Maybe I'm jumping on a shadow here, and Davids disconnection was just theater, but...
If you want to prove a statement, you have to invest a lot of time, searching for people who can corroborate, searching official papers, look up videos. This is really useful, but I think no one of us has the time or the motivation. But Bill Birnes does exactly that to a degree, and he earns my respect for this. So I think at the end no one of us can prove the truth of a statement, it will be always a statement of A versus the statement of B. David always says he can state a qualified opinion in the field of photo analysis, but also states he is just a student in the paranormal. He maybe thinks that the statements of Birnes are out there, but I don't think he can't prove it.
I also think that is not really interesting if the statement of Birnes can be proven or not. You guys are maybe looking for the truth behind this subject, but I can't think we will have proof or the truth, until we will have some comparable technology and they will handle us as worthy enough not to play games with us any more. You also considered this several times, and asked if it of any use what you do. No, it's not, it would make more sense to go, earn a degree in physics and start working on the theory of building these crafts, we will have answers faster that way, but I think non of us is able or willing to do that.
So what we are doing here at the end is burning some of our free time on some issue we enjoy wasting our time on. You as host, and we as listeners. I don't think that Davids hissyness added to the quality of the show, but respect for Gene picking it up well, after he was left alone with Birnes. You have a very few regulars who are always interesting to listen to, Birnes is one of them, I don't think you can allow yourself offending him. I think I going against the mainstream opinion here, but the quality of the shows started to degrade lately. I'm saying this regardless the fact, that for example the Gary E. Schwartz episode was one of the bests you ever made, but Mac Tonnies was awful lately, and the last with Tim and Jeremy was also not very good. I don't want to offend anybody, this is life, once you are on the top of a wave, once not. This degradation started I think with the infamous Greer show, there is Greer, who is maybe a complete a**hole, but I think who made his best performance ever of sounding halfway decent, but David just awfully wanted him to make a mistake or do something outrageous, so he can drive him into a corner, but Greer new where he was, and tried to prevent this. The there was Paola Harris, who is maybe not too bright, heavily naive, but I don't think she deserved what she got based on her performance in your show. Maybe she deserved it for being who she is, the question is can you punish her for what she is, if she is not handling you bad at all?
Regarding some issues I found interesting in this show. I think the original statement of Birnes was that integrated circuits were found in the wreckage, and this helped for us developing our own integrated circuits. I don't know if this is right, but what Birnes said about showing it to people, who already entertained the idea, and had the knowledge to get hints about its working seems to be totally plausible to me. But I don't know if it is right, most probably will never know. As the first working IC prototype was presented in 1958, and the first people started to think about it in 1952, they had enough time to figure it out. Also an integrated circuit is not a transistor! You use these two terms interchangeably, don't do it! The problem is that neither Birnes nor you really understand this issue. An integrated circuit contains millions of transistors on the same die created with the help of lithography, and I don't really know the resolution of microscopes in 1947, or the state of material examination technology, but I can believe that the only thing they could to that time, is to analyze the material, and they got to the result, it is doped silicone.
As to the assumption, that the technology of those civilizations is so far ahead of us, that we can't even analyze it: when I was doing my degree in electrical engineering five years ago, one of our professors told us, that there is an absolute limit for shrinking the size of transistor, it is the point where it becomes the size of one atom, because then it can't be used as an amplifier any more, maybe it still can be used as a switch. He said that based on the pace we could shrink them in the past, (Moore's law) we will reach that limit in 15 years. And if you think about it, there seems to be no way of reducing the the size of anything below the size of an atom. So maybe there is no way to further develop semiconductor technology, and as I know, there already are atomic microscopes, which near the atomic resolution. So maybe more developed civilizations use the same trace width, they just have a better understanding of physics, and they can build warp drives, or whatever propels their ships. If you think about this, we are already at the point, where we can't really build better processing cores, we just make ones width always doubling the data width, and integrating more of them on one die. Also, maybe there will be some super expensive technology X, but why use it for simple tasks, like opening and retracting landing gears in spaceships, when a handful of sand with a few grams of copper can solve it also? Everything is about bang for the buck, and it always will be. I understand that there are a lot of assumptions here, but we won't know until we will see.