What should everyday Americans think about aliens?

My first true political conviction was that they were real, they were here, and the government was covering it up. It was sci-fi, I confess, that did it. I obsessively watched The X-Files as a kid, and I became convinced that it was basically a documentary. Over time, of course, I steadily grew more skeptical, but as a teenager, I talked to a close family friend—a distinguished medical doctor—who believed in aliens. He claimed to have had patients who worked in the government and had told him about these beings. He said that they weren’t extraterrestrial, but inter-dimensional. They could defy our physics. They could even walk through walls.

Now I’m an adult, with a child and a house, which is full of books by the great authors on the subject of aliens: the French computer scientist Jacques Vallée, the journalist Leslie Kean, and the religion professor Diana Pasulka, just to name a few. My wife and I have even visited the sites of supposed abductions and UFO crashes. I’ve mostly treated alien visitations as a distinctly American kind of folklore. But there might be a lot more to it than that.

Look, I know you sound like something of a nutcase when you talk about this stuff. This has long been treated as a topic for cranks, paranoiacs, and dimwits—the sort of people unable to distinguish the difference between sci-fi and actual science. But in the last decade, that has slowly started to change...