Skeptics of alleged UFO crashes like to wonder why, if visiting ETs are vastly superior to us, they seem to crash their vehicles so alarmingly often. It's a fair question, and one that defenders of crash-retrieval cases have yet to adequately address. This is partly due to the prevalent tendency to assume that "flying saucers," given their existence, are necessarily extraterrestrial craft thousands of years in advance of earthly aircraft.

It's generally assumed UFO crashes are grievous accidents. I'm not so sure. Deliberately offering a crashed saucer (and its technological bounty) to an emerging civilization might be a rather artful form of misdirection. "UFO lawyer" Peter Gersten likens the so-called Roswell Incident to a viral infection introduced by an entity he terms "Silog" ("silicon organism"), whose role is to supplant carbon-based life with its cybernetic equivalent. He cites the rise of brain-machine interfaces as possible evidence that we're slowly but certainly merging with Silog -- perhaps recklessly.

A less malign reason to stage saucer crashes might be to inject terrestrial science with vital new ideas without the risk of (potentially disastrous) open contact. Purposefully crashed UFOs could also serve as a sort of invitation to officialdom, allowing the decision for open contact (or simply official acknowledgement) to be made by terrestrial leaders, an idea explored by Whitley Strieber in his fiction book "Majestic."

But there's a more esoteric consideration to explore. If UFOs represent a paranormal intelligence of the sort proposed by Jacques Vallee and John Keel, then operating within the confines of our universe may be surprisingly difficult, even clumsy; the aliens of close-encounter lore may be rather like astronauts forced to wear cumbersome spacesuits. Our familiar world of atoms and molecules may be decidedly foreign to our visitors, who may hail from higher-dimensional space. In their native environment, ufonauts may consist of pure thought; visiting Earth could entail "downshifting" to a gross level in which accidents can and do happen -- up to and including Roswell Incidents.

Additionally, throughout the history of the UFO phenomenon, one finds "aliens" behaving in bizarre fashion. Some "abductees" report alien beings wearing human clothes in an apparent attempt to fit in. Enduring Men In Black sightings, as recounted in Keel's "The Mothman Prophecies," indicate that unearthly intelligences have a limited understanding of human culture, revealed through anachronistic dress or evident incomprehension when faced with trivial activities.

One is forced to conclude that either the controlling intelligence/s wants to draw attention to itself or else it really is impaired in some way; either scenario could help provide a plausible explanation for saucer crashes, which seem all-too-frequent when viewed as nuts-and-bolts navigation errors.