I’ve been an avid stargazer for a fair few decades now and not once have I seen anything that makes me believe we are being visited by aliens! My own experiences aside, there’s no evidence of alien visitations but it seems much of the population believes anything that they cannot immediately identify in the sky MUST be ailens. A new paper suggests there are costs associated with increasing claims such as disctractions to government programs and background noise that hampers science communication. How on Earth should we deal with it? If debunking doesn’t work, then maybe its time for a scientific investigation. 

Do you believe in aliens? It seems that a great proportion of the population does. That’s despite all the usual issues that those of us in science communication trot out to enrich the debate with a little factual information; everything is a long way away, the universe is actually quite young and so on and so on  Yet still we have a problem that a lot of people still think we are being visited by our cosmic cousins. 

Tony Milligan from Kings College London, the author of a new paper into this very phenomenon says that it is ‘no longer a quirk but a widespread societel problem.’ He goes on to explain that it is really quite unusual because there is zero evidence that aliens even exist let alone travel to Earth. He cites the same arguments about the sheer scale of the Universe and how we are far more likely to start to engage and learn about them from remote observation. 

Somewhat worryingly is that the paper articulates almost a quarter of Americans have seen a UFO. This is then supported by a poll that shows 68% of people believe the US Government knows more about UFOs than they are letting on! Of course, and as I have often retorted in such discussions, if you see an aeroplane in the sky but don’t know it’s an aeroplane then it is indeed an Unidentified Flying Object. Doesn’t mean it’s an alien though! 

The essence of the report is that alien visitation claims become a problem when they do one of three things; 1 – move into mainstream debate in such a way that governments have to reply and respond to them; 2 – when they generate background noise which impedes science communication and 3 – when they become entangled with indigenous origin narratives, making it hard to recover the latter.

The rise of artificial intelligence and sheer volume of content in social media makes item 2 even more difficult to separate the proveribal wheat from the chaif. The paper concludes that there it is clear the popular belief in alien visitations makes it difficult to articulate and discuss such topics. Even bursts of debunking seem to fail to cut through the noise and certainly seem to show no sign of reducing it. The Moon landing is another great exmple where people that believe the landings were faked seem to have great trouble in accepting evidence when it is presented to them. 

There will come a time in the not too distant future, asserts Tony Milligan when it will require something of a more structured scientific research program to investigate and explore the concept. The time may not be now but in the near future a program can apply scientific rigour to the debate and perhaps provide an answer. 

Source : Equivocal Encounters: Alien Visitation Claims as a Societal Problem