Nearly half – 47 percent – of Americans say aliens have definitely or probably visited Earth at some point, according to a novel survey survey from YouGov conducted in November 2025, with 1,114 adult participants. This percentage increased from about one-third (36 percent) of Americans respondents in 2012 by Kelton Research, with exactly the same sample size. Gallup published polls on this issue in 2019 and 2021, which also show an increasing trend.
What’s more, people seem to be giving up on the issue in one way or another. In the novel poll, just 16 percent of Americans said they were unsure whether aliens had visited Earth, down from 48 percent who were unsure in 2012. Meanwhile, even as belief in alien visits grows, doubts are emerging: A novel poll shows that 37 percent of Americans said Earth has probably not been visited by aliens, more than double the 17 percent recorded in 2012.
It’s impossible to know exactly why Americans have become more open to visits from outsiders based on polls alone; they contain only raw statistics and lack detailed information about the specific motivations behind participants’ responses.
“It’s important to note that this is a faith survey,” says Susan Lepselter, author and an associate professor of anthropology and American studies at Indiana University, who has written extensively on alien beliefs and UFO experiences. “It’s not a survey about experiences, contact, feelings – nothing like that.”
“We don’t know what their engagement is; we don’t know if their faith changed their lives,” he adds. “We only know one thing, and that is that the statistics have shifted from one set of beliefs to another.”
Of course it’s still possible – and let’s be realistic, game— speculate on the factors driving this trend. One obvious culprit is the novel stance of institutional news sources such as the U.S. government and conventional media, which have finally begun to take unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs) seriously.
This change started with release mysterious Pentagon movies UAP by The Up-to-date York Times in 2017 and has since been accelerated by wave of congressional hearingsand Independent NASA study of UAP. Newly released document Age of disclosurewhich includes claims by former military officials that the U.S. government has covered up evidence of alien visits to Earth, further strengthened the legitimacy of this once marginalized topic.