Americans are becoming increasingly convinced that aliens have visited Earth

Americans have become More open to the idea that extraterrestrials have visited Earth, according to a series of polls showing that belief in extraterrestrial visitation has been on a steady rise since 2012.

Nearly half of Americans (47 percent) say they believe aliens have definitely or may have visited Earth at some point, according to a new November 2025 YouGov poll of 1,114 adult respondents. That’s higher than the nearly one-third (36%) of Americans surveyed in 2012 by Kelton Research, with exactly the same sample size. Gallup published polls on this question in 2019 and 2021 that also show an upward trend.

Moreover, people seem to be moving away from the fence on this issue, one way or another. Just 16% of Americans said they were unsure whether Earth has been visited by extraterrestrials in the new poll, down from the 48% who were unsure in 2012. Meanwhile, even as belief in extraterrestrial visitation has grown, skepticism has also increased: The new poll shows that 37% of Americans said it was likely that Earth had not been visited by aliens, more than double the 17% reported in 2012.

It’s impossible to know exactly why Americans have become more receptive to space visits from these surveys alone; It includes only raw statistics, and lacks precise detail about the specific motivations for participants’ responses.

“It’s important to note that this is an opinion poll about beliefs,” says Susan Lipselter, an author and associate professor of anthropology and American studies at Indiana University, who has written extensively about alien beliefs and UFO experiences. “It’s not a poll about experience, or connection, or feelings, nothing like that.”

“We don’t know what their engagement was, and we don’t know if their beliefs changed their lives,” she adds. “We only know one thing, and that is that the statistics have moved from one set of beliefs to another.”

Of course, it’s still possible – and let’s be real, Hazar– To speculate on the drivers of this trend. One obvious reason is the new attitude of institutional news sources, such as the US government and legacy media, which are finally starting to take unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) seriously.

This shift began with the New York Times’ release of mysterious Pentagon UAP videos in 2017, and has since been accelerated by a series of congressional hearings and an independent NASA study into UAP. The newly released documentary The era of disclosurewhich exposes claims by former military officials that the U.S. government has covered up evidence of aliens visiting Earth, has bolstered the legitimacy of this previously marginalized topic.