Broad spectrum stupidity

Lest you think that otherwise rational folks have an anomalous wiggy place where they put the Great Sky Fairy hypothesis:

The good news is that the latest polls confirm that roughly half of all Americans believe extraterrestrial life exists. The weird news is that a similar fraction think some of it is visiting Earth.

My gut instinct is that many of the folks who think the Genesis fable is literally true are the same people who think that the earth is some sort of intergallactic Grand Central Station. The same kind of magical thinking is required for both, despite (or maybe because of) their seeming incompatibility. (There has to be some overlap, based on the numbers.) If you understand to even a small degree the mind-boggling vastness of the universe, neither of these is likely pass the smell test. But if your mind lives enough time zones from rationality, you can hold these two seemingly incompatible views, because cognitive dissonance just doesn't affect the intellectually tone deaf. How the Big Guy created both vastly superior little green men and humans in his own image is a conundrum that troubles them not in the slightest.