Only one contactee has ever really caught my interest; the rocket instrumentation technician who worked at White Sands Missile Proving Ground shortly after WWII named Daniel Fry. I wrote at some length recently about the reasons why his story stands out
in this thread. All of the other contactee stories that I've encountered were readily dismissed, especially in light of subsequent scientific findings. Curiously, Fry's account not only stands apart from the laughably fanciful takes of the other alleged contactees, but many of the statements in his books have been confirmed by the progress of science
decades later. This is an anomaly that I still to this day cannot explain away.
So I've spent some time considering the possibility that Daniel Fry was telling the truth about his encounter. And it occurred to me if his account was in fact real, then it may be possible that the entire "contactee era" of the 1950s may have been an alien PsyOp - a smokescreen to make the idea of contact seem laughable. For example, it seems that Truman Bethurum may have indeed encountered a woman using the name "Aura Rhanes," and their meetings could have been part of a cleverly orchestrated disinformation campaign, for the purpose of making the government and the public dismiss the idea of alien contact. This would surely be the smartest and most effective way to protect anyone who had actually been contacted, from the consequences of that contact.
In any case, I find this to be a stimulating intellectual exercise - and one which puts this subject in its proper perspective: because if we are indeed encountering alien beings of greater intelligence than our own, and presumably an abundance of experience with encountering more primitive civilizations like ours, then we should expect them to conduct covert missions of supreme effectiveness and masterful deception...not to haphazardly land at random locations and foolishly find themselves facing the business end of some terrified farmer's shotgun, as so many people seem to imagine happening in the event of an alien contact.
I have to disagree here: the Nimitz incidents did not happen in a historical vacuum, and looking at it that way tends to lead people to the premature and I think ill-founded conclusion that the Tic-Tac AAV was human in origin. The radical performance characteristics reported in that case conform perfectly to hundreds and probably thousands of similar incidents dating back over 70 years. Given that context, it seems obvious that the Nimitz incidents are most likely just one more case in a long history of cases involving technologies far beyond our terrestrial science and technology.