For generations, humans have wondered what alien life might look like. Rarely do we turn the question around: what would they think of us?
Avi Loeb, a theoretical physicist at Harvard University, has a frank answer. “If I were looking at Earth from a distance, I’d be quite disappointed,” he said. “Most of our energy goes toward conflict, preventing others from killing us, or killing others first. Look at the war in Ukraine, fought over a strip of territory. That doesn’t signal intelligence.”
The conversation flared again in February, when former President Barack Obama told a podcast audience that aliens are real, though he clarified he had never seen one and had not been “locked up in Area 51.” Days later, President Donald Trump announced on social media that he would order the declassification of government files on the subject, citing what he called “tremendous public interest.”
NASA’s Artemis II mission, which launched April 1, is carrying four astronauts on a ten-day loop around the moon, the first crewed lunar mission since Apollo 17 in 1972. The mission has amplified public fascination with what else might be out there.
A public that already believes
The interest is not fringe. According to a 2021 Pew Research Center survey, roughly two-thirds of Americans believe intelligent extraterrestrial life exists somewhere in the universe, and about half think that UFO sightings reported by military personnel are likely evidence of alien intelligence.
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Bill Diamond, president of the SETI Institute, a Mountain View, California-based research organization dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, was direct about it: “We should not assume that in this incomprehensibly vast universe, life, intelligence, and technology arose only here.”
Roswell to Hollywood to Congress
American fascination with UFOs traces back to 1947, when debris from an unidentified flying object crashed near Roswell, New Mexico. The military initially described it as a flying disc, then revised its account and attributed the wreckage to a weather balloon. That reversal planted a suspicion that decades of official denials have never put to rest.
Hollywood did the rest. Flying saucers, little green men, and grey humanoid aliens became fixtures of popular culture. April 5 holds a minor but devoted place in this tradition: fans of the Star Trek franchise mark it as “First Contact Day,” commemorating the fictional year 2063, when humanity first encountered the Vulcans, a highly logical alien species from the franchise.
Priscilla Wald, a professor of science fiction studies at Duke University, sees something more revealing in how these stories are constructed. “Our imaginings of aliens are projections of our own behavior,” she said. “We project our own violence onto them. They want to conquer us, they’re aggressive. Doesn’t that sound like us?”
In 2024, the Pentagon released hundreds of reports on unidentified aerial phenomena. None pointed to extraterrestrial origin.
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Witnesses and the limits of explanation
That official caution does not resolve what people say they have seen. Debbie Dmytro, a medical professional from Michigan, described multiple sightings over the Detroit area and the suburb of Royal Oak. “Four yellow lights with a golden glow, flying very low, moving in perfect unison, completely silent,” she said. “Was it man-made? Not man-made? Who knows.”
Diamond was matter-of-fact about the gap between observation and explanation. “People see objects in the sky they can’t immediately identify. Not planes, not drones, not helicopters, not birds. So they can’t say what it is.”
Retired military officials speak out
Retired Rear Admiral Timothy Gallaudet, who testified before Congress at a 2024 UAP hearing, went further. He stated that unidentified aerial phenomena are present in both airspace and in the oceans, and may be controlled by non-human intelligence. “We have recovered the crashed craft,” he said, “though we’re not certain whether they’re extraterrestrial in origin.”
Gallaudet said he welcomed Trump’s promise to open the files, while noting the layers of classification that have surrounded this subject for decades.
Edwin Bergin, an astronomy professor at the University of Michigan, spelled out the scale of the question. Given the sheer number of galaxies and stars in the observable universe, the probability that life arose elsewhere is high. If an intelligence capable of crossing interstellar distances chose to visit Earth, Bergin argued, the choice to be seen would be deliberate.
Loeb wasn’t so sure what that visit would look like. “They might be laughing at us,” he said, “or they might be watching to confirm we won’t become predators or a threat.”
Diamond added that some government secrecy around UFOs has a straightforward rationale: “We have advanced satellite and ground-based systems used primarily for defense and national security. They sometimes pick up objects that can’t be made public.”
A congressman who says the public isn’t ready
In Congress, the pressure for transparency is intensifying. Representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee, a member of a federal task force on declassification, told the New York Post on April 3 that if the public knew what he had been briefed on, they would “be up at night worrying.” He described the classification structure around UAP-related information as layered “like an onion,” with each level of access revealing another layer of concealment.
Burchett has called for full disclosure, arguing that citizens who fund the government through taxes have a right to know what is being kept from them. He also raised the deaths of several individuals connected to aerospace and defense research, including a retired Air Force general and a rocket scientist, suggesting the pattern was not coincidental.
Trump has already directed the Department of Defense and related agencies to identify and release government files related to alien life, UAPs, and UFOs. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has registered the domains aliens.gov and alien.gov in response to public interest.