UFOs are a soft sci-fi genre
Real "first contact" will be technosignatures from far away
The worst thing about UFO conspiracists is that they are a bunch of “Soft” sci-fi fans. Their exercise in communal world-building has a place along the Soft vs. Hard sci-fi axis closer to Star Wars (which is Soft because the technology is basically magic, the rules of the universe are subservient to plot, etc). Prominent voices in UFOlogy, those who the media treat as serious people, think that Mussolini once had a crashed flying saucer and the U.S. government took it in WWII and its captured alien beings have attacked human scientists in underground labs—all crappy, derivative space-opera stuff. Their lore, the rules of the universe they're proposing, reeks of the artistic wants of a thirteen-year-old boy; it’s the kind of world where the protagonist gets a plasma gun and says, “Time to melt some bugs!”
It offends me aesthetically. I'd like to say I sometimes write skeptically on UFOs solely because I value the truth and the “UFO community” so often ends up on the wrong side of it (as I wrote earlier this week, the mysterious New Jersey sightings have just been planes). Sure, that’s a big part of it. But I’m also a Hard sci-fi kind of guy, so perhaps a further subconscious motivation is because they don't know aesthetically or intellectually what good sci-fi is.
So instead, let's talk aliens seriously; what would “first contact” actually look like in a Hard sci-fi future? Quite different. First, it’s extremely unlikely our first evidence would be from some sort of physical visitation (and probably not to New Jersey). Contact occurring via an explicitly sent communication (like in Carl Sagan’s Contact) is a bit more likely, but still improbable. We haven't really been worth contacting until a couple hundred years ago and the Milky Way galaxy is over 100,000 light years wide. Who has even had time to send a hello?
Therefore, first contact is likely to be solely observational, which in turn means being inconclusive and probabilistic. A reasonable first contact would be if we accrue evidence of distant alien civilizations from very far away, but then the quality and nature of that evidence is poor and uncertain, accompanied by a great deal of scientific debate. Meaning that first contact might actually entail a stretched-out period of what I'll call “alien agnosticism" within the scientific literature itself. And it's very possible this status will last hundreds of years.
In fact, I think we're beginning to see the moves toward alien agnosticism already. At least, some of the methods that could usher us into that epistemic state are in place. Consider that scientists have now quietly identified 53 Dyson Sphere candidates—stars that look a heck of a lot like some civilization is building megastructures around them to soak up as much energy as possible. That’s right: 53!
