A Growing Number Of People Believe Aliens Have Visited Us – And That Could Be A Problem

However, some people are not convinced by this uncertainty. For them, alien life not only exists, but it has also been visiting the Earth for a long time. And this is not necessarily a fringe community either. In fact, it seems the number of people who believe aliens have visited the planet has been gradually rising over the last few decades. 

For instance, in the US, the number of people who believe unidentified flying object (UFO) sightings are evidence of alien life has increased from 20 percent in 1996 to 34 percent in 2022. Similarly, a YouGov poll conducted in March 2025 found that 32 percent of British people believed intelligent life has visited the planet already.

Aliens and UFO sightings are, for many people, clearly a serious business, and yet this sentiment appears to be out of sync with the scientific and academic world, which has rarely taken the subject seriously. Much of this rests on the fact that we have zero evidence that aliens exist anywhere in the universe, let alone that they have been visiting us. If we can’t even agree that there may be life out there, how can we believe intelligent life has already probed some farmers in rural America?

What are scientists actually doing?

Of course, some scientists are looking for signs of extraterrestrial life, but they are doing so by searching for signals from distant planets. Other scholars have held philosophical discussions about how likely aliens are to exist at all, while some more policy-minded individuals have proposed protocols for when/if a first contact situation occurs.

In addition, biologists have considered how evolution for an alien species may play out on planets that have different conditions to ours (such as more or less gravity). Would these organisms evolve in similar ways to us, or would they appear considerably different? (Spoiler: most think it will be the latter, which makes supposed sightings of very humanoid “aliens” even less likely.)

People imagine that ufologists are harmlessly searching for alien life. That’s not entirely true.

Tony Milligan

If scholars have otherwise engaged with the subject of aliens and alien visitation, it has, as Tony Milligan, Research Fellow in the Philosophy of Ethics at King’s College London, recently noted, settled for “debunking visitation claims without becoming drawn into any ongoing research process.” This, he argues, is because such research would achieve “little more than repeatedly pointing to the exceptionally low quality of the evidence presented and the poor argumentative framing.”

Conspiracies, distrust, and political fallout

However, this is not satisfying to the increasing number of people who regard the scientific disinterest in alien contact as either a sign of academic arrogance or worse, a deliberate effort to cover something up. Alongside the increase in people believing UFOs and UAP (unidentified anomalous phenomena) are signs of alien visits is the conspiratorial belief that corrupt institutions are trying to conceal the truth.

Pressure for “transparency” around UAP sightings has even led politicians to respond to public demand, which was evident in the Pentagon’s recent disclosures. This whole process received interest from both sides of the American political divide.

For Milligan, this is not necessarily a bemusing situation, but a troublesome one.

“It distorts the political process when policy draws upon conspiracy theories about government cover-ups and about scientists secretly co-operating with conspiracies. People imagine that ufologists are harmlessly searching for alien life. That’s not entirely true. The current heavily politicised variant of ufology is also looking for conspirators from the science community and within government. People who have helped to conceal the truth,” Milligan told IFLScience.

“There was a big rise of belief in UFOs in the 1950s, during the Cold War, and when there was a serious threat of nuclear war, in the early 1960s. Alien visitors could be seen as saviours or as a greater external threat. In Yukio Mishima’s Beautiful Star, written around that time, they are both. Ufology reflects our hopes and fears.” 

“The main driver for the recent upswing in belief is not a worry about humanity,” Milligan explained. “Rather, the driver is populism, and particularly the belief that ‘the people’ are being tricked by a controlling, secretive and self-serving ‘elite’: Billionaires, scientists, intellectuals who cling to the old ways. This creates a political climate which is tailor-made for a sharp rise of belief in ufology, just so long as it focuses upon ‘secrets’ and ‘disclosure’ rather than dodgy films, crop circles, and fantasies about Mussolini having his own private spacecraft.”

When ufology rewrites history

As Milligan has shown elsewhere, the rise in conspiratorial beliefs undermines public trust in democratic institutions, which are seen to be part of the great cover-up. At the same time, interest in UFOs and UAPs produces “background noise” – noise often distorts, or all altogether suppresses, new stories regarding legitimate scientific research, such as those conducted by astrobiologists to investigate microbial extraterrestrial life.

Key culprits here are shows like History’s Ancient Aliens and the abundant number of YouTube channels that perpetuate all sorts of bogus claims loosely disguised as true stories or historical fact, or less overtly sensational documentaries on channels like H2, Discovery, and National Geographic.

Ufology messes with our understanding of the past.

Tony Milligan

This distortion of historical reality is one thing, but it gets worse when ufology starts to appropriate and meddle with the history belonging to Indigenous cultures.

“Ufology cuts us off from the past by rewriting human history and Indigenous storytelling about sky beings to fit with the entirely modern idea of visitation by technologically advanced aliens,” Milligan added. “Ufology messes with our understanding of the past.”  

This may not seem obvious at first, but it is a real problem and is subtly racist at its core. Since the 1960s and 1970s, ufologists, as well as some other believers in long-lost super advanced civilizations, have mined the traditions and stories of various cultures to create fictional histories they would rather subscribe to. 

In many cases, these alternative accounts explain how typically ancient cultures, such as the Egyptians or the peoples of South America, could create complex civilizations and architectural and technological achievements at a time when Europeans were still illiterate and hitting one another with sticks. To put it plainly, for advocates of ancient alien visitors, it is far more palatable to imagine high-tech extraterrestrials than to concede that ancient non-European people could be sophisticated.

Nothing new under the Sun, not even aliens

To be sure, this is not necessarily a new phenomenon, but it has gained a more problematic status in the current climate. However, this is arguably a difference in extremes rather than something entirely new. In fact, many of the elements currently at play in the ufology world have been present from its earliest days.

The story mostly started after the supposed UFO sightings around Mount Rainier in 1947. Although initial discussions rarely mentioned aliens, a “meme”, as Professor Greg Eghigian told IFLScience, was nevertheless introduced to the media and popular culture. 

By the mid-1950s, the first stirrings of themes we would recognize today were starting to appear. In particular, authors like Donald Keyhoe and Frank Scully set the stage for the enduring belief that aliens were not only real, but that the US government knew it and was covering it up.

“People were speculating all over the place, but what Keyhoe and Scully did is they crystallized two ideas. One is the possibility of alien visitors and alien technology, and the other is a government conspiracy of silence. And of course, these are the two things that have shaped ufology ever since,” Eghigian explained.

Following this, the first ufology organizations were founded, whereby UFO enthusiasts came together to seek the “truth”. However, what this “truth” was and how to get it varied depending on the organization. Some took the line that they just wanted to figure out what UFOs were, and, if they were alien in origin, then what did the aliens want? In contrast, organizations that were run by Keyhoe wanted to focus on congressional hearings and government disclosures.

This difference in intention and approach is still apparent within the ufology community today, with some individuals relying on more methodical and, dare I say, down-to-earth views of the UFO phenomenon. This group of enthusiasts are not always convinced that UFO reports are of aliens per se, but they do believe that something is going on that is worthy of investigation.

On the other hand, however, are those who are more conspiratorial in their views. These enthusiasts believe that UFOs are evidence of alien visitations and are chiefly interested in revealing the extent of the supposed government coverups. A brief examination of ufology posts on Reddit will be sufficient to see that there is a big divide (and some acrimony) between these two camps.

Official investigations

And, as with today, there were also “official” investigations into UFO claims that stirred public attention. The first of note was Project Sign, conducted between 1948 and 1949, which looked into a wave of unexplained aerial sightings (including the sightings at Mount Rainier in 1947) in the immediate post-war period. The initial report concluded that many of the UFO sightings it investigated may have been extraterrestrial in nature, but when the US Air Force Chief of Staff saw it, he rejected it as failing to prove its claims (Project Grudge replaced it in 1949, and took a far more skeptical approach).

The longest-running investigation, which collected and analyzed thousands of sighting reports, was Project Blue Book, which operated between 1952 and 1969. This project attempted to apply greater scientific rigor to the subject. Importantly, as most UFO cases, then and today, rely almost exclusively on eye-witness statements and anecdotes, investigators tried to transform narratives into useful data. 

Despite examining thousands of cases, the report they produced ultimately concluded that there was no evidence of aliens at all. The same outcome was reached by all subsequent investigations carried out by governments from across the world, including the UK’s UFO desk at the Ministry of Defence (MoD).

But while places like France and Sweden carried out their investigations and worked quite collaboratively with ufologists, places like the US, the UK, and the Soviet Union kept their work behind closed doors. This secrecy, as well as the decision to exclude UFO enthusiasts from the dialogue, has gone a long way to generate the levels of distrust evident today.

The same is true for the academic world’s disinterest in the subject, which has consistently regarded the topic as spurious, indulging popular superstition, or even as “pathological science”, as coined by Irving Langmuir, the Nobel Prize winning chemist, in 1953. This is an area of research that misleads people into believing false results due to subjective influences or wishful thinking.

But beyond this, these official responses actually helped reinforce the belief that something was going on.

“What they do, in an ironic way, is keep everything alive,” Eghigian said, “because first of all, you’d still have that UFO desk. So why do you have that UFO desk? You know? What’s that all about? Secondly, it’s a case of ‘well, the denial is all we had to hear, clearly you’re keeping things from us’.”

This constant refrain that “there’s nothing see, there’s nothing here to see” reinforced for many people that the opposite was true.

“So people start to do deep dives and use Freedom of Information Acts to try to get more information. And so it just repeats,” Eghigian explained. “This is something you see in ufolology as a practice: it is this very repetitive routine that comes up time and time and time again.”

“People often ask me, you know, what do you see going on today? I just see so many, not even parallels. I just see the same set of practices being enacted. But every generation thinks they’re the ones who invented it.”

The internet era of ufology

Little of the current situation concerning aliens, disclosures, and cover-ups is new, but there is one element that Eghigian sees as an unknown factor today: the role of social and digital media.

“We know hoaxing, fakes, and rumor mongering have always been there right from the very beginnings of this. It’s the same way today. But of course, the ability of deep fakes is much better now than it used to be, and the spread of information and disinformation is much easier in many ways. It’s now gotten into a world [ufology] that is also politically dominated by the spread of disinformation and misinformation,” he said.

This has both given it new energy and has also left ufologists who take sightings seriously feeling frustrated.

“These people feel like this focus on conspiracy and disclosure is really not worth it. That it’s missing the interesting things.”

What does this mean for anyone concerned with the truth who is worried about the current political moment? In the past, scientists and scholars have attempted to debunk hoaxes and incredible stories, but Milligan doesn’t think that will work anymore.

“The science community cannot fix this. It doesn’t fix political problems,” he explained. “But it does need a better response. For decades, debunking has been enough. A good paradigm. That’s no longer the case. The paradigm has broken down and we need something else.”