Like many sites, the Canadian pornographic video sharing site Pornhub collects data on what its users do and search for online. It also goes one step further, though, and publishes these insights publicly, offering a unique view into trends in current events and culture.
In 2019, one of the site’s top search trends was out of this world, in a very literal sense.
People who have close encounters with UFOs and extraterrestrials often report feelings of awe or fear. Apparently those aren’t the only feelings that space aliens illicit.
Driven largely by the interest in the Storm Area 51 Facebook event that took place in July, two of Pornhub’s top search terms last year were “alien” and “Area 51.”
The Area 51 raid, in which participants were going to “Naruto run” into the base to “see them aliens,” didn’t amount to more than a couple music festivals with 1,500 attendees between them. But there was enough interest in extraterrestrial encounters to generate hundreds of thousands of searches for Area 51 pornography when the meme went viral back in July. (There were nearly 59,000 searches for “Area 51” on July 16 alone.
Let’s see them aliens, indeed.
Women were 33% more likely to view alien-related videos compared to men, and individuals between the ages of 16 and 24 were 67% more interested in extraterrestrial coupling than any other age group. The most popular state to search for aliens in was Alaska (Colorado is tied with Washington for 12th), and alien videos were most popular on the National level in the Czech Republic (the U.S. comes in at 10th place).
This has us wondering where an X-rated encounter with an alien would fall on J. Allen Hynek’s scale made popular by “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” In his 1972 book, “The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry,” Hynek describes the First Kind of encounter as seeing a UFO within 500 feet – close enough to see details. The Second Kind involves the UFO having a physical effect on its surroundings, such as scorching vegetation, scaring animals or disrupting electronics. The Third Kind occurs when someone, Richard Dryfuss for instance, sees the passengers of the UFO.
They’re not official, but Wikipedia actually lists four more types of close encounter: Fourth, abduction of a human by a UFO; Fifth, communication with aliens; Sixth, the death of a human or animal caused by a UFO; and Seventh, “the creation of a human/alien hybrid, either by sexual reproduction or by artificial scientific methods.”
We’re guessing that most XXX alien footage falls somewhere into that last category. We also know what we would title our screenplay about such an encounter, if we were to write one.
Nick Gonzales
