{"id":915878,"date":"2026-06-27T20:12:19","date_gmt":"2026-06-28T01:12:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/27\/steven-spielbergs-disclosure-day-gets-one-major-thing-wrong-about-the-search-for-aliens\/"},"modified":"2026-06-27T20:12:19","modified_gmt":"2026-06-28T01:12:19","slug":"steven-spielbergs-disclosure-day-gets-one-major-thing-wrong-about-the-search-for-aliens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/27\/steven-spielbergs-disclosure-day-gets-one-major-thing-wrong-about-the-search-for-aliens\/","title":{"rendered":"Steven Spielberg\u2019s Disclosure Day gets one major thing wrong about the search for aliens"},"content":{"rendered":"
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After months of anticipation, Steven Spielberg\u2019s new sci-fi flick Disclosure Day<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n

Disclosure Day<\/i> is far from Spielberg\u2019s first encounter<\/a> with the decades-old trope that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has already found aliens right here on Earth\u2014and 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\u2019t be further from the truth: if scientists ever do find evidence of talkative aliens, transparency is actually in the official postdetection protocols.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s no effort to keep it secret. If we [get] a signal, it\u2019s going to be out there. The next step is transparency,\u201d 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<\/a>. \u201cThe community in general has agreed that\u2019s the ethical thing to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

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What to do when you\u2019ve found aliens<\/b><\/h2>\n

The first postdetection protocols<\/a> 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<\/a> to first seek verification from other researchers. If a signal is independently confirmed, this news should be shared \u201cpromptly, openly, and widely through scientific channels and public media.\u201d It also says that \u201cinternational consultations\u201d should occur before any response is sent back.<\/p>\n

SETI researchers last revised these protocols in 2010 and say this year\u2019s 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\u2019t binding but are rather guidance meant to coordinate researchers.<\/p>\n

\u201cScientists are more available than they\u2019ve ever been before via social media,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

The update also seeks to broaden the protocols\u2019 scope from primarily radio signals to other signs of alien technology\u2014a diverse array of so-called technosignatures<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s growing as more astronomical surveys scrutinize ever-larger swaths of the sky.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/picture>
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A still from the movie Disclosure Day.<\/i><\/p>\n

Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment \u00a9 Universal Studios. All Rights Reserved.<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf someone had detected the signal, the problem would not be that we\u2019d be able to keep it to ourselves,\u201d Garrett says. \u201cThe problem would be that it\u2019d leak out long before it was verified.\u201d<\/p>\n

If everyone involved agrees to share knowledge about aliens with the world, why haven\u2019t we found them yet<\/a>?<\/p>\n

One answer is the Rare Earth hypothesis<\/a>, which theorizes that our planet really is<\/i> 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, \u201ceven with all the numbers in our universe,\u201d Oliver says.<\/p>\n

Another potential explanation is that aliens can be relatively common out there, but it\u2019s 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<\/a>, which connects a civilization\u2019s 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

What about UFOs?<\/b><\/h2>\n

Spielberg\u2019s film extensively references the Roswell incident<\/a> 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/picture>
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A shot of a UFO from the movie Disclosure Day.<\/p>\n

Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment \u00a9 Universal Studios. All Rights Reserved.<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Even so, an unshakable belief that extraterrestrial intelligence is behind \u201cflying saucers\u201d and other UFOs (now often rebranded as \u201cunidentified aerial phenomena,\u201d 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<\/a> aren\u2019t proper evidence<\/a> to indicate that any aliens have actually visited us.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are a lot of things up there. We have drones all over the place now, and they\u2019re not all civilian drones; they\u2019re for surveillance and all sorts of other purposes,\u201d Garrett says. \u201cIf you look, you will find those things. But I don\u2019t believe it\u2019s alien intelligence.\u201d<\/p>\n

Our modern era\u2019s obsession with UFOs, Oliver says, is best understood as a failure of public scientific literacy. \u201cIn 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\u2019t stack up,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Although science-fiction movies can ask fascinating questions about our world and the limits of science (Oliver cites Project Hail Mary<\/i><\/a> as an example), not all will focus on the real questions currently at the forefront of science. \u201cSpielberg is working on feelings he\u2019s had since [he was] a child,\u201d Oliver says. \u201cSo that\u2019s not scientific.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Luz Howe
Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After months of anticipation, Steven Spielberg\u2019s 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\u2019s first encounter with the decades-old trope that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":915879,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32458,2415],"tags":[117947,15675],"class_list":["post-915878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-spielbergs","category-steven","tag-spielbergs","tag-steven"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/915878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=915878"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/915878\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/915879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=915878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=915878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=915878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}