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It just seems very unbelievable that beings that master energies enough to make to Earth from where-ever they came - and it can't be close because we'd notice them somehow already - get here, leave no footprint except some weird artifacts in US govt secret storage and then never show up again in any way. You mean if you look at human exploration, it's not really how it worked, is it? If somebody found some new land, soon tenfold of people would show up, then twentyfold, then hundredfold. Even if the original explorer died without relaying any message, soon somebody would follow their path, and then another somebody, and so on. I could find only two situations compatible with government holding any alien artifacts - a) aliens are very rare and very very far away, and they are essentially launching expendable exploratory probes (biorobots maybe?) at random directions, and one of the random directions intersected Earth but by some malfunction failed to call back so this direction is considered empty for the next N thousands of years until the next random probe arrives; and b) our vicinity is somehow marked in Common Galactese as "exclusion area, do not approach!" - either because we are under-developed, or too weird, or too dangerous, or any other reason - and would remain so basically until the aliens decide otherwise or we develop independent means of discovering them.
The situation even worse for the scenario where they show up, but only as vague images in blurry photos. I mean, a civilization which uses energies several orders of magnitude stronger than we do, dances around among us, and we notice nothing? It's like ants not noticing somebody trying to build a residential neighborhood on top of their ant pile. I think they'd notice pretty soon. They might not understand what is going on but they'd notice.
A variation: They did indeed signal back, but light-speed delay means that the signal itself, nevermind any follow-up-action, will not arrive for a very long time yet.
I'd expect anybody who mastered FTL travel also master FTL messaging. Though indeed it's not a given (I think Bujold universe had FTL travel but no FTL messaging, leading to passing messages with couriers). Without FTL, there's no point to even bother to send probes out.
Ah, sorry, I didn't realize FTL was implied but assumed that the aliens had slow-boated to Earth.
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