What makes people believe in aliens

He was polling around 4 percent at the time. Her house was 50 miles from Mt. It helped that in Congress he did things like trying to ban space-based weapons. According to him, failing to get government files declassified on the Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, UFO incident. They held among their titles that of sixth human in orbit, first Soviet female to break the sound barrier, and holder of more than aviation world records. Once their illustrious flying careers ended, both became ufologists.

People onboard said it was triangular, brightly lit, and rocketed by at 1, miles per hour. Tim Urban : You created a language you think we might be able to use to communicate with aliens. So what exactly is it that we would want to say to the rest of the universe if we had the chance?

Stephen Wolfram : I think the main difficulty is the definitional one. You talk about alien life, you talk about intelligence; what are those things abstractly? We know the specific example that we have historically been exposed to: life on Earth, human intelligence.

The question is, when you generalize away from that, what do you get to? SW : Yes, I think the thing to realize is that we in our civilization have followed a particular path. To any other intelligence, our path would be quite mysterious.

TU : Right, so we actually have unique information to communicate. Here, just a small sampling of the classics. Wells invented for The First Men in the Moon. Betty astonished authorities when she began drawing a map of the constellation the creatures claimed to be from.

Initially it looked like nonsense, until a few scientists noticed its resemblance to Zeta Reticuli, a system inside the constellation Reticulum largely unknown in that year. In , small aliens with huge heads allegedly came for Villas-Boas, a young Brazilian farmer. Villas-Boas was forced inside their vessel, where the creatures took blood samples from, of all places, his chin, and rubbed in some sort of gel.

Soon after, a blonde female with big, almond-shaped eyes joined him. She began rubbing his body, then initiated sex. He turned out all right, though: He got a law degree, had four kids, and died believing his children had a half-sibling living in space. They reported seeing lights chasing their aircraft. The number varied sometimes it was one; other times ten , and so did the colors red, orange, and green. But the unidentified objects shared in common that they moved very fast, up to miles per hour, yet could dart on a dime.

Their lore grew among the squadrons. In , an intense fireball streaked over southern Canada and Detroit and dropped debris over Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. However, a second explanation surfaced in the early aughts: It was Die Glocke, purportedly a top-secret weapon Nazis developed that let them time-travel.

By dumb Back to the Future —esque luck, it had come to rural Pennsylvania in the year These proponents argue Nazi SS officer Hans Kammler was navigating the device when it crash-landed in Kecksburg, allowing him to escape Allied troops in the days before VE Day and successfully integrate into postwar U.

His best guess? On March 13, , thousands of people in southern Arizona say they saw weird lights move across the night sky in a flying V. Most of their reports came in between 7 and p. A majority of people spied the pattern passing overhead it was supposedly several football fields long , but the Air Force also sent a team of A Warthogs from nearby Barry Goldwater Range on a training exercise that same night, and, as luck would have it, those planes dropped some stationary flares just outside Phoenix, considerably complicating any UFO conspiracies with a second set of strange bright lights.

Actor Kurt Russell now claims he saw them while up in a private plane near the Phoenix airport, but air-traffic control told him the radar was clear. Governor Fife Symington reportedly witnessed the V-shaped as well.

Other so-called sonic attacks plagued scores of others in town around the same time. He tried to flee , passed out, then regained consciousness only once the aliens had ditched him on the Arizona roadside.

The story received loads of publicity — authorities thought Walton had been murdered, and seven eyewitnesses corroborating a single close encounter was unheard of. On February 25, , reports filtered in of a glowing object floating over Culver City. Air-raid sirens sounded; the Army proceeded to pepper it with 1, anti-aircraft shells.

Eventually it disappeared from view, but not before a citywide blackout was ordered, shell fragments got lodged in surrounding buildings, and five civilians died. The Navy later explained it had been a weather balloon. If for no other reason than our own repurposing of matter, here on Earth, has become ever more vivid and fraught, and therefore critical to appreciate and modify in aid of long-term survival. What is so fascinating is that in many respects we have already been here and done all of this before, just not recently, and not with the same set of tools that we now have to hand.

It was in almost all respects far simpler and more reasonable to assume that the wealth of life on Earth was simply repeated elsewhere.

That is once one let go of a sense of earthly uniqueness. Even though we might question some of their scientific standards, people like Herschel and Dick were indeed following the philosophy of life being everywhere, and elevating it to the level of any other observable phenomenon. Herschel was also applying the best scientific instruments he could at the time. All the way into the 20 th century, prior to the data obtained by the Mariner 4 flyby in , the possibility that Mars had a more clement surface environment, and therefore life, still carried significant weight.

In particular, the photometrically observed waves of darkening which proceed from the vaporizing polar caps through the dark areas of the Martian surface have been interpreted in terms of seasonal biological activity. Suffice to say, this proposal went the way of many other overly optimistic ideas about finding life on the red planet.

Although it is fascinating how well the periodic darkening phenomenon they discussed could indeed fit into a picture of a surface biosphere on Mars — and remains perhaps a rather sobering lesson in overinterpreting limited data.

UK About For business. Printable version. Majorities across Britain, Germany and the USA believe that extra-terrestrial life exists More than one in two people in the UK, Germany and the US believe there is intelligent life out there in the universe. In the Bible, over 2, years ago, the angelic visitation resulted in the birth of Christianity.

Today, there are plenty of people who view the existence of extraterrestrials not just as a matter of belief, but also akin to a religion. It gives us a sense of purpose. We feel important. They want to go somewhere else to help restore that meaning. Research by the University of Fribourg found that those who believe in a higher purpose, the literal truth of the Bible and divine creation, were also more likely to believe in conspiracy theories.

For instance, people who are more educated are more likely to reject conspiracy theories. Some studies have also shown that disadvantaged groups are sometimes more likely to believe in conspiracy theories.

The desire for escapism through conspiracy theories is understandable. And in some countries, conspiracy theories are extremely prevalent. The study came out before the pandemic took hold. Since then, many people are more anxious and uncertain about the future. If the survey was repeated today, would figures go up?