Last week I did a short post on Obama’s comments on aliens. Then, as soon as that kerffule settled, Trump jumped in (of course) and said he would direct the government to release its documents on aliens, extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs).

As you can imagine lots of people when bonkers. UFO enthusiasts are now sure that - finally - we’re going to get that long hoped for “disclosure” when all is revealed about UFOs, aliens and the great, grand government conspiracy surrounding both.

But, as a scientist who studies the search for life in the Universe, the question I was left with was much simpler. What would disclosure really need to to disclose? What is required for actual, factual proof that aliens exist and they’ve been visiting Earth. So I ended up writing a long post for my Forbes column. Here let me give you a short, sharp version and expand on one additional key theme.

The basic idea is we’ve already had 3 years of breathless congressional hearings on UFOs that have produced zero proof of anything. The best thing about the hearings has been pilots, who’ve had sightings, can make their reports public. I am all in for an open, transparent scientific study of UAPs/UFOs. Being able to report sightings without blowback is step one in that process. As I always note however, personal testimony is the worst form of evidence. So, on its own, it's a dead end.

But the rest of the hearings have been nothing but extravagant hearsay. Claims that alien starships are sitting in government garages are treated as ground truth without a single shred of evidence.

So what do we need? As I wrote in the Forbes piece,

“What do we need from a real disclosure? That’s simple: hard physical evidence… That is what disclosure needs to deliver. Not stories about alien spaceships being held by the government but the actual spaceships themselves. Not stories about alien bodies but the actual icky, gooey bodies with their icky gooey tentacles (OK, maybe they don’t have tentacles). If disclosure provides physical evidence that independent laboratories and independent scientists all over the world can verify, then it will live up to its hype. That would make “Disclosure Day” truly history-making.”

The last point to make is the resilience of conspiracy theories. Once these take hold on a subject the effect is corrosive. No amount of debunking can touch the core of conspiratorial thinking. Every attempt to debunk just opens a new twisted doorway of shadowed “they don’t want you to know” thinking. As I recently pointed out on the Danny Jones podcast, this a great way to end your nation’s scientific preeminence.

So, what do you think? What would it take to know… to really know if UFOs were something not of this Earth. Leave a comment on the webpage version of the post.

— Adam Frank 🚀