Half of America Thinks Aliens Are Already Here, And Most Believe the Government Is Lying About It

A new November 2025 poll reveals that nearly half of Americans think extraterrestrials have visited our planet, and three-quarters believe the government is hiding the evidence.

There’s a poll that came out this week, and I’ve been sitting with it for a few days now because the numbers are genuinely strange. Not strange in the way UFO stories are usually strange, no lights in the sky, no mysterious encounters, no grainy footage of something that might be a weather balloon or might be a craft from another galaxy. This is stranger in a different way. It’s strange because of what it reveals about us, about what’s happening inside the minds of ordinary Americans when nobody’s watching.

YouGov, which is one of the more reputable polling organizations out there, surveyed over a thousand people in early November 2025. They wanted to know what Americans actually believe about extraterrestrial life. And the answers they got back paint a picture of a country that has, in large numbers, already made up its mind about whether we’re alone in the universe. Spoiler: most people don’t think we are. But it goes deeper than that, and the deeper you go, the more unsettling it gets.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

So let’s talk about the methodology first, because it matters. This wasn’t some online poll where UFO enthusiasts clicked a link and skewed the results. YouGov surveyed 1,114 U.S. adult citizens between November 4th and 9th, 2025. They weighted the responses to match the broader American population: by gender, age, race, education, how people voted in 2024 and 2020, party identification, and voter registration status. This is as close as you can get to asking every American what they think without literally knocking on 330 million doors.

And what they found is that 56% of Americans believe aliens definitely or probably exist.

That’s more than half the country. More than half of your neighbors, your coworkers, the people in line at the grocery store. They’ve accepted the premise that somewhere out there, beyond our atmosphere, there’s intelligent life.

Now, to put that in context, YouGov also asked about some other creatures that people claim to have seen over the years. Bigfoot? Only 28% of Americans think he definitely or probably exists. The Yeti, basically Bigfoot’s Himalayan cousin, comes in at 23%. The Loch Ness Monster manages 22%. And the Chupacabra, that legendary blood-draining creature from Latin American folklore, sits at just 16%.

So aliens aren’t in the same category as cryptids anymore. They’ve graduated. They’ve become mainstream. More Americans believe in extraterrestrial life than believe in any of these earthbound legends, and it’s not even close.

They’ve Already Been Here

Believing that aliens exist somewhere in the vastness of space is one thing. It’s actually a fairly reasonable position when you consider the sheer number of stars and planets out there. But believing they’ve already made the trip to Earth, that’s a much bigger claim. That requires faster-than-light travel, or at least travel across distances so immense that the journey would take thousands or millions of years. That requires a civilization advanced enough to cross the cosmic void and find our little blue marble in the darkness.

And yet, nearly half of Americans, 47%, say aliens have definitely or probably visited our planet at some point in history.

The question of whether they’ve visited recently splits the country almost exactly down the middle. Forty-two percent say definitely or probably yes. Forty-one percent say definitely or probably not. The remaining respondents aren’t sure. We’re essentially a nation divided on whether extraterrestrials have dropped by in living memory.

Geography plays a role in sightings. Rural Americans report higher personal sighting rates than their urban and suburban counterparts. Twenty-eight percent of people living in rural areas say they’ve seen something they thought was a UFO. In other areas, that number drops to 19%. Nationwide, about one in five Americans, 21%, claims to have witnessed something unexplained in the sky at some point in their lives.

That’s a lot of people. That’s tens of millions of Americans who looked up and saw something they couldn’t explain.

Now, among those who say they’ve personally witnessed a UFO, the interpretation varies. Twenty-eight percent believe what they saw was more likely alien in nature. Nearly half, 48%, think it probably had some other explanation, like military aircraft or atmospheric phenomena or something ordinary that just looked weird from a certain angle. The rest admit they simply don’t know what they witnessed.

The Disease and the Danger

This is where the poll takes a turn that I wasn’t expecting. Americans aren’t just casually interested in the possibility of extraterrestrial contact. A lot of them are actively worried about what it might mean for the survival of human civilization. And their worries are specific.

When asked whether alien visitation would have a positive or negative effect on humanity, the pessimists outnumber the optimists by more than two to one. Twenty-nine percent predict negative consequences. Only 14% see it as potentially positive. Another 25% believe it would be neither positive nor negative, a cosmic shrug, essentially. The remaining respondents don’t know what to expect, which is probably the most honest answer.

The specific fears tell a more troubling story.

Fifty-five percent of Americans say it’s very or somewhat likely that aliens would introduce new diseases capable of infecting humans. More than half the country, when they imagine contact with extraterrestrial life, pictures some kind of interstellar plague. Pathogens that developed on another world, shaped by entirely different conditions, potentially operating by biological rules our immune systems have never encountered and couldn’t possibly fight. The specter of alien disease apparently weighs heavily on the American imagination.

Forty-three percent believe aliens would unintentionally harm or kill people, not through malice, just through the sheer incompatibility of two civilizations that developed separately since time began. At the same time, 43% think it’s likely aliens would come in peace. So the American public is essentially split down the middle on whether contact would be accidentally catastrophic or deliberately benevolent. Both scenarios have equal support.

The assumption of technological superiority is nearly universal. Seventy-four percent say it’s very or somewhat likely that extraterrestrials would be far more technologically advanced than humans. Which makes sense, really; any civilization capable of traveling between stars would have to be far beyond our current capabilities. We can barely get to Mars. They’d be crossing light-years.

Two-thirds of Americans, 66%, believe aliens would want to stay hidden from us. Only half think it’s likely they would even be able to communicate with humans. There’s this assumption embedded in the numbers that if aliens are here, they’re watching from the shadows, observing us like we might observe a colony of ants, fundamentally unable or unwilling to make themselves known.

And then there’s my favorite finding in the entire poll, because it’s so oddly specific: only 29% of Americans think aliens would have a sense of humor. Apparently, when we imagine beings from another world, we picture them as pretty serious. No alien stand-up comedy. No extraterrestrial puns. Just grave, humorless intelligence staring at us from across the cosmos.

A Nation Divided by Politics and Planets

Because this is America in 2025, the alien question, like virtually everything else, breaks along partisan lines. But not necessarily in the direction you might expect.

Democrats are more likely than Republicans to believe aliens exist: 61% versus 46%. Independents land at 59%, closer to the Democratic position. Democrats are also more likely to believe UFOs are probably alien ships or life forms, 34% compared to 26% of Republicans.

When it comes to whether aliens have already visited Earth, 51% of Democrats say yes compared to 41% of Republicans. For visits in recent years specifically, the gap narrows but persists: 45% of Democrats believe aliens have been here recently versus 39% of Republicans.

So Democrats are more likely to believe in extraterrestrial existence and visitation. The inverse is also true, though: Republicans are more likely to anticipate negative consequences from alien contact. Thirty-seven percent of GOP respondents predict harmful outcomes compared to 26% of Democrats. Republicans are more skeptical that aliens exist, but if they do exist and if they do show up, Republicans expect things to go badly.

Two-thirds of Independents either believe an alien visit would be neutral or admit they simply don’t know what to expect. Which might be the most Independent thing I’ve ever heard, refusing to commit to either optimism or pessimism about hypothetical extraterrestrial contact.

The one finding that unites America across party lines is distrust of the government. And the agreement here is remarkable.

Seventy-three percent of all Americans, including 75% of Democrats and 72% of Republicans, believe that if the U.S. government had evidence of UFOs, it would hide it from the public.

Only 13% think the government would tell the truth.

That’s not a partisan divide. That’s a consensus. In a country where people can barely agree on what day of the week it is, nearly three-quarters of the population has concluded that their government is keeping secrets about unidentified flying objects.

The Secret They’re Keeping

That 73% figure deserves some serious unpacking, because it reveals something profound about where Americans are right now in their relationship with official institutions.

The suspicion has deep historical roots, and some of it is actually justified.

In 2024, the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office released a report that was supposed to settle the question once and for all. The report concluded that most UFO sightings were ordinary objects and phenomena resulting from misidentification. Investigators found no evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence or alien spacecraft hidden by the government. The report even indirectly implicated some prominent disclosure advocates in advancing unfounded claims about cover-ups.

Case closed, right? The government looked into it, found nothing, and told us so.

Except that same year, a separate Pentagon review revealed something else entirely. The U.S. military had deliberately spread fake UFO stories, including staged photos and false briefings, to protect classified weapons programs during the Cold War. This wasn’t speculation or conspiracy theory. This was the Pentagon admitting what it had done. An Air Force colonel acknowledged planting false flying saucer photos near Area 51 to hide stealth jet development. The military’s own disinformation campaigns, once classified, had fueled decades of conspiracy theories about alien cover-ups.

So you can see the problem. The government says there’s nothing to hide. But the government also admits to having spent decades creating elaborate deceptions specifically designed to make people believe there was something to hide. Americans are paying attention to both admissions simultaneously, and they’re drawing conclusions.

A Wall Street Journal investigation published in 2025 added another layer to this. The report revealed that hundreds of Air Force personnel had been told, falsely, that there was a secret program to harvest alien technology. The piece described it as a long-running practice that was like a fraternity hazing ritual that spun wildly out of control. Military personnel were essentially pranking each other with fake alien stories, and some of those stories leaked into the broader culture and took on lives of their own.

It’s getting harder and harder to tell the genuine mysteries from the manufactured ones.

The documentary “The Age of Disclosure,” released in November 2025, has amplified these suspicions. The film features 34 current and former U.S. government officials, including sitting members of Congress from both parties, former defense intelligence personnel, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and aerospace figures, making claims about an 80-year global cover-up involving non-human intelligence and a secret race among world powers to reverse-engineer advanced technology of non-human origin.

Critics have noted that the documentary presents testimony rather than physical evidence. A professor at Boston University who served on a NASA panel investigating UAP evidence stated that he has seen no evidence that the government has been hiding anything. The Wikipedia page for the film describes its central premise as a conspiracy theory. But the mere fact that this many government officials are willing to go on camera and make these claims, true or not, speaks to how mainstream the conversation has become. These aren’t anonymous internet commenters. These are people with security clearances and government pensions.

The Timeline of Contact

Americans don’t just believe aliens have visited. Many believe they’ll be back, or that formal contact is coming, and maybe soon.

Sixteen percent think humanity will definitely or probably make contact with alien life within the next ten years. That’s roughly one in six Americans expecting extraterrestrial contact before 2036. The number rises to 29% for a 50-year timeline, 42% for 100 years, and 46% for 200 years.

Prior belief in visitation correlates strongly with expectations of future contact, which makes psychological sense. If you believe they’ve already been here, you probably expect them to return. Among those who think aliens have already visited Earth, 31% expect formal contact within a decade. Among those who don’t believe in past visitation, only 2% expect near-term contact.

The gap widens dramatically across longer timescales. Seventy-six percent of believers expect contact within two centuries. Among skeptics, only 20% expect it even over that extended timeframe. Your belief about the past shapes your expectations for the future.

These numbers have remained relatively stable over time. In September 2024, 17% believed contact would happen within 10 years, 32% within 50 years, 41% within 100 years, and 44% within 200 years. The 2025 numbers are slightly higher across all timeframes, suggesting expectations may be gradually rising, though the shift is subtle.

Unity or Division

Philosophers and science fiction writers have been asking a question for decades: would the arrival of extraterrestrial beings bring humanity together or tear it apart? Would we rally around our shared humanity in the face of something truly alien, or would we fracture into competing factions trying to gain advantage from the situation?

Americans are genuinely uncertain.

Twenty-eight percent believe alien encounters would make the world’s countries and people more united with more cooperation. Twenty-two percent predict increased division and conflict. Twenty percent believe things would not be significantly different either way, that we’d somehow absorb the most significant event in human history and keep doing what we’ve always done.

Democrats are more optimistic about the unifying potential of alien contact: 36% anticipate greater global cooperation compared to 25% of Republicans. Former President Ronald Reagan famously speculated in a 1987 speech to the United Nations that differences between nations would vanish quickly in the face of an alien threat from outside our world. It was a poetic idea, that the presence of a true outsider would remind us how much we have in common.

The American public, it seems, is less certain than Reagan was about humanity’s capacity to set aside its conflicts. Maybe we’ve seen too many disaster movies where first contact goes badly. Maybe we’ve watched too many news cycles where even the clearest threats fail to bring people together. Or maybe we’re just realistic about human nature.

The Great Silence

All of this belief exists despite an inconvenient fact that scientists have been grappling with for seven decades: there is no confirmed evidence that extraterrestrial intelligence has ever visited Earth or even attempted communication.

The Fermi Paradox, named for physicist Enrico Fermi, who famously asked “Where is everybody?” during a 1950 lunch conversation at Los Alamos, captures the contradiction. Given the billions of stars in our galaxy that are similar to the Sun, many of them billions of years older than our solar system, intelligent life should have had plenty of time to arise elsewhere. Given the probability that some of those civilizations developed interstellar travel, they should have been able to colonize the galaxy in a relatively short time, cosmologically speaking, a few million years at most.

If aliens exist and if interstellar travel is possible, the Milky Way should be teeming with evidence of their presence. We should see their spacecraft, their megastructures, their communications, their artifacts. We should have been visited or contacted by now.

But the universe is silent. And that silence is genuinely puzzling.

Some researchers have proposed what’s called the “Great Filter,” some barrier in the development of life that prevents civilizations from reaching an advanced spacefaring stage. The concept was developed by economist Robin Hanson at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute. The idea is that somewhere between the formation of a habitable planet and the emergence of a galaxy-spanning civilization, there’s a bottleneck. Something stops almost everyone.

The disturbing question is whether the filter lies behind us or ahead of us.

If the filter is behind us, if the hard step is the emergence of life from non-life, or the jump from single-celled to multicellular organisms, or the development of intelligence, then we might be extraordinarily rare. We might have already passed through the eye of the needle. We might be one of the few civilizations lucky enough to make it this far.

But if the filter lies ahead of us, things look grimmer. Maybe civilizations tend to destroy themselves shortly after developing advanced technology. Nuclear weapons. Artificial superintelligence. Climate catastrophe. Some self-inflicted disaster that strikes before a civilization can spread beyond its home planet.

A 2024 paper by Michael Garrett, an astrophysicist at the University of Manchester, suggested that the lifespan of civilizations after adopting widespread AI might be only 100 to 200 years. The idea is that artificial superintelligence poses an existential risk that civilizations consistently underestimate, and that by the time they recognize the danger, it’s too late to contain it. If that’s true, the window for interstellar contact would be vanishingly small. Civilizations would flare into existence, develop advanced technology, and then wink out before they could spread or communicate.

It’s not a cheerful hypothesis. But it would explain the silence.

Watching the Skies

Meanwhile, the official investigation continues.

In September 2025, a Congressional hearing hosted by Representative Anna Paulina Luna featured testimony from former Air Force and Navy personnel about UAP encounters. The hearing was part of ongoing legislative efforts, driven by what officials describe as a small group of policymakers who have been steadily prioritizing whistleblower hearings, public engagement sessions, and other legislative efforts to promote accountability and disclosure.

Witnesses included Jeffrey Nuccetelli, Dylan Borland, and Alexandro Wiggins, as well as George Knapp, a journalist described as a prominent figure in the UFO disclosure community and frequent guest on the paranormal-focused overnight radio show Coast to Coast AM.

In May 2025, a former intelligence official named Matthew Brown claimed that elements of the U.S. Government executive branch had conspired to prevent Congress from exercising its lawful powers of oversight regarding UAP, Technology of Unknown Origin, and Non-Human Intelligence issues. He alleged the existence of a criminal conspiracy to keep the elected government ignorant of profound discoveries and dire threats, and claimed there was an Unacknowledged Special Access Program called “Immaculate Constellation” that consolidated observations of UAP.

These are serious allegations from people with security clearances. They’re also allegations without physical evidence available to the public. Skeptics note that testimony about secret programs is not the same as proof of secret programs. The former director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, resigned from his position in part because of what he described as persistent conspiratorial leanings held by people at the highest levels of government, despite concrete contradictory evidence.

The term “UAP,” unidentified anomalous phenomena, has replaced “UFO” in official government parlance. It’s an attempt to escape the cultural baggage of flying saucers and little green men, to approach the subject with fresh eyes and scientific rigor. But the change in nomenclature hasn’t changed what Americans believe they’re seeing, and it hasn’t resolved the fundamental tension between official denials and public suspicion.

What We’re Left With

One in five Americans claims to have witnessed something unexplained overhead. Whether those sightings represent secret military aircraft, atmospheric phenomena, optical illusions, or something genuinely alien remains unknown. What’s known is that the witnesses aren’t going away, and neither is public belief.

The YouGov poll measured something more significant than casual curiosity about extraterrestrial life. It measured a population that has, in large numbers, already made up its mind. A population that has largely abandoned trust in official explanations. A population that anticipates contact with non-human intelligence as a plausible near-term event. A population that expects that contact to bring disease, danger, and technological inferiority rather than enlightenment or peace.

Fifty-six percent believe aliens exist. Forty-seven percent believe they’ve already been here. Seventy-three percent believe the government is lying about it.

The scientific consensus remains that there is no verified evidence of extraterrestrial visitation. SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, has been scanning the skies for decades and found nothing definitive. NASA probes have explored our solar system and discovered no signs of intelligent life. The universe, as far as our instruments can tell, appears to be vast and empty and silent.

But the American public has reached its own conclusions. And those conclusions suggest a fundamental disconnect between what official institutions are saying and what tens of millions of people believe to be true.

The skies over America remain as empty of confirmed extraterrestrial visitors as they’ve ever been. The minds of Americans are another matter entirely. Half the country is looking up at those empty skies and seeing something that science hasn’t detected, or seeing the absence of disclosure where the truth should be.

Whether they’re right or wrong, whether they’re intuiting something that evidence will eventually confirm or falling prey to wishful thinking and pattern recognition in a chaotic universe, remains to be seen. But as a measure of where we are as a culture, as a snapshot of what Americans believe in the third decade of the 21st century, these numbers tell a story.

It’s a story about distrust and wonder and fear and hope, all tangled together. It’s a story about a species looking up at the stars and refusing to believe it’s alone. And it’s a story about a government that has, by its own admission, lied about this subject before, and a public that has decided, overwhelmingly, that it’s probably still lying now.

The truth, whatever it is, hasn’t been proven. The belief is right here, measured and quantified, sitting in a YouGov database: 56%, 47%, 73%. Numbers that describe a nation waiting for an answer that may never come, or that may have been here all along.

References

– Half of Americans believe aliens have visited Earth — YouGov, November 25, 2025
– Is something out there? Americans aren’t sure, but most say the government isn’t open about UFOs — YouGov, March 2024
– A growing share of Americans believe aliens are responsible for UFOs — YouGov, October 2022
– Disclosure movement — Wikipedia
– UFO conspiracy theories — Wikipedia
– Great Filter — Wikipedia
– Fermi paradox — Wikipedia
– Pentagon planted UFO myths to hide secret weapons programs, report finds — LiveNOW from FOX, June 2025
– Age of Disclosure and truth about UFOs — EarthSky, November 2025
– New Solution To The Fermi Paradox Suggests The Great Filter Is Nearly Upon Us — IFLScience, April 2024

NOTE: Some of this content may have been created with assistance from AI tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is NOT an AI voice.