… If those “recovered technologies” are potentially dangerous, then I can see why the feds should be able to take them, subject to Second Amendment considerations, of course. Light saber, cold dead hands, etc.
If, however, some lucky rancher in New Mexico’s high desert stumbles across enough pieces of crashed alien technology on their property that it can be used to reverse engineer flying cars, say, a miracle fuel, replicators, or the like, he or she should be able to exploit it. This country’s fracking revolution was essentially enabled by the fact that U.S. landowners (unlike their counterparts almost anywhere else in the world) own the mineral rights under their property. Allowing the feds to simply expropriate the alien bounty found on private land not only is un-American, but also might well mean that it will go to waste, buried in red tape or some secretive, remote warehouse.
