Let's just say for a moment aliens did land on earth...

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"we have had the ability to........DEVELOP....interstellar space travel... for decades".
Not "we have the ability to DO interstellar space travel". Just the ability to..someday have the ability to do it.

Thats not much of distinction your making.

In fact it sounds like double talk!

We cant even colonize Mars yet.
And we cant go one percent the speed of light yet-much less break the light barrier.

What? It's possible to have the ability to develop something without actually developing it, there are countries that are that way with nuclear weapons. We have the technological ability to develop reusable launch systems, but they don't magically appear.

Just having the ability to do something doesn't mean it will actually be done. Take rocket propelled kittens, for example. Fairly easy to do, but have you ever seen one? Granted, the Internet will kill you if you try, but the point is... maybe a better one would be desalinisation. We have the technology, and if we were inclined to we could get all our water that way, but we don't bother. Much like we don't bother colonising Mars, despite having the technological skill to do so.

That depends. Are they good to eat?

We have built a spacecraft that will, eventually, leave the solar system and may one day approach another civilization.

But that is a very long way from building a manned spacecraft on which humans could survive for the extremely long time it would take to reach another system. Even traveling to Alpha Centauri would take generations.

During the trip, the spacecraft would have to be very self-sufficient in everything including food, water, oxygen, sewage treatment, power, ... . Enough that many generations could be born, grow up, reproduce, live, and eventually die on the spacecraft.

We don't have that capability today, much less for decades.

Only because we haven't bothered to develop the technology. It's not like expecting a society that knows nothing about electromagnetism to build electric motors; more like expecting one that does know about them to develop the electric lightbulb.

I appreciate all of your inputs even if we aren't always on the same page!

What I like thinking about are possible scenarios and what fascinates me at the moment are these people suddenly showing up in cultures on various continents. What if the aliens showed up, attempting to blend in? You might just think they were oddballs, not aware they are really from a far away world.

I would hardly expect them to be at all human considering that they would have surely had much different evolutionary paths.

That's what your aliens should do!
Instead of asking for their own country, they should just take the low paying stoop labor jobs (like bean picking), and then move up the immigrant ladder, and try to assimilate! Like any other immigrants.

They aren't really human but they can sorta blend in because they happen to be similar to us in the way they walk upright, have hands they can use to hold objects, and very little body hair. Who knows what color their skin would be!

It might be easier for them to just try to hide in plain sight, NaturalPlastic.

Unless an alien was very closely related to us, the odds that he would look like us would be arbitrarily close to zero. We would likely have have a closer resemblance to a panda bear than to an alien.

Let me ask you. How do you know what you need to be able to accomplish what we have is something similar to what we are? Look at all the other creatures that have existed during the entire history of the earth, the ones we know of. Which ones have been able to look toward the sky and contemplate what is beyond it and how to reach those places? No other species, that we know of, have done it, so there could be something in our make up, as in, arms, hands and walking upright, along with sight and hearing, and most importantly, a complex form of communication that involves talking to groups of our own species in precise ways they can understand, that facilitated it. Even chimpanzees do not do this and they are our closest relatives.

Look at all the insects that have existed since the time creatures were still leaving the primordial waters and venture up onto the awaiting land. None of them, that we know have, ever evolved a creature capable of that great leap into space.

There is no reason to think that an alien species would have a past evolutionary history that was anything like ours.

We, as humans, and chimpanzees have very similar DNA that agrees approximately 95% of the time. But with that 5% difference, there is a large difference in the finished results. Hardly anyone would have any trouble telling humans and chimpanzees apart.

The difference between us and Neanderthals is even closer. According to Wikipedia (I hate to use Wikipedia as a source), the difference between our DNA and Neanderthal DNA is only in 0.12% of our DNA. I suppose that someone who is a Neanderthal could possibly pass as homeo sapiens.

For an alien species to resemble us enough that they could pass for human, they would have to have nearly the same DNA. What are the odds of that? What are the odds that two beings evolving on entirely different worlds with entirely different evolutionary pressures would have DNA that is so little different than ours?

Would they even have DNA or would they have something similar, but different? Would their version of genes code for proteins so similar to ours that they would end up being so similar that they could pass for human?

That this could happen is unimagineable. The only possible way it could happen is if we were related to those aliens and that is extraordinarily unlikely.

I can't imagine that the odds that an alien could pass as human could possibly be as high as one in a trillion. Maybe not one in a trillion squared. Or cubed.

The notion that aliens might pass as humans makes good science fiction, but extraordinarily bad science.

Well, let me ask you, with the information we have gathered so far about our surroundings once we away from earth, what are the odds we would even be having this conversation in the first place? Extremely tiny. This is why I tell people always cherish your life as human no matter what. It is truly an incredibly rare gift but so often humans do not understand this and they do stupid things with their precious time and they don't respect others on the same journey. Life is the most precious, rarest thing you have, even more so than money, diamonds, gold, oil, platinum, whatever. Life is the greatest thing in the universe.

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Small, but hardly extremely tiny, and many orders of magnitude greater than the odds that an alien being could pass as being human.

I can't help but imagine that similar conversations have taken place before -- and not just once.

For example, from http://stevedutch.blogspot.com/2013/02/why-would-aliens-want-earth.html:The author of that does present an intriguing idea -- that the alien species might be able to build robots that we could not distinguish from humans.

And from http://worldofweirdthings.com/2010/09/27/why-youre-most-probably-not-part-alien/: