The mental gymnastics is believing little green men, capable of sidesteping special relativity, travel X lightyears just to fly around San Diego and occasionally crash somewhere in the desert.
This is a very narrow perspective. We've only been around for ~200,000 years, only began to take flight 120 years ago, and flew to the moon around 60 years ago.
There are billions of habitable planets in our galaxy alone, a good percentage likely harbor intelligent life, and that life could have easily established civilizations that go back millions of years. Should they have developed tech, even at our pace, they are cycles and cycles ahead of us.
What would stop them from throwing "shit at the wall to see what sticks" to survey surrounding systems, given that their costs of and ability to mass manufacture cheap space traveling drones would take little resources? Would they even care that much if what they built wasnt to perfection, as long as it got the job done? What if there are still anomalies that they just put up with and could careless about accounting for because the losses are so minimal? What if the ones piloting are throwaway biological drones that they can just rebuild or grow? What if their ethics forbid them from interacting or interfering with developing civilizations? What if there's are agreements/laws among a collection of civilizations?
Additionally, there have been attempts by people to get this info out for decades, and what's being brought to congress' attention is that people have been murdered by governments and private organizations to keep this under wraps and to continue public disinfo to keep the ridicule going.
I can imagine that if there is FTL or teleport technology, it could have trouble upon arrival at a planet, because at that point it has to switch to a different mode and deal with gravity and air.
If you're teleporting many lightyears, it would be difficult to hit the target exactly - for example, if your distance is off by 0.00001% of the total, you could end up inside the earth.
