If aliens exist, it would take them at least 400 years to contact us.
And if my grandmother had a 49 cc engine, it would be a motorbike. Sorry for the recurring joke, but it's just that it's so easy.
To be more precise journalistically speaking, even if it is a poisoned conditional, "if extraterrestrials existed" should have been used because the only thing we have been dealing with for centuries is speculation.
It is unknown whether National Geographic uses the conditional because they believe it a little, whether it is a lukewarm way of questioning it or whether they are simply collecting visitors through the misfortune of clickbait. My money is more on the latter.
When the headline opens with an assertion that starts from a supposedly remote or improbable possibility, anything we want to embed afterwards can fit if we embellish the science fiction with a dose of rational science.
We already know that although tontolares are written all year round, in summer they are more frequent. Now it's the turn of aliens again, because since David Grusch, a former intelligence officer, testified on Capitol Hill at the end of July that the US government is hiding alien spacecraft and "non-human remains", the maguffa thing is back in full force for cheap clicks.
If we add to this the fact that almost all the platforms that produce or host documentaries on history, even those that once seemed "scientific" and rigorous, have turned their entire offer into a common and uniform theme based on two pillars: Nazis and UFOs (in all their Martian variants). We can even find a lot of documentaries that talk about Hitler's relationship with extraterrestrials and the Nazis with UFOs or any other alien "mystery" nonsense.
