Why do people believe in aliens and UFOs? We asked a psychologist his views on the paranormal

Astronomers estimate there are 100 - 400 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy alone, and exoplanet researchers calculate there is at least one planet orbiting every star we see in the night sky.

This makes the chances of alien life existing elsewhere in the Universe seem very likely.

When I first discovered the joys of scepticism, I became what I would now see as a fairly extreme sceptic.

I held a lot of views like all kinds of paranormal belief are a bad thing to have, that all people who claim to have psychic powers are either crazy or deliberate frauds, that all parapsychology experiments were flawed, that parapsychologists didn’t know how to do science.

I don’t believe any of those things anymore.

The the deeper I’ve got into it, the more I’ve modified and come back towards the central ground.

Is belief in UFOs and flying saucers common?

It varies from survey to survey, but you will typically find about a third of people say they believe that aliens have visited the Earth.

And again it varies, but certainly 10%, 15% say they have actually seen a UFO.

I’ve met, spoken to a lot of alien abductees, people who in my opinion sincerely believe they have had contact with aliens.

And there’s only two possibilities: either they really have, or they haven’t and there’s something really interesting going on from a psychological point of view.

My favoured explanation tends to be in terms of false memories. But I’m open to the possibility I might be wrong.

It’d be really, really exciting if we do ever make direct contact, but I’m not convinced that we have yet.