Why don't UFOs land? ... would you if you were them?

Texans see UFO, fear 'end of times'. So it seems that a UFO appeared over a Texas town and several dozen people all reported seeing it, describing it similarly. That's nice, but not very new; this sort of thing happens all the time.

My question is this: one person is quoted as saying "I think it must be some kind of military craft -- at least I hope it was."

Why would you wish that? What are you afraid of? I wish someone could explain to me why the idea of extraterrestrial life is frightening, other than the having watched too much television factor. Seriously, if someone can get from any other world to ours successfully, and were here, then if they wanted to hurt us they would have. They would be so far advanced over us that they would not need to resort to being sneaky about it. They would just press the 're-terraform' button and be done with it.

Its sad that people's religions many times cause them to be frightened, and of course the ones in power have reason to be: proof of an extra-terrestrial civilization would destroy the concept of many religions that we are the most important thing in the whole vast universe, if the universe itself hasn't already been enough to kill the idea. Its hard to make a literal interpretation of Christian or Muslim scripture work if we discover other sentient life besides us that isn't 'God' or 'angels' or 'demons' and this makes many people assume strange things. I have seen people say that the aliens were demons, for example, trying to deceive us.

And we wonder why they would not visit us in the open? Obviously before visiting us outright they would need to get people use to the concept that they were around and not harming us (by causing sightings like this), because if they just landed, people would freak out. Some people would try to fight them, others would try to purge random groups from the earth to purge it for the end times, and it would be a general mess. Many people could die, and if the wrong person freaked out (like say someone with the ability to order nuclear strikes) it could literally cause the destruction of our world.

This is not without precedent. The first settlers to an area often have good intentions, but those intentions rarely work out. They can't just step down and say hi to us without causing our society to launch into an upheaval.

If they really wanted to hurt us, all they'd have to do is say 'hi'.

We are a dangerous planet, full of very dangerous people, powers, religions, and the like. I have heard it said that they look at us and say "for only the color of their skin... they kill... we don't want to go there!". If we can't ourselves bring our civilization to a better more 'civilized' standard, then we will never be worth a visit, and the universe will be a better place without us once we destroy ourselves.