Aliens Living Among Us: Where the Claim Comes From

The belief that aliens are already here takes several forms. In the 1950s, contactees such as George Adamski said human-looking visitors could walk among people unnoticed. Later abduction literature described hybrids meant to blend into society. A separate strand, which grew from the late 1970s onward, holds that governments have recovered alien bodies or are in secret contact with living beings, a theme that became central to Roswell lore after the 1980 book The Roswell Incident.

A major moment in the modern story came on 9 May 2001, when the physician Steven Greer, founder of the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence, held a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington for his Disclosure Project. Around twenty speakers, many of them former military or government employees, described UFO encounters or claimed knowledge of secret programmes. Greer called for congressional hearings and argued that hidden alien technology could transform energy production.

Later statements by prominent individuals kept the idea in the news. Paul Hellyer, a former Canadian defence minister, said in interviews in the 2000s and 2010s that he believed aliens had visited Earth and that some were present here. In 2020 Haim Eshed, a retired head of Israel’s space security programme, said in a newspaper interview that aliens were in contact with governments. In 2023, the former intelligence official David Grusch told a U.S. congressional hearing that he had been informed of programmes holding non-human biologics, though he did not claim to have seen them himself.

Believers point to the credentials of the people making these statements. A retired defence minister, a former senior space official and a decorated intelligence officer are not, they argue, the kind of people who would speak lightly. They also cite the number of Disclosure Project witnesses, the U.S. government’s acknowledged history of secrecy about UFO reports, and the existence of real classified programmes such as AATIP and its predecessor AAWSAP.

The weakness is that almost all of this evidence is secondhand or unverifiable. Speakers generally report what they were told or what they believe, rather than presenting documents, bodies or artefacts that can be examined. Eshed’s remarks were not supported by any Israeli or U.S. government confirmation. Grusch’s claims were made under oath, but he said the underlying details were classified and he did not produce the material publicly. Credentials make a claim newsworthy; they do not by themselves make it true.

The U.S. Department of Defense’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office published its Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with UAP, Volume 1, in March 2024. It stated that AARO found no evidence that any U.S. government investigation, academic research or official review panel had confirmed that any UAP sighting represented extraterrestrial technology, and no verifiable evidence of hidden programmes reverse-engineering such technology. The report said many claims traced back to a small group of people repeating and amplifying each other’s accounts.

The NASA UAP independent study team, reporting in 2023, likewise said it had found no evidence that UAP were extraterrestrial in origin, while calling for better data. These findings do not prove a negative, but they represent the most thorough official searches for the kind of evidence the claim requires.

Sceptics offer several overlapping explanations. Genuine government secrecy about aircraft, surveillance programmes and security incidents can be misinterpreted as secrecy about aliens, especially by people who were only partly informed. Claims passed from person to person tend to grow in the retelling. Some claims have also been linked to deliberate disinformation; the AARO report and earlier reporting describe cases in which personnel spread UFO stories, sometimes to protect genuinely classified projects.

Believers counter that official denials are exactly what a cover-up would produce, and that AARO itself is part of the Defense Department it is reviewing. Some members of Congress have said they want more independent oversight. Those concerns about transparency are legitimate in general, but the specific claim that living aliens are present on Earth still has no publicly verifiable support.