By Daniel Stephenson
January 22 2019, 10.10
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Former Ministry of Defence official Nick Pope has commended the words of Britain’s first astronaut to enter space, who said that aliens do exist.
The results of a recent survey by YouGov however, show that the Great British public aren’t quite in agreement with the astronaut.
Earlier this month Dr Helen Sharman, the first Briton in Space, told the Observer Magazine that extra-terrestrial life is bound to be somewhere in the universe.
She said: “Aliens exist, there’s no two ways about it.”
Dr Sharman, 56, made history when she travelled to the Soviet space station ‘Mir’ in May 1991, in a cooperative Soviet Union–British mission, co-sponsored by a group of British companies.
The chemist, who now works at Imperial College, said ‘there must be all sorts of different forms of life’ among the billions of stars.
She postured that aliens may not be made up of carbon and nitrogen like humans.
She said: “It’s possible they’re here right now and we simply can’t see them.”
Many people claim that international government entities have known about the existence of ET life for a long time, but refuse to disclose the truth to the public.
Nick Pope, who headed the department of UFO investigations for the Ministry of Defence from 1991 to 1994, told The South West Londoner: “Dr Sharman’s opinions are a refreshing indication of how UFOs and aliens have come out of the fringe and into the mainstream, with an increasing number of astronauts, pilots, radar operators, military personnel and government officials expressing the view that we’re not alone.”
Despite experts coming forward with substantial information suggesting the existence of intelligent extra-terrestrial life is a very real possibility, the majority of the British public don’t seem convinced.
In a UK wide survey conducted on January 7th 2020, by YouGov, 1,619 adults were asked: ‘How likely do you think it is that there are aliens living on Earth?’
Of all adults surveyed 4% thought this was ‘very likely’, 15% thought it was ‘somewhat likely’, 24% thought ‘not very likely’, 41% felt it was ‘not likely at all’ while 16% chose ‘don’t know’.
For the full run down of all the numbers, check out our interactive infographic below
With 19% believing aliens walking among us to be likely and 65% believing it to be unlikely, it seems the majority of the British public still need some convincing.
To find this out we combined the ‘not likely at all’ and ‘not very likely’ categories’ to find the non-believers and combined the ‘very likely’ and ‘somewhat likely’ categories to find the believers.
We kept the ‘don’t know’ category separate.
Public opinion on the matter seems to be equally balanced between genders with there only being a negligible divide between men and women surveyed.
The voting areas were divided into ‘London’, ‘The South’, ‘The Midlands & Wales’, ‘The North’ and ‘Scotland’.
People from the Midlands and Wales were most likely to believe that aliens could be sharing our planet while Scots were most disbelieving.
But, which political party do you think the believers and non believers are supporters of?
The results may surprise you.
Conservative party supporters were most open to the idea, with 17% saying alien life on earth is ‘somewhat likely’ and 4% choosing ‘very likely’.
Overall however, each of the three main political parties had a pretty similar amount of believers and non believers; with 23.67% of Labour voters believing it ‘unlikely’ that there are aliens living on Earth, 21.67% of Conservative voters and 27% of Liberal Democrats saying the same thing.
