Extraterrestrial

Belief in alien visitation is now gaining 'unprecedented traction'

By T.K. Randall
September 16, 2024

Image: AI-generated (Midjourney) While tales of strange objects in the skies have been recounted in artwork and literature dating back centuries, the modern UFO phenomenon didn't really get started in earnest until the 1940s when tales of 'foo fighters' over the battlefields of Europe and the story of Kenneth Arnold (whose encounter with multiple UFOs saw the coining of the term 'flying saucer') brought the topic to a wider audience.

While interest had waned somewhat by the turn of the century, today, there seems to be an ever-growing number of people who believe that UFOs are the real deal and that we are being visited by curious extraterrestrial entities who have traveled to our planet from a distant solar system.

Whereas polls taken back in the 1990s indicated that around 20% of the US believed that UFOs were alien visitors, now over 34% believe that this is the case .

It's not just the general public who have expressed an interest in the subject, either - US government officials, including former department heads and members of Congress, also maintain that we are not alone.In recent years, some have campaigned for greater disclosure of what the government actually knows about the topic, while whistleblowers such as David Grusch have even claimed that secret efforts have been made to acquire and reverse-engineer "intact and partially intact vehicles of non-human origin".

Elsewhere, US Navy pilots have described close encounters with strange 'tic-tac' shaped objects off the coast of the United States, while footage of alleged UFOs (or UAPs) has been leaked, then subsequently confirmed as real by Pentagon officials.

In other words, it's a topic that remains not only relevant, but also an integral part of modern culture and something that is unlikely to be forgotten about anytime soon.

Whether or not we really are being visited by aliens, however, remains a topic of heated debate.

Source: The Week

Tags: UFO, Alien