Steven Spielberg’s new film Disclosure Day imagines the moment 8 billion humans find out that we are not alone in the universe.
The movie, which opens in US theaters on June 12, is a fictional account of the government cover-up and subsequent “disclosure” of evidence that aliens have contacted Earth.
The UFO community has been chasing that type of cinematic big reveal for 80 years. But it’s more likely that monumental scientific discoveries, like the detection of the Higgs boson in 2012 and the confirmation of gravitational waves in 2016, are a better guideline for how real-world disclosure is likely to play out: through long-running research and with verifiable results. The approach would be less glamorous but still highly impactful.
The prospect of a blockbuster disclosure by the US government that alien life exists and has contacted Earth has felt more likely in recent years, even as results have underwhelmed. Since 2023, a bipartisan group in Congress has held three hearings featuring whistleblowers on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), summoning whistleblowers who alleged a decades-long cover-up by the government and private industry. And in May, the Pentagon began releasing the most ambitious tranche of UFO files in American history, under a program called PURSUE: the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters.
For many UFO believers, this looked like the tidal wave they had waited 80 years for, but no hearings or documents have contained a smoking gun.
“Fuzzy blob videos, unverifiable testimony” is how Adam Frank, a Carl Sagan Medal–winning astrophysicist at the University of Rochester and author of The Little Book of Aliens, describes the evidence. "In light of the explosive claims that are being made in public, this is not enough. This is just more of the same."
It is a verdict shared to an extent by one of the few people who actually claims to have flown alongside the unexplained.
“We've accepted certain facts, but we don't really necessarily have any more answers,” says Ryan Graves, a former Navy F/A-18 pilot who was one of the three witnesses at the landmark July 2023 House Oversight hearing. “And the information we’re getting now comes devoid of any real context or analysis or understanding.”
At that hearing, he testified that his squadron had repeatedly encountered objects off the US East Coast that performed maneuvers beyond the capabilities of known aircraft. He has since founded Americans for Safe Aerospace, a nonprofit that collects and analyzes UAP reports from military and commercial pilots. While conclusive proof has been elusive, Graves is encouraged by how much has changed.
He sees it as both cultural and institutional, pointing to a generation of pilots who now feel comfortable openly reporting what they see through a Pentagon office set up to investigate UAP cases.
“Five, six, seven, eight years ago, a pilot would see something in the air and wouldn't even tell his copilot about this,” he says, adding, “It's really been institutionalized.”
That’s made it “indisputable that there are a large number of objects exhibiting capabilities that we don't understand,” Graves says.
But that lack of understanding hasn’t stopped whistleblowers and former government insiders from continuing to make bold claims in congressional hearings, UFO conferences, and podcast interviews with the likes of Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson. What’s lacking is hard data.
“If a fraction of what these guys claim is true, there should be terabytes of data from the experiments that were done on the spaceships and on the alien bodies. Since those things aren't being released, I don't think they exist,” says Frank.
If they do, then “wheel the thing [spaceship] out, or wheel the bodies out," Frank says animatedly. Barring that level of incontrovertible evidence, though, Frank says real disclosure would require more than the federal government releasing files. It would mean releasing actual data, such as measurements, samples, and sensor logs, that independent scientists can use to formulate hypotheses, test them against evidence, replicate findings, and reach consensus the same way humans have for centuries.
We know what disclosure can look like based on other major scientific findings, notably CERN’s discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 and confirmation by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) of gravitational waves in 2016.
The Higgs boson, sometimes called the God Particle, was the missing piece of physics’ Standard Model—an elementary particle whose associated field gives every other elementary particle its mass. Without it, atoms wouldn’t form, and the universe as we know it wouldn’t exist.
Peter Higgs and others had predicted the particle’s existence in 1964, but it took nearly 50 years, the construction of the largest machine humans have ever built, and the work of thousands of the world’s brightest minds to confirm it. When CERN finally announced its discovery in 2012, two independent detector teams presented the findings simultaneously. They each verified the particle to a statistical confidence of five sigma: a 1-in-3.5-million chance the result was a fluke. Higgs and his collaborator François Englert won the Nobel Prize for their efforts.
The 2016 confirmation of gravitational waves made the 48-year Higgs boson hunt seem fast in comparison. Albert Einstein first predicted there were ripples in spacetime produced by the most violent events in the universe in 1916 as a consequence of his general theory of relativity. But for a century, no one could detect them.
Then, in September 2015, twin LIGO observatories (one in Louisiana and one in Washington) picked up a signal lasting a fraction of a second—the death spiral of two black holes a billion light-years away. The detectors confirmed each other, and the team locked the data down for months while it verified every detail. When LIGO announced the find in February 2016, it had cleared the same bar the Higgs boson researchers had: multi-sensor, replicable, statistically significant. Again, the work was widely accepted, and the Nobel followed.
Each discovery took decades of theoretical groundwork, dedicated instrumentation built to detect a specific phenomenon, independent verification across teams or sites, and a level of statistical certainty that allowed the rest of the scientific community to absorb the result within days. These are the closest modern analogues to what real disclosure of nonhuman intelligence would require, and few would argue that our disclosure model resembles much of that process yet.
“Scientific inspection and confirmation of any evidence would almost invariably take time, and the evidence would likely involve a great many ambiguities,” Greg Eghigian, a history professor at Penn State and the author of After the Flying Saucers Came, writes in an email.
In contrast, modern UAP disclosure has consistently underdelivered. The Pentagon's UAP office concluded in 2024 that there is no empirical evidence of alien technology, and the first PURSUE batch isn’t close to definitive.
But some researchers have taken the limited evidence available and tried to apply the scientific method to it. Beatriz Villarroel, an astronomer at Sweden's Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics, runs a project called Vanishing and Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations (VASCO) that recently released a landmark, peer-reviewed study analyzing the UFO phenomenon in a novel way.
Her team examined photographic plates of the night sky from the 1950s, before any satellites existed, searching for brief flashes of light that appear in images and are gone moments later. The study found those flashes appear to cluster around the dates of mid-century nuclear weapons tests. In plain terms, the photos may show something unexplained in the air during nuclear events, at a moment in history when nothing else manmade was up there.
Her papers describe them as unexplained “transients” with a statistically significant correlation to nuclear test dates. While Villarroel stops short of saying the flashes are alien crafts, she has been a guest on various UFO-centric podcasts and said in a recent appearance, “I don’t think we are alone.”
Researchers have criticized the paper, but it has also attracted defenders recently. What’s playing out is the unglamorous, duel-of-academic-papers version of UFO science. For Villarroel, that is how disclosure will happen.
“Many people want extraordinary evidence, following the Sagan myth,” Villarroel writes in an email, referring to the legendary astronomer’s famous dictum that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. “In reality, we just need evidence.”
And the most realistic way for disclosure to happen is “that evidence will slowly accumulate over time,” she adds.
That means there might not be a disclosure day but instead an accretion of papers, critiques, and replications—the way humans discovered every other consequential thing about the universe.
Still, on June 12, audiences can watch Steven Spielberg’s vision of the moment humanity finds out, a moment people have been imagining for decades. It may not be real, but you can enjoy it with some popcorn, a sugary soda, and a candy bar.
Maybe a Milky Way bar would be fitting.
