Americans are becoming more open to the idea that aliens have visited Earth, according to a series of polls that show belief in alien visitation has been steadily on the rise since 2012.

Almost half—47 percent—of Americans say they think aliens have definitely or probably visited Earth at some point in time, according to a new poll from YouGov conducted in November 2025 that involved 1,114 adult participants. That percentage is up from roughly a third (36 percent) of Americans polled in 2012 by Kelton Research, with the exact same sample size. Gallup published polls on this question in 2019 and 2021 that likewise show an upward trend.

Moreover, people seem to be getting off the fence on this issue, one way or the other. Just 16 percent of Americans said they were unsure if aliens had visited Earth in the new poll, down from 48 percent who were unsure in 2012. Meanwhile, even as belief in alien visitation has risen, so has doubt: The new poll shows that 37 percent of Americans said Earth likely hasn’t been visited by aliens, more than double the 17 percent logged in 2012.

It’s impossible to know exactly why Americans have become more receptive to alien visitation from these polls alone; they only include raw statistics, and lack granular details about the specific motivations for the participants’ responses.

“It’s important to note that this is a poll about belief,” says Susan Lepselter, an author and associate professor of anthropology and American Studies at Indiana University who has written extensively on alien beliefs and UFO experiences. “It’s not a poll about experience, contact, feelings—nothing like that.”

“We don’t know what their engagement is; we don’t know if their belief has been life-changing,” she adds. “We just know one thing, which is that the statistics have moved from one set of beliefs to another.”

Of course, it’s still possible—and let’s be real, fun—to speculate on the drivers of the trend. One obvious culprit is a new posture from institutional news sources, such as the US government and legacy media, which have finally started taking unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) seriously.

This shift began with the release of mysterious Pentagon UAP videos by The New York Times in 2017, and has since been accelerated by spate of Congressional hearings, and a NASA independent study on UAP. The newly released documentary The Age of Disclosure, which features claims by former military officials that the US government has covered up evidence of aliens visiting Earth, has supercharged the legitimacy to this once marginalized topic.

Students can take many possible routes through MIT’s curriculum, which can zigag through different departments, linking classes and disciplines in unexpected ways. With so many options, charting an academic path can be overwhelming, but a new tool called NerdXing is here to help.

The brainchild of senior Julianna Schneider and other students in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing Undergraduate Advisory Group (UAG), NerdXing lets students search for a class and see all the other classes students have gone on to take in the past, including options that are off the beaten track.

“I hope that NerdXing will democratize course knowledge for everyone,” Schneider says. “I hope that for anyone who’s a freshman and maybe hasn’t picked their major yet, that they can go to NerdXing and start with a class that they would maybe never consider — and then discover that, ‘Oh wait, this is perfect for this really particular thing I want to study.’”

As a student double-majoring in artificial intelligence and decision-making and in mathematics, and doing research in the Biomimetic Robotics Laboratory in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Schneider knows the benefits of interdisciplinary studies. It’s a part of the reason why she joined the UAG, which advises the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing’s leadership as it advances education and research at the intersections between computing, engineering, the arts, and more.

Through all of her activities, Schneider seeks to make people’s lives better through technology.

“This process of finding a problem in my community and then finding the right technology to solve that — that sort of approach and that framework is what guides all the things I do,” Schneider says. “And even in robotics, the things that I care about are guided by the sort of skills that I think we need to develop to be able to have meaningful applications.”

From Albania to MIT

Before she ever touched a robot or wrote code, Schneider was an accomplished young classical pianist in Albania. When she discovered her passion for robotics at age 13, she applied some of the skills she had learned while playing piano.

“I think on some fundamental level, when I was a pianist, I thought constantly about my motor dynamics as a human being, and how I execute really complex skills but do it over and over again at the top of my ability,” Schneider says. “When it came to robotics, I was building these robotic arms that also had to operate at the top of their ability every time and do really complex tasks. It felt kind of similar to me, like a fun crossover.”

Schneider joined her high school’s robotics team as a middle schooler, and she was so immediately enamored that she ended up taking over most of the coding and building of the team’s robot. She went on to win 14 regional and national awards across the three teams she led throughout middle and high school. It was clear to her that she’d found her calling.

NerdXing wasn’t Schneider’s first experience building new technology. At just 16, she built an app meant to connect English-speaking volunteers from her international school in Tirana, Albania, to local charities that only posted jobs in Albanian. By last year, the platform, called VoluntYOU, had 18 ambassadors across four continents. It has enabled volunteers to give out more than 2,000 burritos in Reno, Nevada; register hundreds of signatures to support women’s rights legislation in Albania; and help with administering Covid-19 vaccines to more than 1,200 individuals a day in Italy.

Schneider says her experience at an international school encouraged her to recognize problems and solutions all around her.

“When I enter a new community and I can immediately be like, ‘Oh wait, if we had this tool, that would be so cool and that would help all these people,’ I think that’s just a derivative of having grown up in a place where you hear about everyone’s super different life experiences,” she says.

Schneider describes NerdXing as a continuation of many of the skills she picked up while building VoluntYOU.

“They were both motivated by seeing a challenge where I thought, ‘Wait, we have the tech skills to build that. This is something that I can envision the solution to.’ And then I wanted to actually go and make that a reality,” Schneider says.

Robotics with a positive impact

At MIT, Schneider started working in the Biomimetic Robotics Laboratory of Professor Sangbae Kim, where she has now participated in three research projects, one of which she’s co-authoring a paper on. She’s part of a team that tests how robots, including the famous back-flipping mini cheetah, move, in order to see how they could complement humans in high-stakes scenarios.

Most of her work has revolved around crafting controllers, including one hybrid-learning and model-based controller that is well-suited to robots with limited onboard computing capacity. It would allow the robot to be used in regions with less access to technology.

“It’s not just doing technology for technology’s sake, but because it will bridge out into the world and make a positive difference. I think legged robotics have some of the best potential to actually be a robotic partner to human beings in the scenarios that are most high-stakes,” Schneider says.

Schneider hopes to further robotic capabilities so she can find applications that will service communities around the world. One of her goals is to help create tools that allow a surgeon to operate on a patient a long distance away. 

To take a break from academics, Schneider has channeled her love of the arts into MIT’s vibrant social dancing scene. This year, she’s especially excited about country line dancing events where the music comes on and students have to guess the choreography.

“I think it’s a really fun way to make friends and to connect with the community,” she says.

A New York Times spokesperson told WIRED in a statement that Brooks “regularly attends events to speak with noted and important business leaders to inform his columns,” and that Brooks had no contact with Epstein before or after attending the 2011 dinner where the photo was taken.

A representative for the Gates Foundation did not immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did representatives for Google, Allen, Chomsky, and Bannon’s War Room podcast.

The release also includes closeups of women’s body parts with quotes from Vladimir Nabokov’s book Lolita scrawled onto them, a photo of a pill bottle labelled with a medication usually used to relieve the symptoms of urinary tract infections, and redacted images of travel documents from several countries, including Ukraine and Lithuania.

The House committee’s investigation into Epstein has been going on for several months, and is separate from the document dump expected to be released by the US Department of Justice this week. The Epstein Files Transparency Act, which was signed into law last month, requires the DOJ to release “all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials” in its possession by December 19.

As part of the investigation, the committee subpoenaed the Epstein estate, and included instructions for the estate to produce two separate sets of documents—one to the Democrats on the committee, the other to Republicans. As the committee has been receiving documents from the estate, both Democrats and the committee as a whole have done their own releases. Material in these releases has raised new questions about the well-documented relationship between Epstein and president Donald Trump; among other things, it shows Epstein claiming intimate knowledge of Trump’s views in exchanges with a Gates adviser.

Documents related to investigations into Epstein have overshadowed the first year of the second Trump administration, several members of which made the release of the documents a central talking point in the lead up to the 2024 presidential election. The political dynamics have shifted over the past year, as it became clear that Trump, a one-time friend of Epstein’s, appears repeatedly in the investigative record.

“As we approach the deadline for the Epstein Files Transparency Act, these new images raise more questions about what exactly the Department of Justice has in its possession.” said Representative Robert Garcia, the ranking Democratic member on the committee, in a press release. “We must end this White House cover-up, and the DOJ must release the Epstein files now.”