Americans overwhelmingly want UFO ‘X-files’ to be made public

As the U.K. government gets set to make its classified UFO files available to the public, the majority of Americans want the U.S. government to do the same.

According to consumer research firm Piplsay, 61 percent of survey respondents want the U.S. government to declassify the country’s so-called “X-files.” A similar percentage, 58 percent, said they believe the U.S. government “actively investigates extraterrestrial life.”

Breaking down the survey further, 63 percent of Millennials and those in Generation X said they want the U.S. to release its UFO files, while 39 percent of those questioned said they believe Area 51 is a place where “secret alien missions” are conducted. Some 34 percent of respondents said Area 51 was just an aircraft testing ground, while 27 percent said they were not sure.

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Area 51 was in the spotlight last year as a result of the headline-grabbing “Storm Area 51” event in September. Although more than 2 million people signed up on Facebook saying they would attend the viral event, a motley group of about 100 “alien-chasers” converged on the back gate of the secret site early Sept. 20, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Only a few people were arrested, Fox News previously reported.

Artist’s impression of a UFO
Artist’s impression of a UFO (PhonlamaiPhoto/iStock)

Perhaps surprisingly, only 27 percent of those surveyed by Piplsay said they believe UFOs are real; 25 percent said they are misidentified objects, while 9 and 5 percent of respondents said they are hoaxes or delusions, respectively. The remaining 34 percent said they were not sure.

The research firm surveyed 30,741 Americans to come up with their findings.

In January, the British government said it would release reported UFO sightings by the British public. The Royal Air Force ran a UFO unit for 50 years but shut it down in 2009 after it came to the conclusion that none of the reports offered evidence of a real threat.

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In a September 2019 Gallup poll, Americans said they are becoming increasingly skeptical that the government knows more than it is letting on as it pertains to UFOs and an ex-punk rocker may be the one who opened the proverbial pandora’s box.

A spokesperson for the To the Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences (TTSA), co-founded by former Blink-182 singer Tom DeLonge, told The New York Times in September that it “certainly” had obtained “exotic material samples from UFOs,” but no further details were given at the time. Later that month, the U.S. Navy acknowledged that three UFO videos that were obtained by DeLonge and published by The New York Times are of real “unidentified” objects.

“The Navy considers the phenomena contained/depicted in those three videos as unidentified,” Navy spokesman Joseph Gradisher told The Black Vault, a website dedicated to declassified government documents.

Gradisher added that the “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” terminology is used because it provides the basic descriptor for the sightings/observations of unauthorized/unidentified aircraft/objects that have been observed entering/operating in the airspace of various military-controlled training ranges.”

The videos in question, known as “FLIR1,” “Gimbal” and “GoFast,” were originally released to the New York Times and to the TTSA.

The first video of the unidentified object was taken on Nov. 14, 2004, and shot by an F-18’s gun camera. The second video was taken on Jan. 21, 2015, and shows another aerial vehicle with pilots commenting on how strange it is. The third video was also taken on Jan. 21, 2015, but it is unclear whether the third video was of the same object or a different one.

In October, the TTSA signed a deal with the U.S. Army to study its purported extraterrestrial “discoveries.”

November saw the publication of an explosive report that detailed the involvement of two “unknown individuals” who told several Naval officers who witnessed the 2004 event, known as the USS Nimitz UFO incident, to delete evidence.