My friends cousins are all convinced they saw ghosts when they were kids. They also had an uncle who frequently played tricks on them. These two things are unrelated apparently

Ditto "aliens", if we interpret it as "extraterrestrials that have been to Earth".

This is an important distinction.

100% chance there is extraterrestrial life out there somewhere

0% chance any of it has come to visit

Real adulthood is knowing there's no logical way to unconditionally prove those particular negatives. What you do with that information is another discussion.

Edit: Also if anybody is interested in reading up in an absolutely fascinating phenomenon, this was a topic that came up during my hospice / palliative care rotations. This article in particular is a systematic review from last year.

One of the most fascinating things about this phenomenon is that it's markedly different from the hallucinations seen with psychosis and delirium (which I'm more familiar with, my specialty being psychiatry). In particular the person experiencing it presents with orientation and cognition that is completely logical, linear, and otherwise intact.

A patient with psychosis often presents with poor understanding of their situation overall, such as not knowing where they are, not remembering recent events, or sometimes not even recognizing themselves. Their speech also usually presents with either thought blocking / poverty of thought, or the opposite—tangentiality / flight of ideas where their statements don't logically follow each other.

Meanwhile patients reporting death visions are typically able to accurately recall where they are, what has been happening, what is likely to happen next, and retain the ability to have linear and reality based discussions. They just also report seeing deceased family or pets, religious figures, etc.

Fascinating topic.

hey, i have a ghost that lives in my microwave.

first a few things you should know. my entire town was built on an american indian burial ground. like, starting in the 70s they'd have the tribe come out for every new development and help relocate artifacts to [redacted fuck you i ain't telling] and our house is legit burial ground. not cursed burial ground or anything. anyways we have this ghost that turns on our microwave from time to time, seemingly randomly. I named him Smudgy, because we have one of those touchscreen control thingies and i noticed he's active whenever someone with greasy fingers has been using the microwave. and he's really easy to shut up with a soapy washcloth.

i "believe" in ghosts. it's harmless fun.

I don't believe in ghosts or the supernatural, but I've visited sites where America massacred Native Americans and enslaved Africans. What I felt and experienced there can only be described as haunting. Brains do weird things in stressful situations. I get why some people give too much legitimacy to their hallucinations. They can be chilling, compelling, convincing, formative, and even beneficial.

My opinions on the subject are entirely opposite of yours, but I think we might agree that the two lines should actually meet and become "are aliens ghosts?"

I think there may be room to interpret that line as not necessarily a belief in ghosts, but that whatever the base belief, it hasn't changed much. They may not have believed much on the concept of ghosts, but keeping the door open to the idea, but as time went on, it faded a bit. They never really believed, but they did think about it a lot.

That could describe me. I don't really believe in ghosts, but I also know that we don't know much at all about the universe, so who really knows? However, throughout my life, I've thought about ghosts a lot, mostly because of books and movies, but it's been a common subject of thought throughout my life. I probably believe less I'm them now, just like the chart. So while I don't really believe in them, I've thought about them a lot, and that would put them in a similar place on my chart.

In fact my entire chart would look very much like this one.