About a fifth of the UK’s population now Earth has probably been visited by aliens. “Probably” is not “certainly”, but the number is still high. It is higher still in the US, where belief in UFOs has risen from 34 per cent in 2007 to . This is a real shift – and a societal problem.
Odd ideas such as fortune telling and belief in ghosts have . But such sympathies tend to be offshoots of religious traditions involving the supernatural, and have little connection to shifting political trends.
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By contrast, the growth of belief in alien visitation has been driven by a populist wave in US and European politics, now well into its second decade. Typical targets of populism include a secretive billionaire elite, the political establishment and the military, who have subverted democracy and kept the truth from the people. Truth about covid-19, vaccines and aliens. Truth that the scientific establishment is too narrow-minded to consider or else incentivised to conceal. This, at least, is the populist narrative. While its primary target is elites, it also tends to be hostile towards scientific authority.
The comparative success of populist versions of ufology also owe something to their tolerance of ambiguity. Survey questions don’t focus on abduction, crop circles or the 1947 retrieval of alien bodies at Roswell, New Mexico. Often, questions are framed in the language of “probably”. Believers can simply accept that governments and elites are hiding something: they “probably” know more about UFOs and aliens than they are willing to reveal.
While the surveys may track ambiguous belief, ufology’s breakthrough into mainstream political discussion was fueled by a detailing five years of US government funding, to the tune of $22 million, for the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. It’s an official-sounding title for a revamped fringe investigation body, repurposed to search for UFOs and to evaluate any threat they might pose.
Two of the three authors of the exposé were established believers. Ralph Blumenthal has appeared at the UK’s popular annual Exeter UFO Festival and on the Ancient Aliens TV series. Leslie Kean had already written a book on UFOs and the military in 2010. Their main source, Luis Elizondo, was a former US intelligence officer who provided a now-infamous set of grainy videos that will look suspicious to anyone unfamiliar with forward-looking infrared images.
The videos went viral and inspired another ex-intelligence officer, David Grusch, who joined a US military-supported investigative body set up to look into “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena”. Grusch testified to the US Congress in 2023 about secretive committees and covertly funded UFO investigations. Only occasionally did he slip into more old-fashioned ufology claims about covert programmes to recover the bodies of aliens.
While Grusch and Elizondo fit the mould of traditional ufologists, it isn’t obvious that surveys are tracking a rise in similarly fervent beliefs. But if they are merely detecting something softer and more ambiguous, why is it a source of concern? The philosophical answer is that mainstreaming belief in UFOs erodes evidence standards within the public discourse.
The more straightforward answer is that soft believers are a pool from which more conspiratorial hardcore ufologists will emerge, ready to lump science and elites together as enemies of the people. And hardcore ufologists aren’t simply looking for alien life – they are looking for conspirators in the laboratory and at the heart of government.
Tony Milligan is a research fellow in ethics at King’s College London, focusing on space ethics
