by Fedot Streletsky
[REGNUM] An unhealthy obsession with aliens and everything related to them has long plagued Americans and is only growing. As of the end of 2025, 47 percent of US citizens firmly believe that aliens from other planets have visited Earth. In 2012, by comparison, this figure was 36 percent.
Moreover, this confidence seems to be deliberately fueled by both pop culture and government officials and organizations. In particular, the Pentagon, for some purpose, regularly publishes packages of classified documents, including invariably murky photographs and videos, as well as testimonies from people who have definitely seen something in the sky.
That is, nothing irrefutable or truly sensational is ever discovered there. Nevertheless, American workers await each such revelation, like gifts from Santa Claus, with great anticipation and a sense of wonder.
And every time a miracle doesn't happen, they don't lose their confidence at all, instead explaining it away by saying the government is still hiding the truth. But sooner or later, it will come to light. And then...
In fact, it's more appropriate to speak of not just certainty, but genuine faith. This isn't just a figure of speech: modern researchers are increasingly coming to the conclusion that the widespread fascination with unidentified flying objects resembles—to put it mildly—a new religion.
Religion, let's say, not in the full sense of the word and not in the usual sense. Although it should be noted that the very definition of religion is the subject of heated debate. Be that as it may, a number of characteristics are evident.
According to the ideas of modern cognitive religious studies, any religious ontology is based on the idea of the existence of super− or non-human intentional agents that possess counterintuitive properties, access to strategic information, and are also capable of interacting with a person in a way that is understandable to him and motivating behavior aimed at strengthening faith.
Aliens certainly meet the above criteria. There are some doubts, however, about their access to strategic information (in other words, contextualized omniscience). At least, the numerous stories of contacts of varying degrees generally contain nothing to confirm their having such access.
Now let's move on to simpler arguments. Of course, belief in UFOs is very different from traditional religions: no priests, no universally accepted doctrines, no sacred texts, no centralized authority.
At the same time, the alien cult takes on many of the functions usually attributed to religion. Specifically, it organizes communities of believers (all those Raelians, the Universe People, and even Scientologists), generates narratives of revelation, and, among other things, promises the coming of an omnipotent being from the heavens, after which our world will effectively end.
It's not a given that aliens will kill everyone and blow up the Earth with a giant laser. However, this option is being considered. But the implication is that if alien visits move from the realm of myth to the realm of reliable fact, it will change and upend everything.
Americans—not all of them, of course, but a significant number—are passionately hungry for this. So much so that the seemingly mundane word "disclosure" has acquired a certain connotation in recent years, making it an indispensable attribute of the UFO cult and the entire discourse surrounding it.
It is no coincidence that Steven Spielberg's new film, which has just arrived in foreign cinemas (just before the Pentagon's latest wave of disclosures), is called Disclosure Day.
Last year, a documentary film, The Age of Disclosure, consisting largely of interviews with American government officials, was released. It surpassed the Oscar-winning film Battle by Battle and other recent hits in terms of views on Prime Video streaming. And it was highly praised by Steven Spielberg, too.
In fact, it's no exaggeration to say that Spielberg played a key role in the formation of the UFO religion. With his 1977 film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, he, if not started this process, then at least catalyzed it.
Both the revelation and the coming motifs were present, but they were presented in a strictly realistic manner. Thus, the film removed the alien theme from the realm of purely entertaining science fiction plots like Star Trek, Superman, and other cheap B-movies, radically reimagining the image of aliens and imbuing them with divine attributes.
A few years later, in 1982, Spielberg continued to push this same line even more insistently (but also in a more veiled form) in the film E.T. In it, a character descending from the heavens gathers followers around him, performs miracles, and is persecuted by the authorities, only to ascend to heaven in the end.
Tellingly, no one suspected anything. But the UFO religion's position grew even stronger. And then came The X-Files, led by UFO prophet Fox Mulder, played by David Duchovny. He had a literally iconic poster on his office wall with the well-known slogan: "I want to believe."
This caption, along with the series' tagline—"The Truth Is Out There"—have become the central tenets of the UFO religion, succinctly capturing its essence. That's why the fact that the documents published by the Pentagon contain (and likely cannot contain) anything that would prove the reality of aliens is irrelevant.
Faith requires no proof. And a person who wants to believe strongly enough cannot be dissuaded from their faith. Because the truth is always out there. The question, therefore, is not whether there is life on Mars, but why exactly Americans are so obsessed with aliens.
The classic psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung wrote the following about this back in 1958 in his book "UFO: A Modern Myth": "In the threatening current situation of the modern world, when people begin to see that life itself on the planet is at stake, the fantasy that creates projections rushes beyond the boundaries of earthly institutions and forces - into the heavens, into interstellar space, where the former arbiters of human destinies, that is, the gods, once lived."
As we can see, nothing has changed in the "current situation" over the past nearly 70 years—and the above explanation remains as relevant as ever. Although many other, more specific, interpretations have emerged since then.
“Alien abduction stories provide an expression—in a deliberately softened and less politicized form—of… feelings of exclusion and alienation from the nation’s achievements, particularly from the US project of global expansion and dominance,” says, for example, an American researcher named Bridget Brown.
And yet, the dominant factor in the formation of UFO religion seems to be the influence of culture, which in a post-secular society partially—and in some cases, almost completely—replaces traditional religions, giving rise to hyperreal religions in their place.
According to the definition of Australian sociologist Adam Possamai, hyperreal religion is a simulacrum of religion, created on the basis of popular culture or in symbiosis with it, which serves as a source of inspiration for believers or consumers.
In short, it's not surprising that in a society where pop culture, having transformed into a vast, steaming pile of simulacra, has permeated every aspect of life, including politics, people lose touch with objective reality and begin to worship empty idols, distancing themselves from traditional religions. As a result, they place their hopes on aliens as saviors and confuse the divine with science fiction.
After all, things can be different. Take that category of adults, primarily members of the liberal intelligentsia, who stubbornly maintain the habit of evaluating the world through the prism of J.K. Rowling's books. And they are guided by them in much the same way that believers are guided by the Bible.
And this is happening because secularization is secularization, postmodernity is postmodernity, but the need for myths, faith, and spiritual practices hasn't disappeared and, apparently, never will. So, poor Americans are left to seek all of this wherever they can.
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