When I asked him what he preferred the truth to be – a real encounter or merely a vivid dream – the young man said he would prefer it to be true because that would mean he was “special”. The man, who did not want to be named, described an ambiguous close encounter that took place during his sleep. I tell Abeyta about an interview I carried out with a young man in Florida. “People have a need to feel like their lives are meaningful, and these beliefs might suggest that there’s something bigger out there there’s something more important going on,” Abeyta says
Abeyta explains that belief in aliens is akin to religiosity: unfounded beliefs in unfalsifiable ideas, which require a leap of faith. Fast forward to 1961, when Barney and Betty Hill told the world’s first alien abduction story.Īndrew Abeyta, professor of psychology at Rutgers University, co-authored We Are Not Alone, a study into why some of us want to believe in aliens.
Conspiracy theorists confused the balloon for a UFO the US government did a lousy job debunking those claims, and they quickly captured the public’s imagination. If the US military has been quietly and seriously investigating UFOs (or, as the Pentagon would have it, UAPs) since 2007, and if the Pentagon’s official report cannot rule out the existence of extraterrestrials, is it time we looked again at claims of close encounters and the people who have made them? The US government says some UFOs pose 'a safety of flight issue and may pose a challenge to US national security'Įnthusiasm for UFOs and ETs has permeated popular culture ever since a US air force balloon crashed near Roswell in 1947. It’s that “other” bin that has arrested the attention of stargazers and conspiracy theorists. The report offered five typically mundane possible explanations for the UFOs and, crucially, one catch-all “other” bin. The unclassified version of the report (there was also a classified version seen only by US lawmakers) found “no clear indications that there is any non-terrestrial explanation” for the sightings.
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