Recent Polls About UFOs & Aliens – Growing Trends of Beliefs
Part 1
Larry King ran a couple of programs about a UFO sighting in Stephenville TX a couple of years back, and on his website they posted a poll simply asking people “Do you believe in extra-terrestrial life?” It got an amazingly high number of affirmative answers – 86% said yes. That’s the highest number I’ve ever seen on any similar poll from a major media source.
2008 Scripps UFO Poll tells us that 56% of Americans overall believe it either “very likely” or “somewhat likely” that intelligent life exists on other planets, Sci-Fi channel’s Roper Poll says 66% believe in ET life.
2008 Scripps UFO Poll By Thomas Hargrove and Guido H. Stempel |
2002 UFOs & ET Life Roper Poll Commissioned by the Sci Fi Channel |
56% said it is either “very likely” or “somewhat likely” that intelligent life exists on other planets. 74% of 18-24 year olds believed it was likely that intelligent life exists on other planets. 33% of adults, believe it’s either very likely or somewhat likely that intelligent aliens from space have visited our planet.
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66% of Americans say they think there are other forms of intelligent life in the universe
48% say they believe that UFOs have visited the earth in some form over the years
2% said they have had an encounter with extraterrestrial life |
Note that a whopping 74% of the 18-24 year-olds in survey on the left believed intelligent life elsewhere is likely.
All of these numbers are way higher than polls from the 1940s and 50’s through the 1990s have ever reported, so with a result like today’s 18-24 year olds are weighing in at, you can just imagine where the overall number is going to be in twenty more years. 33-48% believe aliens have visited earth, around 10% have seen a UFO, and on the right side bottom, 2% believe they’d had an encounter with extraterrestrial life.
Combining and averaging these polls into one, gives you better than 3 out of 5 believe in life on other planets, and 1 in 10 have seen a UFO.
There are other polls from Roper, USA Today, CNN, and so on that put that last number – people who believe they’ve had an abduction or contactee experience – consistently at 2-3 percent in scientific, credible source, polling. There’s a very good book title, based on The Air Force’s Blue Book Project’s lead scientist astronomer J Allen Hynek’s offhand answer to a journalist’s question, who guessed off the top of his head that the number of contactees in America was one in forty, or 2.5 percent, way before more recent polls made the same claim.
This last graph based on the National UFO Reporting Center database shows how dramatically the numbers of people seeing and reporting UFOs has increased also just since 1990…
So 8 percent, 12 percent, splitting the difference, as many as 1 out 10 people have seen a UFO. About one in forty, maybe one in fifty, have had an experience they identify as extra-terrestrial. Something’s definitely happening.
Before getting into some prominent Christian views, let’s see first what prominent non-Christian researchers and scientists have said about this phenomena over the years.
Part 2: Secular Researchers’ Findings that UFO Activity is Not Extraterrestrial in Origin