FDU Poll: On the 75th Anniversary of the Roswell Incident, 1/3rd of Americans think it might have been aliens

For Immediate Release

Contact:                           

Dan Cassino 

Executive Director, FDU Poll    

973.896.7072/ dcassino@fdu.edu

On the 75^th Anniversary of the Roswell Incident, 1/3^rd of Americans think it might have been aliens

As Congress holds the first public hearings about UFOs, Americans across the political spectrum say it’s plausible that extraterrestrials crashed in New Mexico

Fairleigh Dickinson University, Madison, NJ, June 8, 2022 – Belief that extraterrestrials crash-landed at Roswell, New Mexico 75 years ago this summer is widespread among Americans, across the political spectrum. According to new results from the FDU Poll, one-third of Americans (34 percent) spread out across the political spectrum, think it’s plausible that extraterrestrials crash-landed at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, with 12 percent saying that it is “very likely to be true.” Just 1 in 4 Americans, (28 percent) say that it’s “not at all likely” to be true.

“Roswell has become part of our national folklore,” said Dan Cassino, the Director of the Poll. “This is not a fringe belief: if you ask your friends and neighbors, you’re going to find people who think it’s true.”

For people that believe that unidentified flying objects are the result of extraterrestrials visiting Earth, this summer marks two milestones. First, Congress is holding the first-ever public hearings about UFOs (now often referred to as “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,” or “UAPs”) examining the data collected on them over the years by the military. Second, this summer is the 75^th anniversary of the Roswell incident of 1947, which remains one of the touchstones for UFO believers worldwide.

There are very few beliefs that unite people across the political and social spectrum in the US but thinking that the Roswell incident involved extraterrestrials is among them. Thirty-four percent of Democrats say that it’s “somewhat” or “very” likely that aliens crash-landed at Roswell in 1947, no different than the 31 percent of Republicans who say the same. Similarly, young and old Americans are about equally likely to think it’s plausible: 32 percent of those under 30 say so, compared with 35 percent of those 65 and over. Even people who report regular use of online platforms thought to be vectors of conspiracy thinking are no more or less likely to think it plausible. People who say that they use Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are no more likely than other Americans to say that it’s plausible.

“It’s fashionable to blame social media for the failure to agree upon basic facts,” said Cassino. “That’s true with a lot of beliefs, but Roswell stands apart: it’s not something people are just learning about by watching YouTube.”

There are some factors that lead Americans to be more likely to think that the government has been covering up an extraterrestrial crash at Roswell, and these are the same factors that generally lead people to question government narratives. African-American or Black Americans are much more prone to believe that it was extraterrestrials than others, with 43 percent saying that it’s plausible. Less-educated Americans are also much more likely than those with a college degree to say that the Roswell incident was “somewhat” or “very” likely to have been extraterrestrials: 40 percent of those who didn’t attend college say that it’s plausible, compared with 26 percent of those with a college degree.

While there is no difference between Republicans and Democrats on the belief that aliens crashed at Roswell, regular consumers of Fox News (40 percent) and talk radio (37 percent) are much more likely than other Americans to think it might have been aliens. In contrast, Americans who report listening to NPR regularly are rather less likely to think so (27 percent).

“Lots of people have reasons to not trust the government,” said Cassino. “If you don’t trust the government in general, you’re not going to trust their explanations for what happened at Roswell.”

To put it in context, this means that belief in Roswell as an alien crash landing is more widespread than belief in Bigfoot (23 percent plausible), the belief that childhood vaccines cause autism (28 percent) and the belief that the Earth is flat (9 percent).

“The Roswell Incident has been a part of our culture for decades now,” said Cassino. “People assume that where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and if you hear about something enough, they figure that there must be something to it.”

Background on the Roswell Incident

On June 14, 1947, William “Mack” Brazel and his sons were making regular rounds on a ranch they were managing and happened upon debris they could not identify. While they had seen crashed weather balloons previously, this debris seemed different. Later, he reported the debris to the Sheriff’s office, now linking it to sightings of “flying discs” that had made national news in the interim. The Sheriff, in turn, passed on the information to the nearby Army Air Field. This led to two officers visiting the crash site with Brazel. The following day, the public relations officer of the Air Field put out a press release claiming that the debris was from a flying saucer, and had been recovered by the military. The release, though, was quickly retracted, as the regional commander, General Roger Ramey, and his staff identified it as coming from a balloon.

The incident was largely forgotten, at least in the mainstream discussion of UFOs, until the late 1970s, when one of the officers who had initially inspected the debris reached out to a UFO researcher. There has been intense controversy about the evidence for a crash among the community of UFO believers, but dramatizations of a crashing UFO on television programs like “Unsolved Mysteries,” specials, movies, and many books, have served to cement Roswell in the public imagination. Roswell is now home to the International UFO Museum, much of which is devoted to the purported crash landing, and the city now hosts an annual festival, attracting between 10,000 and 20,000 attendees annually, with almost 200,000 visiting the museum annually.

Government sources have held that the debris observed at Roswell was from high altitude balloons carrying equipment that would allow them to detect nuclear tests in the USSR. This operation, code-named “Project Mogul,” was highly classified, and unknown even to many of the military personnel at the nearby airbase.

Methodology

The survey was conducted between April 24 and April 29, 2022, using a certified list of adult US residents nationwide. Respondents were randomly chosen from the list and contacted via either live-caller telephone interviews or text-to-web surveys sent to cellular phones, resulting in an overall sample of 1,021 respondents. 174 of the surveys were carried out via the TTW platform, 196 of the interviews were carried out via landline telephones, and the remainder (697) were done on cellular phones. Surveys were conducted only in English.

The data were weighted to be representative of the population of adult US residents, as of the 2020 US Census. The weights used, like all weights, balance the demographic characteristics of the sample to match known population parameters. The weighted results used here are balanced to match parameters for sex, age, education and race/ethnicity.

SPSSINC RAKE, an SPSS extension module that simultaneously balances the distributions of all variables using the GENLOG procedure, was used to produce final weights. Weights were trimmed to prevent individual interviews from having too much influence on the final results. The use of these weights in statistical analysis helps to ensure that the demographic characteristics of the sample approximate the demographic characteristics of the target population. The size of these weights is used to construct the measure of design effects, which indicates the extent to which the reported results are being driven by the weights applied to the data, rather than found in the data itself. Simply put, these design effects tell us how many additional respondents would have been needed to get the weighted number of respondents across weighted categories: larger design effects indicate greater levels of under-representation in the data. In this case, calculated design effects are approximately 1.25.

All surveys are subject to sampling error, which is the expected probable difference between interviewing everyone in a population versus a scientific sampling drawn from that population. Sampling error should be adjusted to recognize the effect of weighting the data to better match the population. In this poll, the simple sampling error for 1,021 registered voters is +/-3.1 percentage points, at a 95 percent confidence interval. Including the design effects, the margin of error would be +/-3.9 percentage points, though the figure not including them is much more commonly reported.

This error calculation does not take into account other sources of variation inherent in public opinion studies, such as non-response, question-wording, differences in translated forms, or context effects. While such errors are known to exist, they are often unquantifiable within a particular survey, and all efforts, such as randomization and extensive pre-testing of items, have been used to minimize them.

Weighted Telephone Sample Characteristics

1,021 US Residents

Figures are weighted to overall voter characteristics from the US Census. Respondents who refused to answer a demographic item are not included.

Man                                 

43%                 N = 440

Woman                            

54%                 N = 551

Some Other Way          

2%                  N = 17

18-30                          

26%                N = 265

31-44                          

31%                 N = 317

45-64                          

26%                 N = 269

65+                              

16%                 N = 161

Democrat (with leaners)             

45%                 N = 388

Independent                                 

16%                 N = 139

Republican (with leaners)          

38%                 N = 322

White                                           

50%                N = 515

Black                                              

14%                N = 143

Hispanic/Latino/a                                     

18%                N = 184

Asian                                       

7%                  N = 75

Other/Multi-racial                                    

8%                  N = 84

No college degree                      

53%                N = 541

College degree or more             

45%                N = 461

Question Wording and Order

In recent years, there has been an increase in the willingness of Americans to do research and draw their own conclusions about important topics.

I’m going to read you a list of statements [that scientists, government officials and other experts say are false]/[that have been made on popular websites]. For each, tell me if you think that the statement is…

[Wording is randomly assigned]

Not At All Likely to be true

Not Very Likely to be true

Somewhat Likely to be true

Very Likely to be true

Don’t Know/Refused [Vol]

[Item order is shuffled, half of the respondents get C1 first; the other half get a different item, randomly selected, first]

C1. Donald Trump really won the 2020 US Presidential election.

C2. Childhood vaccines cause autism.

C3. Extraterrestrials crash landed at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947

C4. Creatures known as “Bigfoot” or “Sasquatch” exist in the woods of the Pacific Northwest.

C5. The Earth is actually flat

C6. COVID-19 was made in a lab

Release Tables