New Scientist 8.2.25.
'About a fifth of the UK's population now believes Earth has probably been visited by aliens'.
'Probably' the same fifth as presently polling for RebrandUK.
An increasing trend signifies younger people, not older ones. How did we permit such a large proportion of our young people to emerge from a decade of compulsory education so daft?
@RejoinEU One tiny problem with the poll question is that the answer could easily be true even in our own reality-based world. The Sun is a second-generation star, only half the age of the galaxy, and interstellar travel is physically possible at speeds that make alien visits to Earth a realistic possibility. What I don't believe is that reported UFO sightings have anything to do with those aliens. Surely they are better than that at the covert stuff, and if they really wanted to disclose themselves to the public, that wouldn't be hard...
If they are so advanced - why bother to be covert - do we bother to conceal ourselves from ants?
Perhaps ants was indeed a poor analogy. Personally, I'm am totally agnostic as to whether we have been visited by aliens. The evidence "for" is fragmentary and generally rather poor, and there is no evidence against.
@Paulos_the_fog @RejoinEU I don't think that metaphor works: ant colonies don't practice science, or philosophy, they have no conception of the meaning of life, the universe, and all that. Us hiding from them would hardly even register with them.
On the other hand humanity finding evidence that alien life or an alien civilization exist would be huge, also in its impact on society, positive, negative, or both. Historical analogues would be Copernicus and Darwin. Visiting aliens may want to avoid that impact, which would 'spoil the experiment' irreversibly, and also interfere with their ability to monitor and study us in peace.
Therefore, any contact would from their side be a conscious choice.
Now you could say, but what about limited exposure or contact only with some people, with plausible deniability, perhaps as a contact experiment? Certainly possible in principle. Like, contacting only a government. Good luck trying to prevent that from leaking. And if the people promulgating this idea are overwhelmingly also conspiracy theorists with no understanding of how evidence works, as they are? Occam's razor bids us to just ignore that...