Life probably exists somewhere else.

That doesn’t mean they visit us in secret and there’s a conspiracy to hide it.

It’s two very different things

I assume other life exists somewhere, because the universe is practically infinite in size, but I also assume that we will not meet them, because the universe is practically infinite in size.

I am sure there are extraterrestrial life forms. It’s scientific consensus.

I do not think “the government” has proof and hides that from us.

The universe is big enough that life probably exists in other places. Anything advanced enough to reach us (an extraordinarily difficult feat) would not be dumb and incompetent enough to fall under the control of people, and people just want to believe in something fun to compensate for how boring modern life can be.

existence of extraterrestrial life

Absolutely certain

and the potential involvement of governments in concealing or studying such entities.

Completely absurd.

The Fermi Paradox is only a paradox if you apply a ludicrously unjustified value to the last figure in the Drake equation.

Technological civilizations are very likely self-extinguishing simply because technological power grows faster than any evolved species capacity to apply that technology to the benefit of the species.

Only way out of that would be that bio life is just a bootstrap for machine life and machine life just isn’t that interested in interacting with biological life so we’ll never see or hear from it.

While I 100% believe that the universe is probably crawling with extraterrestrial life, I don’t think any of it has visited us here.
Any alien race who had the technology to travel across the galaxy would look at humanity the same way we look at an ant hill while we’re driving down the highway, we don’t even notice it.
Sure, there may be some alien scientists that want to study our planet the same way that our scientist want to study ants, but what are the chances they even know about us? And is there anything interesting enough about us to distinguish us from all the other ant hills?

I refuse to believe that we are the only intelligent life in the universe, even though for most humans that bar is pretty low.

When I finally “die” I’ll no doubt get kicked back out into the real world and have to plug in another quarter.

Is there other intelligent alien life in our Galaxy? Probably. Given how fast life formed on Earth, there must be millions of other life-bearing planets, and intelligence can’t be that rare, but it might be short-lived.

Are there UFO sightings? Yes, people do see unidentified flying objects. Some of them can be explained, some cannot.

Are the UFOs aliens? I don’t know, I’m a “curious agnostic” on the subject.

There’s a LOT of UFO sightings, and evidence from good observers, including US Navy aviators. The US Air Force continues not to cooperate, and officially denies any sightings exist. The very enthusiastic refusal to look at evidence, aside from Project Blue Book, is suspicious.

It’s technically plausible that someone within 50-ish light years of Earth could have heard our radio, sent a ship here, and use drones or manned ships to observe us without interacting. There could also be many other explanations.

We don’t know, and until the last couple years there was no effort to investigate.

The probability that there are no aliens is very small, considering just how large the universe is. For the same reason we will probably not get to meet them though.

The universe has so many planets that it is unlikely that life only started on earth. However, the universe is simply too big. We are alone in the universe. And the aliens, they are alone too.

Depends on what do you mean by existence of aliens:

0. Some chemical/biological processes happen on other planets in the universe, that are necessary for life to exist. Or maybe there are “life” forms like viruses.

1. Life exists, but only in the simplest form, like single-cell organisms (e.g. bacteria).

2. Life exists, but only in the form of simple multi-cell organisms.

3. More advanced species exist, like fish or frogs on Earth, but nothing like Humans.

4. Other advanced species with their own civilizations exist (or existed and destroyed themselves), similar to ours, but again they might not look like humans at all.

5. Super advanced civilization of aliens exists, and they have tech we could only dream of.

Given that we know only one place where life naturally exists (Earth), it’s probably hard to tell which one is true. But I think that it’s sane to think that there are at least several other civilizations out there similar to ours, but given that our universe is relatively young, we might be the only one in our neighborhood (even on galaxy level) for now.

It’s also very important to note that extraterrestrial life might not resemble our life at all, and make us reconsider what even is life.

At this point, I’m beginning to think the gulf of space is too much to bridge, and if it were possible, they wouldn’t bother hiding / being sneaky / probing whatever.

The only truly reasonable position to have on this question is pure agnosticism: you do not and cannot know if life exists elsewhere in the universe, especially intelligent life. We could, in theory, be the only intelligent species to ever evolve in this universe. Period.

Depending on your interpretation of the Drake equation, they are either impossible or inevitable.

In general, yes. In the expanse of space there must be life somewhere.

For fun I let myself believe they’ve visited earth, and that at least some UFOs were alien, but that’s more of a fun “what if…” belief than anything and it doesn’t impact anything beyond my imagination.