Just Show Us the Spaceships Already
· The Atlantic
Spaceships. That’s all I’m asking for. Just one actual stinking spaceship. I’d also take an actual alien body—I’ve been told that the government has some of them as well. Instead, the first “alien files,” released yesterday, appear to be the same old, same old: stories but no hard evidence—certainly not of the kind I’d want to see as a scientist, or that could truly advance the debate about UFOs and their alien connection.
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I am disappointed.
A lot of expectation led up to this document “disclosure.” Just a few months ago, former President Obama prompted wild speculation with a misinterpreted comment about the reality of extraterrestrial life. Not to be outdone, President Trump then posted on social media that he would direct the release of “Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs).” I’m an astrophysicist whose day job includes searching the cosmos for intelligent life. I was skeptical, though intrigued about the possibility of finally getting scientific evidence that extraterrestrials existed and are regularly visiting our planet.
That’s not what happened. What I’ve seen so far of the website constituting yesterday’s release looks like more fuzzy images and retracted accounts of ordinary people and members of the military seeing “something.” Some of the documents—which the Pentagon has said that it will continue to release on a “rolling basis” every few weeks—go back decades. One image of a silver oval, an FBI employee’s “graphic overlay” on a picture of a field, intended to depict eyewitness accounts, is almost laughable in its simplicity. Low-resolution images of flying blobs cannot begin to answer the existentially important question of alien life.
The history of UFOs and claimed government conspiracies hiding their alien origins goes all the way back to the Roswell incident, in the late 1940s, when the first UFO report made national headlines. Then in 1956, Edward Ruppelt, an Air Force captain who led early Air Force UFO studies, published a book claiming the existence of a document ominously called “Estimate of the Situation.” Ruppelt asserted that this top-secret report concluded that UFOs were of extraterrestrial origin. No version of the document, however, has ever been found. Still, Ruppelt’s claims set the stage for decades of fever-dream UFO- and government-conspiracy mongering. UFOs became a kind of shorthand for “kooky”—so much that the false association between UFOs and the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence nearly killed all such government research.
Then in 2017, The New York Times published a detailed exposé on a Pentagon program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP. The principal goal of the AATIP was the study of UFOs (rebranded as “unidentified aerial phenomena,” or UAPs). Along with the story came the release of two UAP videos shot from cameras on Navy fighter jets. The videos show fuzzy blobs that some people claimed were moving in ways that no terrestrial vehicle could match. A handful of Navy pilots also came forward to tell their stories about encounters with these tic-tac UAPs. Suddenly, serious people were taking the possibility of alien vehicles seriously. The modern era of “disclosure” had begun.
The videos were compelling, and I was happy that the pilots could tell their stories without fear of reprisal. Personal testimony, however, is the worst form of scientific evidence. Many studies show that people can have a difficult time recounting details that match with hard evidence, even when they want to. As for the videos, the more I looked at them, the dicier they appeared from a scientific point of view. They are predigested clips with no context—not the kinds of things that make for a thorough scientific investigation into a history-making discovery.
Even more damning, much of the behavior seen in the videos could be explained by motion in the cameras themselves or by other effects. In fact, the subject of another video released at the time, called “GOFAST—which alien advocates claimed shows a tic-tac skimming the ocean at tremendous speeds—was later revealed to be an object moving thousands of feet in the air at a speed of about … wait for it now … 40 miles an hour. That’s called a balloon. A Pentagon program that came after the AATIP, called the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), lists GOFAST as a UAP sighting that’s firmly in the explained category.
The next step in the new age of disclosure was congressional hearings, which was when things started to get really interesting—or depending on your perspective, when they went off the deep end. Since 2022, Congress has held a number of hearings on UAPs, but most notable was one in July 2023 in which the former Air Force intelligence officer David Grusch testified under oath that the U.S. government had been retrieving “non-human” spacecraft and “biologics”. (In an interview, he came right out and said he meant dead alien pilots.) He also claimed this supersecret program involved both military and private contractors and that breaking secrecy came with costs.
Now, that is the kind of X-Files material people are really thinking of when they talk about disclosure.
Except it wasn’t. Not really. When Grusch was pressed for details, he would generally respond, “It’s classified.” He had also not personally seen any of the supposed secrets that he was disclosing, he acknowledged. He’d merely heard about these top-secret programs. Never in the hearings did Congress get actual evidence that the government has alien spaceships in garages and alien bodies in freezers.
This left people outside the UFO-true-believer camp in a tough spot. Grusch had high security clearance, so in theory, he should have known what he was talking about. Sean Kirkpatrick, the first director of the AARO, suggested that people like Grusch stumble into a self-reinforcing belief system that has existed for decades within parts of the military and intelligence community: In an article for Scientific American, Kirkpatrick called it “a textbook example of circular reporting.” This kind of circularity can never really answer the questions it’s posing, because it’s relying on the same information from the same people, over and over again. A real disclosure would look very different, because only one thing matters: hard evidence.
At its best, this would be the actual physical spaceship, on display for all to see and examine. If the government can’t get a whole ship floating on its “suspensors” or whatever, then give us some pieces of all of those crashed alien vehicles. UAP aerial maneuvers that defy the laws of physics would demand materials unlike anything that human technology has produced. Give us samples of the crashed vehicles that can be sent to laboratories around the world for fully transparent, fully scientific analysis. Ditto for “nonhuman biologics.” If disclosure is going to have real teeth for anyone besides true believers, then show us some real alien teeth, or skin, or tentacles. Until there are samples that can be shared with scientists around the world, the whole story is just that—a story.
If for some reason, no actual samples are in the offing, then give us reports that have real data in them. If UAPs have made inhuman aerial maneuvers, then show us the actual radar data, including the radar systems used, so that independent researchers can plot trajectories and see whether anything involved really did break the laws of physics. If artifacts have been recovered, share high-resolution, detailed images whose veracity can be confirmed. The kinds of tests that a modern scientific lab would run on a sample of supposedly alien metal are not hard to imagine—let’s see the numbers from those tests, along with a detailed description of the instruments used to get the data. This is exactly what would get recorded in any other scientific investigation: collection methods, data tables, charts, graphs.
The same should be true for those alien bodies. I can go online and get the detailed results of my blood-work labs from last week. Where are those kinds of data for the aliens? If all of this is real, the resulting investigation would have to generate pages and pages of basic physiological test results. Those results should be the disclosure documents.
None of this was in the pages released yesterday. Instead, they are the kind of stuff we’ve seen before. They include FBI records of “eyewitness testimonies, and public reports concerning Unidentified Flying Objects and flying discs documented between June 1947 and July 1968.” Some of this material had already been released. There is an “FBI memo from 1958 reporting a UFO sighting by a Detroit man.” The site also has many reports of more recent sightings, including lots of videos, many of which seem profoundly unimpressive (although I should note that I have not been able to look at them all yet). Some documents seem to fall under only the broad category of “space”—such as a 1996 Air Force report, Modeling of Unlikely Space-Booster Failures in Risk Calculations.
This was not the disclosure that I, as a physicist bound to honor the rules of science and quality data, was hoping for.
In the end, this latest trove of documents makes me think of the John F. Kennedy assassination and the endless swirl of conspiracy theories that still surrounds it. Since 1992, multiple rounds of documents relating to that ill-fated day in 1963 have been released. None of it has resolved what happened for the conspiracy-theory prone. Perhaps nothing ever will. This may be what happens with UFOs/UAPs. It’s easy to imagine that a decade from now, we’ll still be rehashing the same claims, and the same arguments over those claims.
Meanwhile, the science of astrobiology is pushing onward. Using ultrapowerful telescopes, astronomers will continue the slow, steady work of looking for alien life where it lives, on alien worlds. One day, likely over the next few decades and perhaps long after the current UFO-disclosure frenzy is over, my fellow astronomers might give us hard evidence that life is either common or rare in the galaxy. That will be the only disclosure day history remembers.