The Numbers

Here is the part of the argument that can be checked.

Everything else on this site is a reading of the record — a claim about how people behave, dressed up in dates. This section is the part where somebody counted. Polling is a soft science in a hard hat, and I want the figures down with their years, their sample sizes, and their question wording attached, because the wording is not a footnote. On this subject the wording is most of the finding.

The cheap question

Pew, fielded June 14–24, 2021, 10,417 U.S. adults: 65% say their best guess is that intelligent life exists on other planets. Among adults under 30 it's 76%; among those 50 and older, 57%. DOCUMENTED

Nobody argues about this number. It is also the least interesting figure in the file, because "somewhere in a galaxy" costs a respondent nothing.

The expensive question

The expensive question is whether they're here, and here the numbers get shy.

Gallup, fielded July 1–19, 2026 by telephone, 1,200 adults, ±4 points: 37% say at least some UFOs have been alien spacecraft visiting Earth from other planets or galaxies; 49% say all sightings can be explained by human activity on Earth or natural phenomena; 13% have no opinion.

That 37% is four points below the 41% Gallup got in 2021 CONTESTED — which is inside the margin of error, so the honest statement is that belief did not rise, not that it fell. What actually moved is the "no opinion" column: 7% in 2019, 9% in 2021, 13% in 2026. Gallup's own summary is worth quoting, because it is the opposite of what a seven-year disclosure boom was supposed to produce:

Rather than become increasingly convinced that some sightings have been alien spacecraft, the percentage of Americans who are unsure has grown, from 7% in 2019 to 13% in 2026.

What the wording does to the answer

Gallup asks a rotated two-option item — the preamble, then "Which comes closer to your view -- [some UFOs have been alien spacecraft visiting Earth from other planets or galaxies, (or) all UFO sightings can be explained by human activity on Earth or natural phenomenon]?" No third choice is read aloud. "No opinion" is recorded only when a respondent volunteers it.

In the same summer, CBS News/YouGov's version of the alien-spacecraft question came back 51/49.

Fourteen points, one country, four weeks apart. Nothing happened in between except grammar.

I want to keep that line, so I owe you the qualification. Gallup's wave was conducted by telephone; YouGov's ran online. Mode may be doing as much of the work here as wording is. Either way the fourteen points came out of the instrument and not out of the country. Anyone who hands you a single headline number on this subject — including me — is handing you an artifact of how the question was built. Treat the shape of the trend as the finding and the level as decoration.

The number that actually moved

The number that has moved is not about aliens.

Gallup has asked, three times in thirty years, "In your opinion, does the U.S. government know more about UFOs than it is telling us?" Yes: 71% in 1996, 68% in 2019, 78% in July 2026 — the highest of the three readings, with 17% saying the government is not withholding. DOCUMENTED

Ten points is not four points. The 2019-to-2026 move sits outside the 2026 poll's ±4, and it is the one shift on this page I am willing to call a shift. Gallup notes that the reading follows Trump's February 2026 directive and the Pentagon's first release of files in May. Gallup draws no causal line from one to the other, and neither will I. But the pattern deserves saying plainly, because it cuts against the easy version of this site's argument: across the disclosure era, belief that they're here stayed flat, and belief that something is being kept back went up ten points. Disclosure converted nobody. It may well have made people more suspicious.

The partisan spread on that 78% is three points — 78% of Republicans, 79% of independents, 76% of Democrats, per Gallup's topline and tabs. I cannot think of another live political question in this country that produces a number like that. CBS/YouGov, asking a two-way version in June 2026, got 84%.

Read the two blocks together, because the gap between them is the actual public opinion on this subject.

Seventy-eight percent think something is being kept back. Thirty-seven percent think the something is aliens. Same pollster, same field period, same fourteen days on the phone. The country has not concluded that they're here. It has concluded that it is not being told, which is a different belief with a much longer service record, and one that no press conference is going to surprise anybody with.

A baseline for the 78%

Further down, this page used to confess that it had no way of knowing whether 78% is a large number, because it had nothing to measure it against. That confession was honest and it was also an excuse. So I went and got the comparator.

It does not go my way. It is going in anyway.

Start with the head-to-head. CBS News/YouGov was in the field June 2–4, 2026, 2,023 adults, ±2.8, and got 84% on "knows more about UFOs than it is telling." Reuters/Ipsos was in the field June 3–8, 2026, 4,531 adults, ±1.5, and got 75% calling it definitely or probably true that "the federal government is hiding information about... the alleged clients of accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein." The two field periods overlapped by two days. DOCUMENTED

Nine points. Two different secrets. One suspicion.

The Epstein figure is not a flash reading, either. Yahoo News/YouGov, July 24–28, 2025, 1,729 adults, ±3.1: 69% said the government is hiding information about the client list — in a question whose own stem told them the Justice Department had concluded there was no client list — including 55% of Republicans, with 67% saying the same about his death. Reuters/Ipsos, on an identically worded item, read 69% and 60% on July 15–16, 2025, and 75% and 65% by February 13–16, 2026, 1,117 adults, ±3.0. CNN/SSRS, January 9–12, 2026, 1,209 adults, ±3.1: 67% say the government is intentionally holding back Epstein information that should be released, against 16% who say it is making an effort to release all it can. DOCUMENTED

I wanted to write that those numbers were flat. They are not — the identically worded Reuters/Ipsos item rose six points on the clients between July 2025 and February 2026, and the share saying "definitely" rose from 36% to 49%. Call it a drift, not a spike. What matters here is that a year of readings on an entirely terrestrial secret sits in the same band as the UFO number, and nobody has written a website about how that proves anything.

Then the wording, which is worse than I let on above. Stay on UFOs and change nothing but the sentence:

• "Knows more about UFOs than it is telling the public": 78% (Gallup) and 84% (CBS/YouGov).
• "Governments are hiding evidence about UFOs and alien visitors": 38%. UNH Carsey School, POLES 2025, fielded April–May 2025, 1,134 U.S. adults, roughly ±3. DOCUMENTED
• "The government is concealing what they know about... alien encounters": 42.6%. Chapman University Survey of American Fears, Wave 3, May 5–18, 2016, 1,511 adults, GfK KnowledgePanel. DOCUMENTED

A forty-six point range on one subject. Some of that gap is real and I have to say so: the Carsey item offered an explicit "unsure," which 37% took, while Gallup and CBS forced a binary; the Carsey item also requires believing in alien visitors, and the brief says that was deliberate — the wording "meant to exclude a less radical view that unidentified aerial phenomena might be secret earthly aircraft." The Gallup and CBS readings also land thirteen months later and after a federal release. So it is not one belief measured four ways, and I cannot pin the whole spread on grammar.

But that cuts against me too. It means "knows more than it is telling" is a low bar, and a low bar is what my headline number clears. The government satisfies that sentence by owning a classification stamp. You can answer yes while believing every object in the file is a Chinese balloon and a bad night on a sensor. A lot of people almost certainly do.

Then the floor. Chapman is the only instrument here that puts the comparators in one survey under one stem — "The government is concealing what they know about…" — and asks the identical question about each. Percent agreeing or strongly agreeing:

• The 9/11 attacks — 54.3%
• The JFK assassination — 49.6%
• Alien encounters — 42.6%
• Global warming — 42.1%
• Plans for a one world government — 32.9%
• Obama's birth certificate — 30.2%
• The origin of the AIDS virus — 30.1%
• The death of Justice Antonin Scalia — 27.8%
• The moon landing — 24.2%

Third. Not first — third, behind two events that actually happened, and in a statistical tie with global warming at this sample size.

And the same battery included an event the researchers made up. "The North Dakota crash" was invented for the survey, and 32.5% of Americans said the government was concealing what it knew about it — higher than five of the nine real items. That is the floor. Roughly a third of any sample will affirm the concealment of something that never occurred. Every secrecy number on this page, mine included, is standing on it. DOCUMENTED

So: is the 78% distinctive? No. It sits inside the ordinary band of American institutional suspicion — near the top of it, but inside — and a fair share of its apparent size belongs to a permissive verb rather than to anything about the sky. The load-bearing figure on this site is real, correctly reported, and means less than I wanted it to mean.

One thing genuinely does stand out, and it is not size. It is flatness. The CBS crosstab on that 84% runs Democrats 85%, independents 85%, Republicans 83% — a two-point spread — and Gallup's version runs three. There is no live political question in this country that behaves like that, and I said so above. I am not taking it back. I am only noticing what it implies, which is not what I would have liked it to imply: a belief that divides nobody, costs nothing to hold, and asks nothing of anyone is broad and it is shallow. The CNN reading has the same shape from the other side — 6% satisfied with what has been released about Epstein, but only 49% dissatisfied, and 33% saying the amount released does not matter to them either way.

Shallow beliefs do not produce consequences. That is this site's whole thesis, and the baseline just handed it to me by taking my best number away.

The closest thing to a controlled experiment

The federal government did release the files. CBS News/YouGov went into the field June 2–4, 2026 — after the first two PURSUE tranches — with 2,023 adults, ±2.8 points, and asked: "From what you know, do the files and videos released by the federal government make you more or less likely to believe that alien life has visited Earth?"

More likely, 29%. Less likely, 14%. No impact, 57%. DOCUMENTED

That is the load-bearing figure on this page, and it comes with a deflator. Fifty-seven percent had heard "a lot" or "some" about the release, so it is not true that nobody noticed. But 43% had heard "not much," and 59% had watched none of the videos. Some meaningful share of that 57% "no impact" is not a considered verdict on the evidence. It is a shrug from someone who never opened the tab.

Which is still a shrug, and still the point. But it is the weaker version of the point, and the weaker version is the true one.

Everyone else's government

Every figure above was collected in the United States, and the claim this site makes is about a public. That gap is fixable, partly.

The YouGov-Cambridge Globalism Project put one sentence to 26,276 adults in 24 countries between August 4 and September 21, 2021, country samples running 1,004 to 1,473: "Humans have made contact with aliens and this fact has been deliberately hidden from the public." Net true, by country: DOCUMENTED

• India 37%, Mexico 36%
• Thailand, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa, 32% each
• Hungary 27%, Turkey 26%
• Greece, Australia and Brazil, 24% each; Canada 23%; Italy 21%
• United States 20%, tied with Indonesia
• Spain 17%; Great Britain, Japan and Russia, 16% each; France 15%; Poland 14%; Sweden 13%
• Germany 10%, Denmark 6%

The American figure is fourteenth of twenty-four, just under the median of 22%, with thirteen countries above it. Denmark is at 6%. India nearly doubles the United States. Whatever this belief is, it is not an American disease and America is not its capital — which means the site can broaden its claim here rather than narrow it.

Then the caveat that eats half the meal. The Globalism item names no government at all. "Hidden from the public," full stop, by nobody in particular. Every American and British number on this page names a specific national state. Those are not the same question, and I am not going to pretend a 20% and a 78% belong on the same axis.

How badly does format move this? YouGov asked the identical sentence three years running and got three different countries back, none of which was a different country.

• 2019, fielded February 28 – March 26, 22 countries, select-all-that-apply checklist: United States 15%. The rest of that wave ran Mexico 26%, Nigeria 21%, Turkey 19%, Brazil 17%, India 17%, Thailand 17%, South Africa 16%, Canada 15%, Italy 15%, Australia 14%, Spain 14%, Great Britain 13%, Japan 12%, Egypt 11%, Saudi Arabia 11%, Poland 11%, Sweden 9%, France 8%, Germany 8%, Denmark 7%, Indonesia 7%.
• 2020, fielded July 30 – August 24, rated true/false with a separate "don't know": United States 29% — 8% definitely true plus 21% probably true, with 22% saying don't know. Ninth of the twenty-one countries fielded, behind Mexico 44%, Nigeria 42%, Turkey 41%, Hungary 36%, South Africa 35%, Greece 33%, Brazil 31% and Canada 30%.
• 2021, fielded August 4 – September 21, same rating scale but with "don't know either way – this may be true or may be false" replacing the bare don't know: United States 20%, with 38% now parked in that middle option.

Fifteen, twenty-nine, twenty. DOCUMENTED The honest reading is not that wording did all of it — the three waves are also three different years spanning a pandemic and the June 2021 ODNI report, and eighteen of the nineteen countries fielded in both later waves fell between 2020 and 2021, with Australia level at 24%. What the three waves do establish is that the format differences are large enough that any trend line drawn through them is worthless. Anyone quoting you a UFO poll number without the response scale attached is selling you something.

The one clean pairing. Only two countries in this file have ever been asked whether their own government would hide it, in near-identical words, by the same pollster. YouGov GB, fielded May 24–25, 2021, 2,018 adults: "If the UK government had evidence of UFOs, do you think it would…?" Hide it from the public 62%, tell the public 18%, don't know 21%. YouGov US, fielded June 26, 2020, 8,339 adults: hide it 56%, tell the public 22%, don't know 22%. On the softer item — whether the government knows something about UFOs not being shared — Americans read 54% in July 2019 against 49% for Britons. YouGov drew the comparison itself. DOCUMENTED

Britons distrust their own state about UFOs more than Americans distrust theirs. The country with no Roswell, no Area 51 and no congressional hearings is the more suspicious one. Caveat, and it is a real one: the two fieldworks are eleven months and two national samples apart, both are opt-in online panels rather than probability samples, and a six-point gap under those conditions is indicative rather than precise.

And ask a different alien question and the table reshuffles. Ipsos, for Reuters, asked 24,077 adults across 22 countries between November 4, 2009 and January 13, 2010 whether "alien beings have come to earth and walk amongst us in our communities disguised as us." Global agreement 20%; India 45%, China 42%, Japan 29%, South Korea 27%, Italy 25%, United States 24%, Brazil 24%, Australia 23%. Japan sits near the top of that item and near the bottom of the concealment item at 16%. But the rankings do not simply invert: India tops both lists, and China, second on the Ipsos item, was not fielded in the 2021 Globalism wave at all. CONTESTED — Ipsos's own data tables disagree with its own press release on four countries, showing Mexico at 17% where the release printed 10%, and the two readings are eleven years, two pollsters and two response scales apart, with the YouGov "don't know either way" option absorbing between 23% and 49% of respondents.

Ipsos Global Advisor's Predictions 2023 is the largest multi-country alien question there is — 24,471 adults across 36 markets, fielded October 21 to November 4, 2022 — and it is no help at all, because it asks how likely respondents think it is that "aliens will visit Earth," a forecast question filed alongside "the war in Ukraine will end in 2023." The United States came in at 17%, against a 36-market average of 18%. There is no concealment item anywhere in that report. I am listing it so nobody presses it into service as one.

While I am here: Brazil is not a UFO-belief outlier, whatever you have read. DEBUNKED It reads 24% on the 2021 Globalism concealment item against the American 20%, 31% against 29% in 2020, 19% against 17% on the Ipsos visits question, and exactly tied with the United States at 24% on the 2009–10 walk-among-us item. Even the widely circulated "42% of Brazilians" figure — which is Glocalities, asking about belief in intelligent alien civilizations among 26,492 respondents in 24 countries, fielded December 2015 to February 2016 — ranks Brazil eighteenth of twenty-four, below the United States and Germany at 45% each and Britain at 43%, and far below Russia at 68%, Mexico at 61% and China at 60%.

The narrowing. Here is the sentence this file cannot write: "X percent of Canadians think their own government is hiding it." It does not exist here, and neither does its Japanese, Australian, Mexican or Brazilian equivalent. The multi-country instrument names no government; the own-government question has only ever been put to Americans and to Britons. So the claim narrows, explicitly: where this site says a public believes its government is concealing something, it means the American public, with the British public as the single available check — and the British public is more suspicious than we are. The broader statement that concealment belief exists at meaningful rates across two dozen countries survives. The statement that any particular nation suspects its own government does not, outside those two.

Where this is thinner than I'd like

The cover-up trend is three data points with a twenty-three-year hole in the middle. It is not a line, and it should never be charted as one.

The single best "nothing changed" number comes from one pollster, one field period, one question. The corroboration I have for it — Talker Research, July 2026, finding 54% reported no change in opinion — comes from an opt-in commercial panel with no established sampling frame, and should be read as company, not as confirmation. The same panel reports the belief shift concentrated among its youngest respondents and close to absent among its oldest, which is the part that cuts against this page. I am not going to print its figures as though they were Gallup's. I am not going to leave them out of the room either.

This page used to say, in this spot, that it had no baseline for the 78% — that if generic institutional distrust ran near 78 on everything, then the UAP-specific story was thinner than I had made it sound. That paragraph is now answered above, and the answer is the one I did not want. Distrust does run near there. The UFO figure is a representative sample of a much larger mood, not a signal about UFOs. The section stays; the number stays; the weight I put on it does not.

What I still do not have is a Federal Reserve comparator, and I am not going to fake one. There are polls about auditing the Fed, which measure what people want done, not what they believe is being hidden. Swapping one for the other because it would round out the list is exactly the move this page exists to refuse.

And AP-NORC, which you would expect to have something here, has nothing at all: a site search of its archive for "UFO" returns no results. DEBUNKED I mention it so nobody cites an AP-NORC UFO poll that does not exist.

What the numbers support

What the numbers support is narrower than the title of this site.

Not "everyone already knows they're here." Rather: a stable minority thinks so, a stable plurality doesn't, a growing sliver has stopped having an opinion, and an overwhelming supermajority — larger now than at any point Gallup has measured — assumes it is being handled.

Disclosure arriving into that room does not confirm the alien hypothesis to most people. It confirms the withholding hypothesis to almost everybody. They were never waiting for the first thing. The first time Gallup thought to ask, in 1996, seventy-one percent had already stopped waiting on the second.

And the supermajority is not a UFO fact. It is a fact about the country, wearing a UFO costume — the same country that says the same thing about a dead financier's contact list, and that told Chapman it was being lied to about a plane crash in North Dakota that never happened.