What Disclosure Day gets wrong about the search for aliens

After months of anticipation, Steven Spielberg’s new sci-fi flick Disclosure Day is now in theaters. Its fictional premise concerns a group of people planning to leak the long-suppressed news that aliens are real and visiting our planet.

Disclosure Day is far from Spielberg’s first encounter with the decades-old trope that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has already found aliens right here on Earth—and that a vast government conspiracy is preventing anyone else from finding out. But researchers at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., say this trope couldn’t be further from the truth: if scientists ever do find evidence of talkative aliens, transparency is actually in the official postdetection protocols.

“There’s no effort to keep it secret. If we [get] a signal, it’s going to be out there. The next step is transparency,” says Carol Oliver, a professor of science communication and astrobiology at the University of New South Wales in Australia and one of the architects behind the latest version of the SETI Post-Detection Protocols, set to be codified later this year. “The community in general has agreed that’s the ethical thing to do.”

On supporting science journalism

If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.

What to do when you’ve found aliens

The first postdetection protocols were adopted by the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) in 1989 and mostly concerned searches for radio signals from other cosmic civilizations. The protocol document advises any scientist who believes they have evidence of a possible signal to first seek verification from other researchers. If a signal is independently confirmed, this news should be shared “promptly, openly, and widely through scientific channels and public media.” It also says that “international consultations” should occur before any response is sent back.

SETI researchers last revised these protocols in 2010 and say this year’s planned update is overdue. It would seek to account for the impact of the Internet and the proliferation of organizations with instruments turned toward the stars. The protocols aren’t binding but are rather guidance meant to coordinate researchers.

“Scientists are more available than they’ve ever been before via social media,” says Michael Garrett, an astronomer at the University of Manchester in England and a co-author of the 2026 protocols. One concern he and his fellow researchers have is that because so many more scientists now promote their work via social media, any controversial findings they post could make them more vulnerable to backlash, whether online or offline. Garrett says the new protocols acknowledge that academic institutions have the responsibility to take steps for the safety of their researchers and protect them from potentially dangerous interactions with conspiracy theorists and other reactionary zealots.

The update also seeks to broaden the protocols’ scope from primarily radio signals to other signs of alien technology—a diverse array of so-called technosignatures.

The changes, Garrett says, are all designed to provide additional guidance for scientists who may not necessarily be involved in the SETI community but may stumble upon a potential signal from extraterrestrial intelligence anyway. That possibility may seem remote, but it’s growing as more astronomical surveys scrutinize ever-larger swaths of the sky.

In the new film, a shadowy government organization, not a handful of ethically minded scientists, tries to hide the existence and terrestrial visitations of aliens. But the sheer volume of projects making use of radio astronomy for reasons beyond SETI is one of the reasons information about extraterrestrials might be more likely to leak than stay a secret.

“If someone had detected the signal, the problem would not be that we’d be able to keep it to ourselves,” Garrett says. “The problem would be that it’d leak out long before it was verified.”

Why intelligent extraterrestrial life is probably not among us

If everyone involved agrees to share knowledge about aliens with the world, why haven’t we found them yet?

One answer is the Rare Earth hypothesis, which theorizes that our planet really is special. It took 13.8 billion years of cosmic history as well as 4.6 billion years of Earth history (and at least five planetary mass extinction events) to get to intelligent life, with an unknown number of potentially fatal pratfalls being dodged along the way. That, paired with the notion that technological civilizations may be inherently unstable, eventually burning out or fading away, might make any chance for contact exceedingly rare, “even with all the numbers in our universe,” Oliver says.

Another potential explanation is that aliens can be relatively common out there, but it’s simply too hard to get here from wherever they might be. In the 1960s Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev described what became known as the Kardashev scale, which connects a civilization’s capacity for technological advancement to its ability to harness larger and larger amounts of energy. This is an important consideration for something like interstellar travel: the odds seem long indeed that any alien species would reach us from even our nearest stellar neighbors in Alpha Centauri, some 4.4 light-years away, because the energies and timescales involved are so enormous.

What about UFOs?

Spielberg’s film extensively references the Roswell incident of 1947, in which the U.S. government purportedly retrieved materials from a crashed alien spaceship. Tales of what happened at Roswell have grown in the telling so that it’s now seen as a keystone event by many true believers in the alien origins of unidentified flying objects (UFOs). But the story is more legend than science history and has mundane explanations.

Even so, an unshakable belief that extraterrestrial intelligence is behind “flying saucers” and other UFOs (now often rebranded as “unidentified aerial phenomena,” or UAPs) has become almost as American as apple pie (although such sentiments are also common worldwide). But experts say these anecdotal sightings and blurry images aren’t proper evidence to indicate that any aliens have actually visited us.

“There are a lot of things up there. We have drones all over the place now, and they’re not all civilian drones; they’re for surveillance and all sorts of other purposes,” Garrett says. “If you look, you will find those things. But I don’t believe it’s alien intelligence.”

Our modern era’s obsession with UFOs, Oliver says, is best understood as a failure of public scientific literacy. “In all I know about astrobiology and all I know about the universe and all I know about the energy requirement [for interstellar travel], it just doesn’t stack up,” she says.

Although science-fiction movies can ask fascinating questions about our world and the limits of science (Oliver cites Project Hail Mary as an example), not all will focus on the real questions currently at the forefront of science. “Spielberg is working on feelings he’s had since [he was] a child,” Oliver says. “So that’s not scientific.”