If NHI are here, and have been for at least decades, then they must be directly related to us. Here’s why

First, let me rule out why they could NOT be travelers from another planet. The galaxy, let alone the universe, is so vast, that pretty much the only way to detect another civilization would be to catch one of their transmissions or otherwise detect their energy usage. For the vast majority of human history, we had not been using enough energy to be detectable, nor had we been making any transmissions – that’s only happened very recently relative to the whole of the human timeline.

We hear a a lot of stories about how a ton of UFOs started showing up around the dawn of the nuclear age. We have stories going back to the 30’s about this. But we didn’t have broadcast television until about the 20’s, which means anyone capturing our transmissions and arriving by the 30’s would have to be from Alpha Centauri and pretty much no where else. That means the closest star system to us has intelligent life, which would also imply the probability of intelligent civilizations forming in exoplanets like ours is very high, since we are 2 for 2 on data in our little neighborhood. That would lead directly into the Fermi Paradox: where is everyone? Surely if intelligent life is so common, SOMEONE has advanced enough to be Type 2 in a near enough star system to be easily detectable, but we haven’t seen it.

That would also mean this intelligent civilization nearby us is advanced enough to be way ahead of us in propulsion to travel at near-light speeds, but not so advanced that they are Type 2 and are using their star for energy, which we would definitely notice. So that means they must have started at almost exactly the same time as us by cosmic time scales. Even if they were a million years ahead of us, 1 million years out of the 13+ billion years the Milky Way existed is, for all intents and purposes “the same time.” The probability of that our species would have started so closely in time to our next door neighbor is very low.

So, that means if there is NHI visiting us, they’ve always known about us. There’s just no other way they could have detected us and be here so soon. If they’ve always known about us, they were either here first, or they seeded this planet with us. There’s no other explanation.