UFOs: Why the government will not be disclosing secret information about alien visits

Concept graphic to illustrate a supposed unidentified object above Earth, created by Seth Shostak. Concept graphic to illustrate a supposed unidentified object above Earth, created by Seth Shostak. Photo: Seth Shostak Photo: Seth Shostak Image 1 of / 9 Caption Close UFOs: Why the government will not be disclosing secret information about alien visits 1 / 9 Back to Gallery

Is someone going to prove Fox Mulder right? Will somebody convincingly show that aliens have come to Earth?

That's the growing expectation of many members of the UFO community. For seventy years, they've been confidently insisting that some fraction of the strange objects seen flitting through the atmosphere are extraterrestrial craft, piloted by otherworldly beings on a junket to our planet. But while 100 million Americans give this claim a thumbs up – confident that our skies are peppered with interstellar intruders – few scientists agree.

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It's not that they don't like the idea. After all, it's hard to think of anything that would be more interesting and important than aliens in our airspace, short of the cure for death. And scientists aren't skeptical simply because interstellar travel is stunningly expensive and time consuming, although it's both of those. They demur because the evidence for this idea is seriously iffy. None of it is unambiguous enough to sway their minds.

However, judging by the more recent remarks of UFO proponents, there seems to be a crescendo of confidence that things are about to change. Well-known fans of visitation – for example Steven Greer, Richard Dolan, and Stephen Bassett, all of whom publicly and frequently expound at the many UFO conferences held each year – are saying that "disclosure" is nigh. The federal government is finally going to come clean with solid evidence about alien UFOs.

That would change this subject from one that rolls eyeballs to an accepted fact-of-the universe.

At least some of the disclosure optimism derives from the revelation in 2017 of a secret $22 million government project, begun a decade earlier and innocuously named the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP. The best-known results of this five-year effort were several videos taken by Navy pilots using their gun-sight infrared cameras. Some of these videos showed strange, elongated objects whose identity is uncertain. This was an encouraging sign for the disclosure enthusiasts. If the U.S. military was willing to trickle out such suggestive evidence about extraterrestrial visitors, perhaps they were on the cusp of admitting to a larger truth?

To the UFO crowd, that sounds encouraging. But it doesn't make sense.

It's sad that the UFO crowd has come to this – seemingly giving up on proving their own case and hoping that the feds will do their work for them.

To believe the government has been keeping mum about the aliens since the 1940s – surely not an easy thing to do – requires asking why. What's the motivation? It's not credible that it's because of an official fear that the public would go berserk if they were told there are saucers in the skies. One-third of them believe this already, and most have remained berserk-free.

Steven Greer, a former emergency room doctor who now takes folks on escorted tours to witness purported alien craft, has suggested a deeper reason: Extraterrestrial hardware is an existential threat to humanity's global power structure. Greer maintains that reverse engineering alien technology would lead to cheap energy for all countries, first world through third, providing a significantly higher economic standing in parts of the globe that could pose a serious challenge to western dominance.

Consequently, the powers-that-be have kept the UFO phenomenon under wraps. According to Greer, the potential disruption of alien technology is worse than the difficulty and embarrassment of keeping secrets from the public.

But does it really make sense to believe that the federal government could keep a secret of this magnitude during two generations of civil servants? Could the feds really twist the arms of all other nations to participate in such schemery?

In addition, reverse engineering alien technology is about as plausible as the tooth fairy. Imagine giving a cell phone to Ben Franklin and telling him to "reverse engineer" it so George Washington's army could better stay in touch while fighting the British. Any aliens who can rocket themselves to Earth are far more advanced than we are – indeed, the technology gap is surely greater than that separating us from Franklin.

The real problem with the idea of disclosure is not whether or not the government has had a good reason, and an uncanny ability, to keep an alien presence quiet all these years. It's the faulty premise.

If extraterrestrial craft are really strafing the stratosphere, and in numbers sufficient to cause roughly ten thousand citizen reports annually in the U.S. alone, then why must we throw up our hands and claim "only the government can prove it's true"? What about the hundreds of thousands of amateur astronomers who avidly observe the sky on clear nights, but don't seem to see any mysterious flying objects? What of the many thousand commercial satellites that make high resolution photos of our planet all day long without witnessing strange intruders? Are none of these data good enough?

One might argue that the military has better equipment. Of course it does, but if this phenomenon can only be proven with "better equipment," then that's not only a suspiciously convenient argument, it also degrades any claim that the countless saucer photos offered to the public for the past seven decades should be taken seriously.

Besides, does one really need military infrared cameras to find UFOs? Several of the Navy pilots who testified about encounters along the Atlantic seaboard in 2014 and 2015 said they observed these things "nearly every day." That sounds like an opportunity for any civilian with a good camera and a telephoto lens.

It's sad that the UFO crowd has come to this – seemingly giving up on proving their own case and hoping that the feds will do their work for them. Mainstream scientists don't wait for government agencies to prove their theories. That ball's in the researcher's court. And yet UFO proponents are now saying that, deus ex machina, the government will soon book some network air time and fess up about the aliens.

That's both an unconvincing argument and a mentally lazy one.

Dr. Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer, SETI Institute



