Over the past 20 years, the public’s belief in aliens visiting Earth has steadily increased. And from the point of view of some scientists, this is very bad, because it increases people’s infantilism and their tendency to anti-government conspiracies.
Number of alien believers grows
Recently, the journal Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union accepted for publication an article by researcher Tony Milligan, dedicated to a rather unusual topic — the impact of belief (that aliens have visited Earth) on social and political processes in society.
Over the past few decades, the number of people in Western countries who believe aliens have visited Earth has been increasing. Only in the UK, 7% of respondents claim to have seen a UFO. In the U.S. in the period from 1996 to 2022, the share of believers that intelligent beings from other worlds flew to us increased from 20 to 34%. At the same time, a quarter of the population believes that they have seen UFOs.
And Milligan sees nothing positive in all of this. He mentions that no evidence for the existence of aliens is available to modern science. And therefore, increasing the number of people who believe in them is a social problem.
Why is believing in aliens a bad idea?
The main thing that is wrong with belief in aliens, according to the author of the study, is that it increases citizens’ distrust of elites and government. While at first glance it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with it, the reality is that 68% of Americans surveyed believe in the U.S. government hiding the existence of extraterrestrials. That’s much more than those who simply believe in their existence.
In other words, this case shows an irrational fear that the government is hiding something important. Accordingly, a public demand is formed to reveal even something that doesn’t exist. And politicians are forced to respond to it. At one time, the disclosure of classified UFO material was promised to their constituents by Jimmy Carter, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. And Joe Biden’s administration has even taken practical steps in that direction.
Right now, the main mover of this topic in American politics is Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer. He made the Defense Department’s 2023 report on unidentified aerial phenomena public, with the support of Republican colleagues. Nevertheless, it did not ease tensions.
Hazard
According to Milligan, the main danger is the desire of citizens to learn the truth about aliens at any cost. Cause everyone laughed at the calls to storm Area 51, where the alien remnants were supposedly stored, and then the crowd took over the Capitol.
Ideas of alien visits to Earth are spreading too rampantly and uncontrollably, and create ideal conditions for the spread of pseudoscientific concepts. And it makes it harder to popularize real scientific research on alien life, because channels about fictional alien visits have millions of viewers, while NASA’s website is only visited by thousands.
And the highlighting of “secret indigenous knowledge” has nothing to do with the bacchanalia of stories about ancient aliens. The largest network for researching autochthonous beliefs is funded by NASA, but not many people have heard of it.
But everyone has heard myths about aliens who helped the natives of Central America build the pyramids. And they are not based on any real research. They are rooted in the fantasies of Europeans of the last century, who tried to imagine how “savages” could have created such grandiose structures.
According to phys.org
