I’m not really big on polls, especially when it comes to the paranormal. The poll, in and of itself, doesn’t really tell us much other than what popular belief is, and in the long run, contributes nothing to the field of paranormal research. And I know when people think of really scientific and hard-hitting research, they think of The Huffington Post. But the interesting thing to me is not how many people think aliens are visiting Earth, but the other statistics in this study…
It seems like new results from polls related to UFOs and/or extraterrestrials are released every few months. So the fact that results from a recent UFO/ET poll were released today isn’t shocking.
This latest UFO poll, conducted by the Huffington Post and YouGov, reveals that fifty percent of Americans believe there is some form of life on other planets. But when asked if there is intelligent life on other planets, that number dropped to thirty-eight percent.
The poll results also reveal that a quarter of Americans believe aliens have visited Earth.
Britons seem more open to the idea of intelligent extraterrestrials, but they are less open to the idea of alien visitation. Based on data from a recent similar UFO poll, sixty-four percent of Britons believe intelligent life exists on other planets. But only nineteen percent believe extraterrestrials have visited Earth in UFOs.
The Huffington Post explains:
[The] poll was conducted June 11-12 among 1,000 adults using a sample selected from YouGov’s opt-in online panel to match the demographics and other characteristics of the adult U.S. population. Factors considered include age, race, gender, education, employment, income, marital status, number of children, voter registration, time and location of Internet access, interest in politics, religion and church attendance.
I know it can be interesting to see statistics, but in this day an age where interest the paranormal is seemingly at one of its all-time highs, it doesn’t really add much to the conversation to say that 25% of people believe in this,m or 50% of the people believe in that. Except for when it’s that only 50% of the people polled believe in extraterrestrial life. With all we know (or think we know) about the size of the universe these days, I would have thought that those numbers would have been much higher. Even most UFO skeptics, while doubting that we have been visited by aliens, at least acknowledge they in all probability exist. The only real question is can they visit us?
