An alleged UFO — or a pair of airplane lights — outside of Las Vegas. (Adam Baker/Flickr)

Aliens have been in the news a lot recently—regardless of whether you think they are, or have ever been, anywhere else.

A group of former Congressmen convened at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. earlier this month to hear impassioned eyewitness testimony on everything from the Roswell “incident” to more recent, unexplained lights in the sky. Vanity Fair this month published a lengthy profile of Harvard psychiatrist John Edward Mack—a man who believed, implausibly, in alien abduction.

Meanwhile, the “world’s first comprehensive” UFO exhibition recently opened in Myrtle Beach, S.C., where organizers promise 200 artifacts ranging from replicas of the Easter Island statues to “authentic video and audio recordings of people reporting alien encounters.”

“Myrtle Beach is a hot spot for sightings,” one organizer points out in a not-quite-skeptical account of local sightings on CarolinaLive.com.

What is it about UFOs that drive so many people to believe they exist despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary? According to a 2012 National Geographic poll, 36 percent of Americans believe aliens have visited earth. And yet, as a concerned acquaintance wrote to Harvard’s Mack in 1994, such visitations “contradict virtually all of the basic laws of physics, chemistry and biology on which modern science depends.”

Researchers at the Universities of Westminster and Vienna have identified a proverbial host of factors that appear to correlate to belief in UFOs: Gender, politics, religiosity, intelligence, fantasy proneness—even certain psychological disorders, like schizophrenia.

Studies and polls have found, for instance, that conservatives and religious people believe in UFOs far less than their liberal or less religious peers. Men are more likely to believe in aliens than women. (But women, interestingly, are more likely to believe in ghosts.)

The children of believers, of which there were several at the hearings in D.C., are also more likely to spot extraterrestrial life, according to parapsychologist Harvey Irwin.

“When it comes to the Roswell incident, I believe my father and grandfather,” concluded Denice Marcel, one of the hearings’ primary Roswell witnesses, and the descendant of other Roswell truthers.

But the enduring power of UFOs doesn’t seem like something we can explain away as delusion or demographic proclivity. It seems to spring from someplace deeper—the same place, psychologists like C.G. Jung have argued, that forced early humans to make up myths to explain the weather. These stories explain things we don’t, or can’t, understand. (“I was dealing with a phenomenon that I felt could not be explained psychiatrically,” the Harvard psychiatrist who believed in alien abduction once said.)

Without these stories, psychologist Stephen Diamond explains in an essay on UFOs and the “cry for meaning,” we have to accept the fact that some things mean nothing, and others are totally beyond us—a strange, frightening and ultimately deflating thought.

In fact, it’s arguably easier to believe the universe is full of life, even hostile life, than to believe the universe holds no meaning at all. In that respect, a belief in UFOs answers many of the same questions as a belief in God—explaining, perhaps, why the religious tend to not believe in them. Both things convince us, in Diamond’s words, that we are:

“… still capable of experiencing something that lifts us out of our everyday, mundane, ordinary, banal, often seemingly purposeless lives, and [they also remind us], if only momentarily, what it means to be fully, ecstatically alive in a universe filled with beauty, mystery, terror, danger and wonder.”

The alternate narrative isn’t very compelling, which explains why conferences and museums on existentialism, if they existed, would draw far smaller crowds than Myrtle Beach’s “UFO Experience” and D.C.’s recent UFO hearings. It also accounts for the flood of Hollywood features on UFOs—500 since 1947, according to IMDB—and the relative lack of movies on the vast, dark emptiness of the unfeeling universe. (Also worth noting: according to Irwin and others, more alien movies = more UFO sightings.)

Perhaps viewers want to feel what Roy Neary felt in the 1977 hit “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

“I know this sounds crazy, but ever since yesterday on the road, I’ve been seeing this shape,” Neary says after seeing a UFO. “Shaving cream, pillows… Dammit! I know this. I know what this is! This means something. This is important.”

Read more by Caitlin Dewey and follow us on Facebook and Twitter at @innovations.

It’s a big, dark presence at the farthest reaches of our solar system, a mysterious force powerful enough to skew the paths of planets in orbit and yet so subtle that it slips undetected past even the most powerful telescopes on Earth. For centuries, it has eluded some of the most brilliant minds in astronomy — some say it even destroyed one. It’s the subject of endless calculations and rampant speculation, crackpot theories and countless hours spent gazing, fruitlessly, at the night sky.

It’s known as Planet X.

And on Tuesday, a group of astronomers said they’d found not just one such presence, but two of them.

“ALMA discovers the most distant object of the solar system,” read the title of one paper uploaded to the research-sharing site arXiv. “The serendipitous discovery of a possible new solar system object with ALMA,” went the other.

Using the Atacama large millimeter/submillimeter array (ALMA), a powerful telescope located in the high desert of Chile, the researchers said they’d come across two extremely large objects skimming through the outskirts of the solar system.

Though both studies were submitted to the prestigious journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, neither has been peer-reviewed or formally published — steps that are par for the course with any kind of serious scientific research but especially when pronouncements of previously unknown planets are at stake. They’re both based on limited observations — just two spottings apiece for each odd object. And even after just 48 hours online, they have garnered a great deal of skepticism within the astronomy community.

But the researchers say they posted their papers with exactly that purpose.

“We specifically wanted to reach the community that could tell us if we overlooked something, in which case we fully intend to withdraw the papers,” Wouter Vlemmings, an astronomer at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden and co-author on both studies, told Scientific American.

Here’s what Vlemmings and his colleague say they found:

A large rocky something they call “Gna” (for a fast-moving Nordic messenger goddess, one of the authors told Scientific American), that could be an asteroid-type object roughly the size of Ireland zooming around somewhere near Uranus. Alternatively, the researchers propose, it could be an undiscovered planet floating much farther out, or even a brown-dwarf (bigger than a planet, smaller than a star) passing through interstellar space.

Also, a mysterious, unnamed object that appears in the sky close to the alpha centauri system that may be a “Super-Earth” planet far beyond even Pluto or a super-cool brown dwarf that’s really far. It could also conceivably be an icy “trans Neptunian object,” of which there are plenty in the frozen darkness past the eighth planet, but the researchers say that’s less likely (it’s also, not coincidentally, less interesting).

All of which sounds pretty cool — unless you’re Mike Brown, a Cal Tech astronomer who has spent the majority of his careers scanning the farthest reaches of the solar system for just these kinds of objects.

Brown, the self-proclaimed “Pluto killer” who discovered a trans-Neptunian object (big things out past Neptune) that helped dethrone the erstwhile ninth planet back in 2005, would be thrilled to find the long-sought Planet X. He’d be almost as happy to see a paper reporting that other researchers had found it.

But these two papers, he said, are not that.

“The logical leaps are sort of astounding,” he said. “What they really saw they saw is a little blip and then six months later another little blip.”

The evidence that the researchers offer for their findings is too scanty, Brown said, and the probability that they could have stumbled across a huge, planet-like object in a tiny patch of sky is too small. Finding Planet X in the small field of vision they studied with the ALMA telescope, he said, “would be like scooping a cup full of water from the ocean and pulling out the white whale.”

Several other astronomers offered similar commentary in the days after the papers’ initial publication.

Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Gizmodo it was a “considerable stretch” to claim a outer solar system object had been found based on the information in the reports. There could be problems with the ALMA instruments or other explanations for the “blips” that form the basis of the reports, he said.

This may be a classic case of “we should have waited for the referees’ report before going on arXiv,” he said.

“There’s so many reasons why they can’t possibly be correct,” Brown said. “It’s embarrassing to the field.”

That’s because of Planet X’s “long and sordid history,” as Brown put it. Though the notion of a ninth planet of some kind at the outer edge of the solar system is perfectly legitimate — scientists have long seen it as an explanation for irregularities in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune — it’s been plagued by false hope and unfounded “discoveries.” One 19th century researcher claimed that the planet was a star he was studying and “lost” (really he just lost track of it). Another claimed there must be as many as three planets out beyond Neptune, though he provided no evidence for his conjectures.

But no Planet X researcher was more beleaguered than Percival Lowell, who launched into the search for the distant object in an attempt to redeem himself after he became a laughing stock for suggesting that aliens might be building canals on Mars.

Little did he know that Planet X was no place to find redemption.

Lowell spent years photographing the night sky with nothing more than a primitive camera and borrowed telescope, searching for evidence of a planet whose existence was still only a theory. He died of a stroke in 1916, his search unsuccessful. A lifelong friend said that the failure “virtually killed him.”

But Lowell didn’t fail — at least, not totally. Unknown to him, Lowell actually captured a large, distant object twice in his photographs. We now call that object Pluto.

Pluto would become “Planet X” a decade later, when a farm kid named Clyde Tombaugh working at the Flagstaff, Ariz., laboratory that Lowell founded came across a small moving speck in his own photos of the sky. “That’s it!” herecalled exclaiming.

And for about 80 years, that was it. Until Brown and his fellow astronomers came along and took the title away from poor Pluto.

Meanwhile, modern analysis of the trajectories of our most far-flung space craft — things like the Voyager and Pioneer probes — has found no evidence of gravitational influence of the kind that could be attributed to a distant planet, at least not as early astronomers envisioned it.

Still, the search for Planet X has continued.

“For those of us who actually work on this, it’s embarrassing to even say you might be looking for these sort of things in the outer solar system because there have been so many crazy theories,” Brown said.

So when reports like the two arXiv studies come out, “you worry that when someone finally finds something that’s not crazy, people are going to say ‘Oh, I heard that story three months ago and it’s not real.'”

But Brown may not need to be so concerned. After all, two centuries of failure has not stopped astronomers from scanning the distant corners of our solar neighborhood, bit by bit, searching for something out there that resembles the rock we call home.

Interest in Planet X is plain to see. Even if the planet itself isn’t.