[Frooxius]

@Coder-san: Yes. That's also a thing, all the people who allegedly witnessed things that are in the Bible are long dead, while many people who report being kidnapped by UFO's and so on are alive and you can ask them. Yet many more people believe the former than the latter (although both are quite insane ).

The thing about our brains is that they can be surprisingly easily tricked and deceived into believing something, which isn't actually true. Our minds can be deluded in many ways and make up crazy explanations/connections, which was also demonstrated in various experiments (not just on humans, but other animals as well) - I recommend reading about the skinner box experiment which demonstrates how brains find nonexistent "connections" in random phenomena - which also explains a lot of religious behavior.

However I would point out that there's a difference between claiming that aliens exist and that aliens visit Earth in the flying saucers and kidnap people.

Given what we know about the universe and life on Earth and the huge size of the universe, we can say that it's probable that life has developed elsewhere as well by similar processes as here on Earth - doesn't have to be necessarily intelligent life though.

Life if very rare thing that requires combination of several conditions. But like one physicist said: Universe is huge and rare things happen all the time.

Probabilities are one of the things which human mind notoriously underestimates or doesn't work well with. For example consider something that has chance of happening 1 to million. Seems quite rare doesn't it? But multiply it by the number of people on Earth and statistically it will happen to a few dozen thousands of people every day.

I would say that it's quite probable that life exists somewhere else in the universe, but there doesn't seem to be any reason to believe the aliens actually visit Earth, that's just bunk.

Although in principle, I wouldn't say that statistically it makes something more believable. What is very significant is also the quality of evidence and just because a lot of people report certain things doesn't mean that it's sufficient to make conclusions on the number of reports alone.