Earlier this month, President Obama finally admitted the truth. No, not that ketchup is the only correct condiment for hot dogs. (Crispy fried onions or bust.) That aliens are out there. 

Obama quickly caveated his cosmic bombshell—which came during a speed-round of questions with podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen—by saying he’s not aware of any secret government program confirming aliens have visited Earth. Of course, nobody believed that for a microsecond. The former president’s comments flamed across the news cycle like a fireball meteor, sparking countless takes from pundits and an accusation from sitting president and noted extraterrestrial Donald Trump that his predecessor had disclosed classified information. 

In response to the uproar, Obama clarified that he thinks the “odds are good” life is out there given the vastness of the universe. Which might have been a better thing to say in the first place, but hey, maybe we’ll get some new UFO files now.

But in this humble science journalist’s opinion, the real story here isn’t what Obama, or the government, is hiding. It’s that there is nothing controversial, surprising, or remotely fringe about the former president’s opinion on ET. Many people—perhaps most of us—agree with Obama wholeheartedly.

“I think most people have the Obama view that it would be really strange, statistically, to be the only life form in the universe,” Becky Ferreira, science journalist and author of the recent book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, told me.   

A longtime reporter on the search for alien life (and writer of an excellent newsletter on the subject), Ferreira traces that cosmic conviction back to our earliest mythologies. As First Contact reveals through a combination of historical vignettes, irreverent alien jokes and arresting visuals, humans have ascribed purpose and presence to the night sky for as long as we’ve studied the stars. Celestial events like eclipses and comets became messages from beyond. Sky gods gave shape to our hopes and fears about what cosmic encounters might bring, and from these mythological deities, contemporary tropes about aliens were born.

For instance, one of the ideas animating the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, is that we might pick up some revolutionary technologies from our interstellar neighbors. That notion, Ferreira notes, is refracted back in time to stories about deities like Prometheus, the Greek god who gave humans the power of fire. 

“The amazing technologies and knowledge that we could get from a contact moment are a very Promethean idea,” Ferreira said.

Of course, ancient humans also told stories about cosmic tricksters, alien abductions, and extraterrestrial hookups—an “imaginative nebular cloud from which the modern concept of aliens condensed,” Ferreira writes.

From this narrative proto-matter, a series of science fictional archetypes were born, which First Contact lumps into five main buckets. These include monsters (think the Blob), saviors (Superman), peers (Spok), subordinates (Nibbler) and strangers (The Thing). There are, of course, plenty of oddball aliens that don’t fit neatly into one of the categories, including alien dinosaurs, a thriving sci-fi subgenre that Ferreira argues expresses “a hope that what is dearly departed from Earth can one day be found alive again off it.” (I’d add that Star Trek IV’s extraterrestrial whales reflected a similar anxiety about a group of animals careening toward extinction.)

In short: We humans have imagined a bustling galactic scene, filled with exotic-but-familiar life forms that embody our deepest fears and desires. “There are so few things about humans that are universal, and this is definitely one,” Ferreira told me. “All cultures look to the sky and tell stories about what’s there.”

For some people, these alien imaginaries are distilled into the profound personal experiences of UFO encounters. But even if you haven’t personally made contact with aliens, there’s a good chance you think someone’s out there beyond the Oort cloud. Recent polling suggests that more than half of all Americans believe aliens “definitely or probably exist,” which is significantly higher than the 28% of us who say the same about Bigfoot or the paltry 22% on team Loch Ness monster. 

Equally fascinating is the fact that 47% of Americans say aliens have “definitely or probably visited Earth” in recent years. Which means only a slim minority are basing their belief solely on the Obama-endorsed statistical probability that some other world had its prebiotic stew pop off at some point in the lifespan of the universe.

But whether you’re convinced the answers lie in the bowels of Area 51 or you’re simply applying Vulcan logic to the Drake equation, there’s never been a better time to keep tabs on the cosmic search. 

A slew of upcoming scientific investigations could bring an end to our galactic isolation, including the Habitable Worlds Observatory, a future space telescope that aims to directly image Earth-sized planets in the habitable zones of their stars, the Square Kilometer Array, which will listen for radio chatter from advanced civilizations, and NASA’s Dragonfly mission, which will hop around Saturn’s moon Titan, searching for signs of exotic life in its chilly methane seas. There’s even an emerging scientific effort to identify interstellar alien junk in Earth’s near neighborhood.

Personally, I find the upcoming solar system missions most exciting. While they’re unlikely to turn up hidden civilizations, bringing samples of extraterrestrial fossil microbes home for study, as the beleaguered Mars Sample Return Mission aimed to do, could provide the sort of slam dunk evidence that would be hard to come by in the reflected starlight of a distant world. 

Finding evidence of life elsewhere in our solar system would also speak volumes to the likelihood of life emerging around other stars. And it could help resolve the intriguing question of whether life can hitch-hike across space on chunks of wayward rock, a hypothesis known as panspermia.

Of course, whatever we learn about life beyond Earth will shape society in profound ways. The last few chapters of First Contact explore what it would mean for humans to make contact or not, including how the world’s major religions could react to news of alien life and whether galactic silence might lead us to treat our home-world better (one can hope). Perhaps, we’ll receive a message from the extragalactic frontier, and with no way of answering in a human lifetime, we’ll embrace intergenerational planning.

“I hope [the search for aliens] is a way we can have more of that type of thinking,” Ferreira said.

The seastorm of daily news has already moved on from a former president declaring his belief in aliens. But the quest to prove or disprove that belief continues—and whatever discoveries we make on distant cosmic shores will help us discover ourselves.