Americans have long been fascinated by the possibility that we’re not alone. The latest news about leaks of government information on UFOs — now calls UAPs — has renewed the buzz, and UT law professor Glenn Reynolds weighs in with a few fun thoughts.

We’re starting to hear a lot about them lately, and from more-or-less respectable sources informed by what appear to be plausible leaks from within the government. Of course, leaks from within the government, as recent history demonstrates, aren’t always true. Sometimes they’re deliberately false or misleading. Sometimes the leakers are honest, but what they’re leaking is false. Sometimes it’s not false, but a piece of the story that is misleading in isolation. Sometimes they’re flat-out made up by dishonest journalists or other actors.

On the alien-story front, I think we can rule out pure journalistic invention. Over the past couple of years, enough of these stories have emerged in various ways and outlets to strongly indicate that they’re coming from somewhere else, probably somewhere within the government.

As a first-order probability, the likelihood is that it’s the government that’s lying. Lying governments are commonplace. Aliens, so far as we know, are not. So if you play the odds, it’s a phony story from the government, released for some obscure reason.

Nevertheless, Reynolds admits, there’s some intriguing stuff here. “The evidence available to us isn’t conclusive,” he says, “but there’s now a fair amount of it, and while alien spacecraft seem unlikely, unlikely not the same as impossible.”

That said, I have questions. First: Why are these spacecraft crashing all the time? If we really have “12 or more spacecraft” of non-human origin, er, what’s wrong with them? I mean, to lose one spacecraft could be an accident but to lose twelve seems like carelessness.

He lightheartedly contemplates several possibilities for an answer before moving on.

Second: Why now? Assume that this has been going on since the beginning of the Postwar era. Why is this stuff coming out now? There wasn’t a Daniel Ellsberg-style massive leak. It’s come out in dribs and drabs. Yes, there are whistleblowers appearing now, but they’re mostly expanding and reinforcing other stuff that has leaked out.

“Maybe,” he teases, “they’re softening up people for a large-scale encounter, so that it will be less of a shock.”

And finally, what’s the aliens’ game? Yeah, I know, they’re alien, which means they may have motivations we don’t understand. But I assume you don’t cross the trackless miles lightyears of interstellar space without a pretty good reason. What do we have that they might want? …

Maybe they find us entertaining and just like to keep track of our shenanigans. (…Perhaps its egocentric to assume that we’re that amusing, but then again, look around. How many intelligent species are likely to be crazier than humans? How much crazier could they be and still survive?)

In any case, there’s a lot to wonder and not enough answers, but some previous theories are “sounding not quite so crazy today, in light of these reports.”

Read the whole thing here.