If aliens ever do come to visit Earth, it seems like they’ll make first contact with the residents of the United States of America.

Our friends across the pond have a certain fascination with alien species and over a third of them believe government officials have already made contact.

According to a new report, a healthy 78 per cent of Americans believe in the existence of aliens and exactly half reckon they’ll be friendly.

Of course, that means the other 50 per cent of the population think E.T. will turn out to be hostile, but lets keep the glass half full for now.

After examining data from the US’s National UFO Reporting Center Database, a team at MyVision.org conducted a poll of 1,000 individuals. They found more than one in 10 US adults has seen a UFO or something they couldn’t explain.

The team also put together a map revealing which US states have recorded the most UFO sightings.

Amazingly, it’s not Texas. Or Florida. Or even Nevada, home to the famous Area 51 military base.

Instead, it’s California. Which has notched up an impressive 15,401 sightings going back to 1974. That’s twice the number of sightings than anywhere else across America.

Part of the reason for California’s success rate may just be down to the fact there are just more people there looking up at the sky. There are over 39 million people in California, a whole 10 million more than Texas, the second most populous.

Over the last half-century, Florida (7,749), Washington (6,866), Texas (5,786), and New York (5,590) rounded out the top five states reporting UFO sightings.

The aforementioned Nevada comes way down the list at number 27 with only 1,605 UFO sightings.

MyVision analysed the number of reported UFO sightings from the database by looking at each state’s overall number of reports and the reports from the last five years. The team then looked at the number of reports from the last five years and compared it to each state’s population, per 100,000 residents.

While it’s long been known that the US government has collected data on unidentified flying objects – officals have been loath to release too much information.

In response to a Freedom of Information Act request from a government transparency site called The Black Vault, the Navy said last month that any public dissemination of new UFO videos ‘will harm national security as it may provide adversaries valuable information regarding Department of Defense/Navy operations, vulnerabilities, and/or capabilities. No portions of the videos can be segregated for release.’

‘While three UAP videos were released in the past, the facts specific to those three videos are unique in that those videos were initially released via unofficial channels before official release,’ it said.

‘Those events were discussed extensively in the public domain; in fact, major news outlets conducted specials on these events. Given the amount of information in the public domain regarding these encounters, it was possible to release the files without further damage to national security,’

The three videos were first leaked to former Blink-182 singer Tom DeLonge and the New York Times but earlier this year the Pentagon showed additional clips of UFOs to Congress.

In one short video, a small object appeared to zip past a military pilot. A second video and photo showed two glowing triangle-shaped objects flying by an aircraft, viewed in the night sky through night vision goggles.

In 2021, the United States Department of Defense announced the formation of a new group to investigate reports of UFOs near sensitive military areas.

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