The Science of Alien Sightings | StarTalk

Set a lot of people. They think UFOs and alien visits are the same thing. So what's up with that? Well, I think that most people who are into the UFO phenomenon—and by the way, that's not a small percentage—it's one third of the public. One third of the public thinks there's his gun. That's right, one, two, three together, there are ten thousand, twenty thousand sightings reported per year in the US. So that's a lot.

So, is it a delusion that people think this way? Do we worry about it psychologically? You know, I used to worry about it because I get phone calls every day from people who are having difficulties with the aliens in their personal lives. And well, in an institute, I'm sure people feel really distressed about this. Well, you know, an 8% of the public, according to one poll, is actually being abducted by them, hauled out of their bedrooms for experiments. Their mom! All right, so you know, I mean, maybe it improves their social life. Who's to say?

I think it's no different than the instinct towards religion, and indeed the instinct towards science. It is feeling ourselves to be a small part of something much grander and in sending out tendrils to find what those things could be. We do that in our storytelling, cinematically. Yes, and these files and ET, Men in Black, Independence Day, or the world’s… So you look at the range of how aliens have been portrayed. Yet, if you ask anybody who has met them, they all kind of look the same. They all have this common report.

Do we have an image? Do we have an image of that? See, they all look like that, right? So, Seth, why do they all look like that? How do you get convergence on what an alien looks like in that way? Yeah, well, there is something in biology called indeed convergence. You know, I tell you what the aliens really look like. I don't know if you can handle this, but think of what we're going to do, and I scan.

I can't handle the truth! Think what we're going to do in this century, which is invent Thinking Machines. The aliens have probably already done that, so the real aliens probably look like machines. Okay, so now that we've all heard it out of his mouth, we just need everyone to look right here. It's focus right there. Okay, thank you, thank you for that. What were we talking about?

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