Steven Spielberg’s new film Disclosure Day imagines the moment 8 billion humans find out that we are not alone in the universe.

The movie, which opens in US theaters on June 12, is a fictional account of the government cover-up and subsequent “disclosure” of evidence that aliens have contacted Earth.

The UFO community has been chasing that type of cinematic big reveal for 80 years. But it’s more likely that monumental scientific discoveries, like the detection of the Higgs boson in 2012 and the confirmation of gravitational waves in 2016, are a better guideline for how real-world disclosure is likely to play out: through long-running research and with verifiable results. The approach would be less glamorous but still highly impactful.

The prospect of a blockbuster disclosure by the US government that alien life exists and has contacted Earth has felt more likely in recent years, even as results have underwhelmed. Since 2023, a bipartisan group in Congress has held three hearings featuring whistleblowers on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), summoning whistleblowers who alleged a decades-long cover-up by the government and private industry. And in May, the Pentagon began releasing the most ambitious tranche of UFO files in American history, under a program called PURSUE: the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters.

For many UFO believers, this looked like the tidal wave they had waited 80 years for, but no hearings or documents have contained a smoking gun.

“Fuzzy blob videos, unverifiable testimony” is how Adam Frank, a Carl Sagan Medal–winning astrophysicist at the University of Rochester and author of The Little Book of Aliens, describes the evidence. “In light of the explosive claims that are being made in public, this is not enough. This is just more of the same.”

It is a verdict shared to an extent by one of the few people who actually claims to have flown alongside the unexplained.

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

At that hearing, he testified that his squadron had repeatedly encountered objects off the US East Coast that performed maneuvers beyond the capabilities of known aircraft. He has since founded Americans for Safe Aerospace, a nonprofit that collects and analyzes UAP reports from military and commercial pilots. While conclusive proof has been elusive, Graves is encouraged by how much has changed.

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

“Five, six, seven, eight years ago, a pilot would see something in the air and wouldn’t even tell his copilot about this,” he says, adding, “It’s really been institutionalized.”

That’s made it “indisputable that there are a large number of objects exhibiting capabilities that we don’t understand,” Graves says.

But that 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’s lacking is hard data.

“If a fraction of what these guys claim is true, there should be terabytes of data from the experiments that were done on the spaceships and on the alien bodies. Since those things aren’t being released, I don’t think they exist,” says Frank.