The idea that extraterrestrial beings may have visited Earth is becoming increasingly popular. Around a fifth of UK citizens believe that extraterrestrials have visited Earth, and around 7 percent believe they have seen a UFO. In the US, the numbers are even higher and rising. The number of people who believe that UFO sightings are evidence of extraterrestrial life has risen from 20 percent in 1996 to 34 percent in 2022. Around 24 percent of Americans say they have seen a UFO.

This belief is somewhat paradoxical because we have no evidence that aliens exist. Also, given the vast distances between star systems, it seems strange that we only learn about them when we visit them. The evidence for aliens most likely comes from signals from distant planets.

In the article accepted for publication Proceedings of the International Astronomical UnionI argue that belief in extraterrestrial visitors is no longer a fad but a widespread social problem.

This belief is now so widespread that politicians, at least in the United States, feel they must respond. The Pentagon’s disclosure of information about anomalous phenomena (not UFOs, not UFOs) has attracted great interest from both sides of the country.

Much of this plays into familiar anti-elitist tropes that both sides are eager to deploy, such as the idea that the military and a secret group with vested commercial interests are hiding the deep truth about alien visitation, which is believed to involve alien sightings, abductions and reverse engineering.

Belief in a cover-up is even higher than belief in alien visitation. A 2019 Gallop poll found that a staggering 68 percent of Americans believe that “the U.S. government knows more about UFOs than it is saying.”

This political trend has been building for decades. Jimmy Carter promised to declassify the documents during his 1976 presidential campaign, a few years after he reported a UFO sighting himself. As with many other sightings, the simplest explanation is that he saw Venus. (This happens a lot.)

Hillary Clinton also suggested she wanted to “declassify the files.” [Пентагону] “As much as possible” during his presidential campaign against Donald Trump. As seen in the video below, Trump suggested that he should “think” about declassifying the so-called Roswell dossier (concerning the famous alleged UFO crash and recovery of alien bodies).

Former President Bill Clinton claimed that he sent his chief of staff, John Podesta, to Area 51, a top-secret U.S. Air Force facility, in case any rumors of alien technology were true. It goes without saying that Podesta has long been a enthusiast of all things UFO.

The most prominent advocate of document disclosure today is Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer. The 2023 UAP repeal bill, which would release certain UAP records, was co-sponsored by three Republican senators.

The Pentagon announcements have finally begun in the early stages of Joe Biden’s term, but so far there’s been little to see. Nothing like a date. Nothing seems imminent. But the background noise doesn’t go away.

Problems for society

All of this ultimately fuels conspiracy theories that could undermine trust in democratic institutions. There have been cynical calls to attack Area 51. And after the attack on the Capitol in 2021, that looks like an increasingly dangerous possibility.

Too much background noise about UFOs and UAPs can get in the way of a legitimate scientific message about the possibility of microbial extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology, the branch of science that deals with such questions, has a much less effective promotional machine than UFOlogy.

Part of the Disney-owned YouTube channel History, it regularly airs programs about “ancient aliens.” The series is in its 20th season and has 13.8 million subscribers. It’s hard to get to 20,000 subscribers on NASA’s astrobiology channel. Real science far outweighs entertainment repackaged as fact. Alien visitation narratives have also repeatedly attempted to rewrite indigenous history and mythology.

The first steps in this direction can be traced back to Alexander Kazantsev’s science fiction novel “The Explosion: The Story of a Hypothesis” (1946). It presents the fall of the Tunguska meteorite in 1908 as an explosion of an alien spacecraft engine similar to Nagasaki. In Kazantsev’s story, a giant black woman who survived the ordeal was endowed with special healing powers. This led the indigenous Evenks to accept her as a shaman.

NASA and the space science community really support efforts like the Native Skywatchers initiative, founded by the Ojibwe and Lakota indigenous communities, to make sure the stories of the stars survive. There is a real and extensive network of local scholars on these issues.

But in exchange for combining authentic tales of indigenous life from the skies with fictional UFO stories repackaged as cover-up history, ufologists promise that indigenous history will become much more popular.

After all, the modern narrative of extraterrestrial visitation didn’t originate in indigenous societies. Quite the opposite. It emerged in part as a way for conspiracy thinkers in racially ravaged Europe to “explain” how complex urban civilizations might have existed in places like South America before European settlement.

Filtered through the filter of 1960s new age counterculture, the narrative was inverted to see indigenous peoples as once possessing advanced technology: every indigenous civilization was once Wakanda, a fictional country featured in American comic books published by Marvel Comics.

If everything had remained in its own box as entertaining fiction, all would be well. But it is not, and neither are they. Visitation narratives tend to rewrite local stories about heaven and earth.

This is a problem for everyone, not just indigenous people struggling to preserve authentic traditions. It threatens our understanding of the past. When it comes to understanding our distant ancestors, there are few remnants of prehistoric storytelling, such as indigenous star tales.

Perhaps this is why these explanations are aimed at enthusiasts of alien visitation, some of whom even claim to be “Pleiadeans.” Not surprisingly, the Pleiadians do not resemble the Lakota or the Ojibwe, but they are strikingly blond, blue-eyed, and Northern. It is becoming increasingly clear that belief in extraterrestrial visitation is no longer just entertaining speculation, but something with real and harmful consequences.