I'm slightly cheered by the high ratio of skeptical eyerolling to credulous batshittery in the responses so far. Having participated in a few discussions of Japanese-style comic books chapters on this site, I was worried it'd go the other way.
Me, I'm in favor of aliens. By which I mean the possibility of them. To be honest, I've wished nearly all my life to witness the arrival of some -- by which I mean any, any even half-credible -- evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial life in our stupid empty butthole universe. But a near-century of collective human seeking has, to date, produced sweet fuck all. The universe's silence on this point depresses me in much the same way (or so I imagine) that God's silence depresses the depressive Christian. Only more so, in that the universe actually exists.
It's not the loneliness of humanity's isolation that gets me down. Loneliness and I have a pretty good working relationship. And though they hung heavy over my teen sci-fi mind dungeon, I'm no longer bothered by the quasi-scientific "implications" of universal silence. Somewhere along the way, I noticed that the human perception of any given situation's implications will almost always tend, in the absence of good information, toward anxious superstition. Applying this insight to myself, I find, helps keep the occasional recurrence of cosmic horror in perspective.
My despair arises, I think, from the empty universe's denial, on the grandest possible scale, of transformative strangeness. I'm neither a religious believer nor a spiritual seeker. I've never seen an aura, "felt a presence", or received a premonition. Where others discern the fingerprints of their preferred Creator, I see the output of nested physical systems, a pachinko-verse in which waves and particles throw shapes. I nevertheless long very deeply to experience a radical break in what I take to be reality. I'm not talking about drugs or madness. I want the unreal made real.
I'd give almost anything to learn a bit of magic, befriend a winged lion, or join for a moment the procession of immortals who glide forever above the clouds. But none of those things, the dreams of ages long past, seems plausible in the present. Which is where the aliens come in. Rational materialism is obliged to grant at least the possibility that the crab nebula's ranking Cubic Z-Lords can deploy super freaky space-type cube powers. Aliens are, in this sense, a kind of transtemporal cheat tube, one through which a semblance of the atavistic uncanny can be successfully ported into the dully rational framework of 21st century consensus reality.
Our silent stupid butthole universe doesn't outright deny the existence of aliens, but it's not playing ball. That's not a problem in itself, as we can easily make up excuses for the universe's total fucking lack of alien anything anywhere ever. Unfortunately, however, the volume of bullshit required to excuse an entire universe makes it all but impossible for the bullshitter to suspend disbelief throughout the application process. At which point, ~poof~ go the aliens. I'm being flippant, but the loss kind of breaks my heart.
I mean, I love life. I love the world. But I very nearly hate living in a world that has outlived its sustaining ghosts, gods and monsters. What would any of us be, I wonder, without a few ridiculous dreams?