"What most people believe about flying saucers comes from drug store magazine racks." - Stanton Friedman, inventor of the Roswell conspiracy theory, which was first published in the National Enquirer.
There are not now, there have never been, and there will never be aliens visiting Earth. Why? Because aliens are nothing more than the modern space-age incarnation of fairies, elves, goblins and mermaids: imaginary humanoid creatures which lived in the sea, on invisible islands, in lakes, marshes, forests, or misty mountaintops, or underground: always just beyond the boundaries of human habitation, viewed only as distant lights, shadows or blurry objects which were, in reality, meteors, mirages, aurorae, swamp lights and various mammals and birds.
In the modern day, superior mirages are called Fata Morgana (Morgan the Fairy). Ignis fatuus ("foolish fire," aka swamp lights, corpse candles, etc.) is better known as Will O' The Wisp, Jack O' The Lantern or Robin Goodfellow - names belonging to medieval elves and fairies. No one ever saw Jack or Will or Robin, nor their lanterns. They only saw distant lights. Their imagination filled in the missing details and provided the source of the light: an elf - tall and thin, or small and winged - holding a lamp, possibly to lure passersby into a swamp or graveyard, or to abduct them to the land of the fairies.
For a bit of fun, Irish pranksters created fake "Jack O' Lanterns" by placing candles in hollow turnips and mounting them on sticks so they appeared to hover over dark paths at night, startling weary travelers.
But that was the middle ages, long before science illuminated the dark corners of our world and solved those ancient mysteries. Why is it the case then, in the 21st century, that so many highly educated people believe in flying space fairies? It all began during the Age of Enlightenment.
In 1752, Voltaire wrote the novel Micromegas, an early work of science fiction in which social commentary is provided by a giant from a planet orbiting the star Sirius.
Only 6 years later, in 1758, Swedish philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg claimed to have channeled a Venusian who informed him that Venus and all planets in God's creation were "Earths" inhabited by humans.
In 1824, Bavarian astronomer Franz von Paula Gruithuisen believed he had discovered cities on the moon. Later (1833), he found signs of life on Venus: an atmospheric phenomenon known as "ashen light" was, Gruithuisen theorized, the celebration of the ascension of a new Venusian emperor.
These revelations may have been the inspiration for the 1835 "Great Moon Hoax" in the New York Sun, which reported detailed descriptions of lunar flora and fauna, most notably intelligent flying himanoids.
Another hoax, published in a French newspaper in 1862, told of a dead Martian encased in a meteorite with a metal plate engraved with Martian hieroglyphs. A revised version of the story appeared in a Peruvian paper in 1877.
That same year, Italian astronomer Giovanni Shiaparelli mapped out what he believed were islands surrounded by naturally occurring channels on the surface of the planet Mars (Percival Lowell would do the same in 1895). The Italian word for channels is "canali." This was widely mistranslated as "canals," suggesting the presence of intelligent life on the red planet, leading foreign astronomers - Lowell in America and Nicholas Flammarion in France - to conclude that we are not alone in the solar system.
Contact with the Martians soon followed. In 1896, a spiritualist medium named Helene Smith allegedly made psychic journeys to Mars while in a trance state, describing the people and their strange customs (instead of round dinner plates, Martian plates are square, and so on).
In 1897, British author HG Wells wrote War of the Worlds, about hostile Martians. He followed this in 1901 with First Men in the Moon, which was filmed as A Trip to the Moon in 1903, and under its own title in 1919 and 1964. Here we are introduced to several races of Selenites, who are prototypes of the two most popular types of biological entities in alien lore: the noble and sophisticated "Nordic" aliens and the insect-like "Grays." These prototypes are also found in Wells' earlier novel, The Time Machine (1895), with the Nordic eloi facing abduction by the inhuman morlocks.
In 1901, inventor Nichola Tesla claimed to have received radio transmissions from Mars. One contemporary critic who scoffed at the idea was fellow inventor and radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi, who would eventually, in 1919, claim that he, too, was tuned in to the frequencies of Martian broadcasters.
Newspapers in the 1930s offered serious speculation about Martian life. Was the planet populated by giant beavers?, wondered one publication. It is not surprising, then, that the 1938 CBS broadcast of a radio play based on HG Wells' War of the Worlds would lead many listeners into a state of panic. They had grown up hearing scientists (and, of course, science fiction authors) tell them not only that Martians existed, but that they were keeping a close watch on the planet Earth, so it seemed entirely reasonable that tentacled space monsters could visit New Jersey for a bite to eat.
Nearly a decade later, people began reporting "flying disks." Speculation about the origin of the disks, in the summer of 1947, ranged primarily from secret US technology to secret Soviet technology. Very few - mostly jokers and self-proclaimed psychics - considered the possibility that the disks might be Martians.
In the ensuing years, the extraterrestrial hypothesis became the prevailing wisdom, largely due to the efforts of science fiction publisher Ray Palmer, editor of Amazing Stories magazine, who began promoting "aliens-are-real" stories beginning with the Shaver Mysteries in 1945. These were ostensibly "true" accounts by a hospitalized paranoid schizophrenic named Richard Shaver who claimed that two warring Atlantean races lived beneath the Earth, and that one of them traveled in strange vehicles and - like fairies, morlocks and Selenites - abducted humans. Palmer began linking this mythology with the flying disk mania of early-July 1947. In 1948, he launched a new magazine called Fate, which specialized in "factual" stories of aliens, ghosts and psychic phenomena.
By 1953, a large percentage of the population believed that unidentified flying objects were visitors from Mars or Venus. However, with improved telescopes and space probes came greater knowledge of what was on those planets - and what wasn't. By the 1960s and '70s, the alien visitors no longer originated from our close neighbors. Contactees and abductees now reported that the aliens hailed from distant, unreachable stars like Zeta Reticuli and the Pleiades.
So, like our ancestors, we are haunted by the remote fairie folk on their invisible islands; the mermaids hidden in the murky depths; the elves in dark forests; the goblins in subterranean caverns. And, like the pranksters of ancient Ireland, with their roadside Jack O' Lanterns, there are folks who simply get a kick out of beguiling the credulous. Sometimes the pranksters are media, government or military personnel. When any of them claim to have heard about space fairies from what they deem to be a "credible source," their personal belief in aliens - regardless of sincerity - does not constitute the least bit of objective evidence that aliens exist. If an eyewitness reports seeing fairies, the chances are astronomically greater that he saw an ignis fatuus or an owl or a flaming turnip, or nothing at all, than that he saw actual fairies. The same standard should apply to space aliens, whose existence is no better attested than that of the broomstick-riding witches of the Renaissance or the mischievous elves of the middle ages.
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