In that governments (particularly the US) have been lying to us, about
UFOs. There must be a body of information gathered about UFOs by now,
if you go by the number of indisputable sightings and crashes.
Someone has been gathering up all this intelligence and data.

Yes of couse. UFOs are ours, but we are not telling you! On the
question of ET I do indeed try to keep an open mind, although an open
mind is not an uncritical one.

I think we should take the issue of crashes first of all. If UFOs are
black they will crash from time to time. They will in fact crash quite
frequently because:-

1) They are trying to do something difficult eg. Blackstar was trying
to get into orbit.
2) Being secret they lack the vital safety valve of peer group review.

ET spacecraft if they are so technologically advanced will be safer
than our current generation of civil airliners and will not crash. Any
crash will therefore make hypothesis "1" untenable.

I am not really talking about morality when I refer to AI. If you have
AI the way to take over the world is simple. You simply download onto
the Web and you get your candidate elected. In presidential elections
the candidate who spends the most on TV advertising ususally wins. You
need money to becaome President of the United States.

Now the President is going to add a new star to the flag, Venus. The
Web will produce a design of Von Neumann machine which will be used to
terraform. When the terraforming is complete and a sunshield built
(together with lasers for interstellar sail probes) ET is simply going
to come and brake with what has been built. No need for Forward's twin
sails if you have a laser system built for you. You can take over the
world from that point. I stated that the mechanisms for interstellar
travel were already quite well known. That would bean immoral
civilization. It is what I might do myself. I don't think I would
actually want to conquer, but that would be the quickest way to bet the
Von Neumann probe working.

A more moral civilization might be content to observe. There again the
prime target would be the Web. Flying around in the atmosphere is
unnecessary anyway.