One of my favorite misunderstandings of humanity is the clip from Men in Black where Tommy Lee Jones says something like "An individual human is smart, but humans are dumb, panicky animals and you know it." This is an explanation of why the government can't tell the public that there are aliens - it would cause people to panic.<p>In reality, I think this less well known excerpt[1] from the deservedly short lived "Nightly Show" better captures how humanity would react to aliens. In the excerpt Bill Nye is trying to hype people up for the discovery of water on Mars - the other panelists though just don't care. The audience and the host don't really seem to care either.<p>This is basically how I think people will react to aliens. It won't cause a panic, some people will be somewhat interested. Oh, aliens exist and sometimes fly around in our atmosphere? Okay, cool. I expect most people will say and believe that they "always knew" UFOs were real.<p>As near as I can tell it seems like the interested US government programs believe there are advanced flying objects of unknown origin operating in our atmosphere and they publicly acknowledge this. This is also not an enormous topic of conversation.<p>1 - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yy7GOO7Y96Y&t=130s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yy7GOO7Y96Y&t=130s</a>