Why won’t real-life reveal day look like the new Steven Spielberg movie?

New Steven Spielberg film Disclosure day Imagine the moment when 8 billion people discover that we are not alone in the universe.

The film, which opens in US theaters on June 12, is a fictional account of the government cover-up and subsequent “revelation” of evidence of alien contact with Earth.

The UFO community has been chasing this kind of big cinematic reveal for 80 years. But huge scientific discoveries, such as the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 and the confirmation of gravitational waves in 2016, are likely to serve as a better guide to how detection might occur in the real world: through long-term research and with verifiable results. This approach will be less glamorous but still highly impactful.

The possibility of a major detection by the US government that alien life exists and has contacted Earth has become more likely in recent years, even though the results have been disappointing. Since 2023, a bipartisan group in Congress has held three hearings featuring unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) whistleblowers, subpoenaing whistleblowers who alleged decades-long cover-ups by the government and private industry. In May, the Pentagon began releasing the most ambitious batch of UFO files in American history, under a program called PURSUE: Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters.

To many UFO believers, this seemed like the tidal wave they had been waiting for for 80 years, but no hearings or documents contained conclusive evidence.

“Mysterious videos, unverifiable testimony,” says Adam Frank, a Carl Sagan Medal-winning astrophysicist at the University of Rochester and author of The Little Book of Aliensdescribes the evidence. “In light of the explosive allegations being made publicly, this is not enough. This is just more of the same.”

It’s a fairly common judgment by one of the few people who actually claims to have flown alongside the Unexplained.

“We’ve accepted some facts, but we don’t necessarily have more answers,” says Ryan Graves, a former Navy F/A-18 pilot who was one of three witnesses in the House’s historic July 2023 hearing. “And the information we are getting now comes devoid of any real context, analysis or understanding.”

At that hearing, he testified that his squadron repeatedly encountered objects off the East Coast of the United States that performed maneuvers beyond known aircraft capabilities. He has since founded Americans for Safe Space, a non-profit organization that collects and analyzes UAP reports from military and commercial pilots. While definitive proof has been elusive, Greaves is encouraged by how much change has occurred.

He sees it as cultural and institutional, pointing to a generation of pilots who now feel comfortable publicly reporting what they see through a Pentagon office created to investigate UAP cases.

“Five, six, seven, eight years ago, a pilot would see something in the air and he wouldn’t even tell his co-pilot about it,” he says, adding: “This has already been institutionalized.”

This makes it “indisputable that there are a large number of things that exhibit capabilities that we don’t understand,” Greaves says.

But this 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 we lack is hard data.

“If part of what these people are claiming is true, there should be terabytes of data from experiments done on spaceships and space objects,” Frank says. “And since these things haven’t been launched, I don’t think they exist.”