A top space researcher claims the U.S. has "no evidence" of alien technology in the skies, downplaying widespread speculation of the existence of hovering, extraterrestrial machinery.

"We don't have any evidence of any credible source that would indicate the presence of alien technology in our skies. And we never have," Bill Diamond, president and chief executive officer of the SETI Institute, an organization dedicated to researching intelligence in the universe, told Space.com. "The idea that the government is keeping something like this secret is just totally absurd. There's no motivation to do so."

While Diamond doesn't rule out the possibility of discovering alien technology in the future, he said, "we should equally not jump to the conclusion that UFOs are alien technology in the absence of any compelling evidence to that effect. And there is no compelling evidence," he said.

The fact that it would take the fastest spacecraft ever humanly built 80,000 years to travel to Earth from the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, is what leads Diamond to believe that "any civilization that has mastered the ability to traverse the incomprehensibly vast distances of interstellar space would have technology so far advanced from our own as to be beyond our comprehension."

"If such beings exist, they would likely send hardware here first and not biology, and they certainly wouldn't crash-land in our deserts," he joked.

"The farthest things we have sent into space are hardware. And that's logical," said Diamond, the outlet reported. "But if you did send beings and the most interesting thing you can do is draw circles in crops... come on!"

Diamond also pointed to a lack of government funding to research UFOs, which he suggested was "either the government being quite certain that there's nothing to these accidental observations – or – the government preferring that we not use available technology to closely watch our skies because of our own human technologies that are being developed – in secret."

He noted, "I think that's the most compelling bit of evidence against the idea that we've got visitors in our skies."