You certainly seem enthusiastic about all this surveillance! Hmm... Perhaps a little TOO enthusiastic — as a way of allaying suspicion?..

Poppycock. Even setting aside technological or transhumanist means of overcoming boredom, more time means more opportunities to do new things. Fewer people would be stuck in boring dead-end jobs, for example, if they knew that they could switch careers as many times as they wish, that there's always going to be…

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department!" says Werner von Braun.

I'll let Tom Leher blame him as few others could:

And years... and years... and years... :P

I blame volcanoes. On the sun.

"Our birth rate is plummeting! We need ideas, people!"

I do remember reading a short story (I think it was by Turtledove, but I can't remember for sure?..) about an interstellar empire that discovered faster-than-light travel in their equivalent of the middle ages, stalled in technological development, and invaded Earth with blunderbuss-wielding conquistadores, only to be…

What about fairly intelligent animals? There's a bit of a scale here — it may be a mistake to assign human-like motives and thoughts to a barnacle or insect, but what about, say, a dolphin? A chimpanzee? Even cuttlefish are actually pretty intelligent (for invertebrates, anyway). Of course that doesn't mean a…

That is a good point, though the Colonel doesn't really bring it up or explain it this way. He also mentioned that he thinks the second UFO was trying to rescue survivors from the first crash — which would imply both that these weren't unmanned drones, and that the aliens on the second ship, at least, would have…

I do not think this is possible since, as other commenters have mentioned, a space-craft's electronics have to be hardened anyway just to survive the harsh environment of outer space, where ionizing radiation and electromagnetic pulses are found naturally. Even supposing these aliens were a bunch of interstellar…

Sorry! A double post. :(

Perhaps in reality they disabled the UFO by sending it the first-ever computer virus. Though how they fit all those vacuum tubes onto a plane, we'll never know... :P

And perhaps the UFO really crashed because the parents called the alien version of OnStar... It would complete the "alien child messes with humanity until its parents show up" Star Trek plot. :P

To me, the least plausible part seems to be the bit where a U.S. military plane (even an experimental one) from 1947 (or even from today, or any time in the near future, for that matter) is able to bring down a spacecraft built by people who have the technology to travel between stars. The fact that Col. French…

Now it just needs to find Opportunity and team up to rescue Spirit. :D

Advertising dollars well spent! :D

Just because the demonization of Edison sometimes goes too far doesn't mean his wrongdoings can simply be dismissed by saying he was a "complicated" person with "strengths and weaknesses." I'm sure Tesla wasn't always an angel, and if Edison maintained a friendship with Samuel Clemens, it certainly suggests he wasn't…

Yesss thank you. :D I hope they swap this one for the one in the article presently...

And the Earth's atmosphere was still too thin to support sound, and colours hadn't been discovered yet!