Huh?

Posted by Sappho on August 20th, 2005 filed in News and Commentary


Roughly Half of All Americans Think Aliens Visiting Earth:

The good news is that the latest polls confirm that roughly half of all Americans believe extraterrestrial life exists. The weird news is that a similar fraction think some of it is visiting Earth.

What the heck? Doesn’t anyone else (besides my husband) share my belief that alien life probably exists and probably isn’t visiting Earth? Are we the center of the universe, or what? Why would every alien in the vast universe want to visit us and conduct experiments on us?



2 Responses to “Huh?”

  1. Rudy Says:
    August 20th, 2005 at 2:47 pm

    There is an interesting and not-too-technical paper on this, that points out that we are very likely to be in the position of a lost Amazon tribe, not yet found by outsiders:
    http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0112137
    Most people will want to grab the PDF (Acrobat) format of this.

    The idea is that the global culture is spread very non uniformly, so that
    if you are not already in touch with it, you are likely not to stumble into it by accident.

  2. Jean Says:
    August 23rd, 2005 at 5:34 am

    Sounds like a badly designed survey, or bad reporting thereof, which is not at all unusual. Very likely it ought to have said “half _of those surveyed_ believe in extraterrestrials and nearly half _of those who believe_ believe in earth visitations” or something like that. And what was the questions: simple yes/no, or worded like “believe it is possible they could have”? I believe it is possible they could have; I don’t believe they really have.