When I was in middle school, I read A TON about the supposed UFO incident in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947.

And even though I’m not sure if UFOs and aliens exist, I still like reading about all that stuff and hearing people talk about why they believe.

AskReddit users shared the best theories they’ve heard about UFOs and aliens.

Let’s see what they had to say.

1. Interesting…

“There is a very simple explanation as to why abductees independently described grey aliens as looking the same.

There are no aliens and no abduction took place, but rather they are abstracting residual memories left over from being infants and looking up at adults.

Before an infants visual cortex is fully developed, an adult human looking down at them would appear rounded and grey in color with large eyes.

Cross that indistinct memory with a sleep state subconscious and standard psychological patterns and boom; alien abduction. It also explains the sensation of being lifted, examined and probed.”

2. Breakaway civilization.

“That they are from a breakaway human civilization that is keeping their secrets to themselves.

Essentially, that some place like “Wakanda” is real.

Or that Jules Verne really isn’t science “fiction” — it’s actually science “fact.”

When the rest of the world was making due with steam-powered industrialization, someone figured out anti-gravity and zero-point energy from the interaction between electromagnetism and gravity.

So they kept this technology for themselves, and have been zipping around the rest of us keeping an eye on things.”

3. Cave dwellers.

“I don’t believe it, but that they live in underground caves and dwell primarily in Antarctica.

I don’t remember the complete theory but people say they’re an advanced race adapted for life underground, and that they have advanced machinery because they have been living on the earth longer than humans.”

4. Their technology.

“If you wanted to explore space, you’d send technology instead of risking the life of a scientist.

The little gray/green men and other now cliche depictions are just biological computers that they can control and that’s why they look so simplistic and unidentifiable.”

5. Time travel.

“All the UFO sightings throughout history are just humans from the future on a time traveling safari meant to observe how we were in the past.

They are supposed to keep out of sight, but thanks to human/mechanical errors there have been hiccups with their cloaking which have resulted in being seen.

That’s why there have always been so many reports of them throughout history, but there has never been an attack. It’s just us.

Also the reason why we don’t see many as many examples of UFOs now even through pretty much everyone has a camera is because people are not that interested in this time period since we already document aspects of human life all the time.”

6. Could be…

“The US military has intentionally orchestrated alien “sightings” and “kidnappings”, as well as funded UFO religions and conspiracy theories, to prevent people from being taken seriously should they happen to notice some experimental planes and so forth.

There are no aliens, but there are US military agents in goofy spacesuits who mutilate cattle and “probe” deranged people to encourage them to make fools of themselves.”

7. This is wild.

“That there are alien empires out there, but our planet is just restricted because it is on the border or neutral zone between them, so no visitors are suppose to appear but some jump quarantine to visit and deal in exotic Earth goods.

Also from Issac Arthur, the sightings of UFOs are just blackmarket traders in their janky spaceships who have bad stealth tech so they are more easily sighted and sometimes even crash.

The governments of Earth may have some low-level deals with them for protection against things like asteroids.”

8. Just checking in.

“That earth is one of a few life generating planets and that aliens are actually earth originated beings who have moved on to settle the galaxy.

Any visits are them checking in on our development, and eventually we’ll be advanced enough to join and make way for another wave.”

9. IT’S US.

“We’re not the first, we are the aliens that we’re looking for.

Mammals are not native to earth, the asteroid was a massive chunk of our planet and we populated the earth after that.

Is that a theory that I believe? No, not at all.

Is it a good concept for a sci-fi movie? Yes.”

10. We can’t really see it.

“UFOs are higher dimensional objects moving through our dimension.

Like, if we moved a 3D object through 2D space, to a 2D being it would look crazy weird.

A hollow sphere would start as a dot, then look like a hoola-hoop that starts small, gets big, then small again.

They’d have no idea what they were looking at.

So what would a higher dimension object look like passing through our 3D dimension?

It might rapidly change shape or appear to move at incredible speed as the (whatever) moved through our space-time.

Gravity wouldn’t effect it (I don’t think).

It wouldn’t appear to have any form of propulsion.”

11. Contact.

“The movie “Contact” actually makes a good case that we haven’t been visited by UFOs or aliens.

Our most powerful broadcasts have traveled at best a few dozen light years from this planet. To put that into perspective…

If the Milky Way galaxy was the same size as North America, the Earth would be a speck of dust floating around a nick knack on a living room table in a house in Arizona.

Our most powerful broadcast signals have made it to the end of the driveway, or at best across the street.

If there were a hyper-intelligent species two blocks over desperately listening for signs of intelligence in the neighborhood, they wouldn’t even know we existed for at least a couple thousand years.

When they finally picked up our signal (our first television broadcasts) it would take their response another couple thousand years to arrive here.”

12. They’re shy.

“The most logical theory I’ve ever heard is that 99% of alien sightings are set up by special intelligence agencies to distract from more nefarious things they are doing.

The best theory I’ve ever heard is that aliens do want to make contact with us but they’re simply shy.”

13. Maybe?

“If aliens are on this planet, they are likely using the ocean as a place to hide.

The Nimitz encounter and some of the best actual video evidence we have shows that UFOs and USOs might be the same thing and that they can easily travel through water and air both.

Plus there have been rumors about Lake Baikal in Russia for centuries.

Lake Baikal is one of the deepest lakes on Earth and could absolutely harbor some crazy s**t.”

14. You never know…

“The premise in Lilo & Stitch.

That Earth is a mosquito preserve.”

15. Not going back there.

“Aliens landed once in Africa, got eaten by lions.

Planet now marked as dangerous by the Galactic Feds.”

16. We can’t see them.

“That if any civilization elsewhere in the universe had the technology to reach us, for any reason, they’d be very likely to be also be able to disguise their presence from our detection methods.

They could observe us close up using nanotech, microscopic biological spacecraft etc and we’d never know.”

17. Think about it.

“Consider the fact that the human race is a divided mess of contradictory intents.

We have the scientific community reaching out peacefully, yet if aliens do come into the airspace of any nation, the first to greet them would be the military.

You can imagine what the response of the military would be when a UFO enters forbidden airspace.

Given the declassified government files regarding UFOs, it is quite likely that contact has been attempted in the past and the results were tragic.”

18. I want to believe.

“That “greys” aren’t fully biological, but rather remotely controlled androids, or that they are biological, but their grey appearance is a suit and not the body.

Imagine other lifeforms looking at our astronauts saying “here come the marshmallow cyclops creatures again”.

19. Two theories.

“The best two I’ve heard:

We don’t allow ourselves to contact lost tribes in the Amazon or other wild places. Extraterrestrials may have similar laws on a galactic scale.

We split the atom, but made weapons out of them instead of trying to reach the stars. They leave us alone out of fear that we’ll destroy ourselves if war accidentally breaks out.”

20. In the past…

“There are so many star systems with potentially inhabitable planets out there that the chances that we have been the only life in the universe is extremely slim.

The question, instead, is whether life arising elsewhere has managed to survive destruction and remain alive today such that they might be able to contact us.

That is to say, there have probably been countless civilizations for the past several billion years that simply haven’t made it.”

21. We might not recognize it.

“That life in the universe could be so unrecognizable to us that we wouldn’t even register it as being alien life.

What if life on another world was not carbon based, but another element?

How would we even know what to look for since our definitions and descriptions of life are based on a completely different perspective?’

22. Well, there’s that.

“They came, they saw, they weren’t impressed.”

23. Let’s see what else is out there.

“They visited 250 million years ago.

Saw a planet full of big lizards and labeled us a junky planet not worth revisiting and moved on.”

24. We’re being studied.

“Any species advanced enough to find us wouldn’t “make contact”.

They’d study us the way we study animals. Ideally with minimal interference.

Compare the average “abduction” story to the way we dart large animals, collect data and leave them to wake a bit groggy and confused but unharmed.”

What do you think?

Is it possible that UFOs and aliens exist or is it all a bunch of malarkey?

Talk to us in the comments and let us know!