The suggestion that alien visitation is “both completely unevidenced and physically implausible” cannot be fair-mindedly substantiated. The first reason is that there is plenty of evidence, just not of the type that certain skeptics deem valid...
This is absolutely untrue. First I would like to point out that the word "skeptic" is used by believers in whatever UFO phenomena as a means of giving themselves more credit than is due. I am not "skeptical" about alien visitation in the same way that I am not "skeptical" about the idea that the world rests on the back of a giant turtle. To say that I am a "skeptic" suggests two opposing, but equally valid opinions. This is far from reality. Whether there is or is not evidence for alien visitation is not a matter of opinion, it is a matter of fact. I am not a "skeptic", I am being realistic.
Second, the term “UFO” is used very ambiguously among UFO enthusiasts. It absolutely does not mean “alien craft”. The “U” stands for “Unidentified”. So how does that term engender a definitive identification? And there ARE UFO enthusiast who absolutely do not believe they are aliens. Other common beliefs are lizard or mantis people from the center of the Earth. A little later on I’ll give you another example from someone I’ve actually spoken with at length (online in a forum and in private messages).
The problem is, as it always is, the believer’s interpretation of what constitutes “evidence”. When we form a belief which we treasure, but which is not based in fact, we lower the bar for what we will accept as evidence for that belief. Normally you have to prove something is “true” to get someone to believe it. The default position is usually not to believe. But if you really, really want to believe something you may instead demand that others prove that it is “false”. The default position is to believe. The problem with this is that there can be no evidence that a thing does not exist that can’t be rejected easily. Prove to me that there’s no lead in my water. It tested negative? How do I know your test is accurate? How do I know it didn’t sink to the bottom of the water and you tested from the top? I can dismiss any evidence against it that I want because, unlike proving something “is”, you cannot simply show it to me.
If you truly examine that which is claimed to be evidence for alien visitation you will find that it is actually evidence against mundane things, the dismissal of evidence against the belief as described above. “Evidence for” something would cause a person who had no previous concept of that thing to conclude it was that thing. Someone who had never even considered life from somewhere other than Earth would come to the conclusion, based solely on the evidence, that the evidence says that this was life from somewhere other than Earth. There is no such evidence. The so called evidence for alien visitation is always either eyewitness claims, notoriously unreliable in the best of times, or little more than ruling out everything mundane you can think of an asking, “What else can it be?”
To show this point, earlier I mentioned another belief that I would bring up. I used to know a lady who had once believed that UFOs were alien visitation, but had since come to the conclusion that they were actually demons sent to trick us into believing they were aliens. Thinking back on all of the evidence you have ever seen which proves that it really is alien visitation, what, among that evidence, proves this lady was wrong? What evidence is there that it’s actual aliens and not just demons pretending to be aliens?
As for the logistics, I’ve done the math. We know of nothing which can travel faster than the speed of light. We have never seen it happen. But imagine that we could travel faster than the speed of light. Imagine that we could go, for instance, 100x the speed of light. At that speed, more than 100x faster than the fastest known speed we could go, how many star systems do you think you could visit in 2 weeks? The answer is ZERO. The closest start to us, called Alpha Centauri, Proxima, is about 4.24 light years away. Take 4.24 times 365.25, the number of days in a year and you get 1,548.66 light days from us. But we’re going 100x faster than the speed of light, so we have to divide that by 100. That puts it 15.4866 days away at that speed, more than 2 weeks. But if we’re going 100x the speed of light, why not just imagine 10,000x faster than is even possible? Then it would STILL take us nearly 4 hours to get there. That’s a boring trip. How about a MILLION times the speed of light? Almost 2 1/4 minutes even at that speed, but at least that makes it feasible. So how about to the nearest neighboring galaxy? That would be Canis Major Dwarf at .025 million light years away. That’s a 9 day trip at a million times the speed of light. A little more. What about just to the center of our own galaxy? About half a day LONGER. So let’s up it to 10 million times the speed of light. Then it’s just under a day to get to the center of our own galaxy.
But let’s say we average just 2 minutes to get to a star, check it out and move on to the next, on average. There are believed to be 100-400 BILLION stars in the Milky Way. Assuming the smallest possible number you could know, for sure, if there was other life in our galaxy in a mere 380,257 years! Maybe we had better go a gazillion times the speed of light…