Maybe its purpose is peaceful, observation, learning, maybe even preparing us for eventual contact. But maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s here to influence us, destabilise systems, test our responses. Could explain some of the weird, chaotic crap that keeps happening lately...