If they do, then “wheel the thing [spaceship] out, or wheel the bodies out," Frank says animatedly. Barring that level of incontrovertible evidence, though, Frank says real disclosure would require more than the federal government releasing files. It would mean releasing actual data, such as measurements, samples, and sensor logs, that independent scientists can use to formulate hypotheses, test them against evidence, replicate findings, and reach consensus the same way humans have for centuries.

We know what disclosure can look like based on other major scientific findings, notably CERN’s discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 and confirmation by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) of gravitational waves in 2016.

The Higgs boson, sometimes called the God Particle, was the missing piece of physics’ Standard Model—an elementary particle whose associated field gives every other elementary particle its mass. Without it, atoms wouldn’t form, and the universe as we know it wouldn’t exist.

Peter Higgs and others had predicted the particle’s existence in 1964, but it took nearly 50 years, the construction of the largest machine humans have ever built, and the work of thousands of the world’s brightest minds to confirm it. When CERN finally announced its discovery in 2012, two independent detector teams presented the findings simultaneously. They each verified the particle to a statistical confidence of five sigma: a 1-in-3.5-million chance the result was a fluke. Higgs and his collaborator François Englert won the Nobel Prize for their efforts.

The 2016 confirmation of gravitational waves made the 48-year Higgs boson hunt seem fast in comparison. Albert Einstein first predicted there were ripples in spacetime produced by the most violent events in the universe in 1916 as a consequence of his general theory of relativity. But for a century, no one could detect them.

Then, in September 2015, twin LIGO observatories (one in Louisiana and one in Washington) picked up a signal lasting a fraction of a second—the death spiral of two black holes a billion light-years away. The detectors confirmed each other, and the team locked the data down for months while it verified every detail. When LIGO announced the find in February 2016, it had cleared the same bar the Higgs boson researchers had: multi-sensor, replicable, statistically significant. Again, the work was widely accepted, and the Nobel followed.

Each discovery took decades of theoretical groundwork, dedicated instrumentation built to detect a specific phenomenon, independent verification across teams or sites, and a level of statistical certainty that allowed the rest of the scientific community to absorb the result within days. These are the closest modern analogues to what real disclosure of nonhuman intelligence would require, and few would argue that our disclosure model resembles much of that process yet.

“Scientific inspection and confirmation of any evidence would almost invariably take time, and the evidence would likely involve a great many ambiguities,” Greg Eghigian, a history professor at Penn State and the author of After the Flying Saucers Came, writes in an email.

In contrast, modern UAP disclosure has consistently underdelivered. The Pentagon's UAP office concluded in 2024 that there is no empirical evidence of alien technology, and the first PURSUE batch isn’t close to definitive.

But some researchers have taken the limited evidence available and tried to apply the scientific method to it. Beatriz Villarroel, an astronomer at Sweden's Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics, runs a project called Vanishing and Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations (VASCO) that recently released a landmark, peer-reviewed study analyzing the UFO phenomenon in a novel way.

Her team examined photographic plates of the night sky from the 1950s, before any satellites existed, searching for brief flashes of light that appear in images and are gone moments later. The study found those flashes appear to cluster around the dates of mid-century nuclear weapons tests. In plain terms, the photos may show something unexplained in the air during nuclear events, at a moment in history when nothing else manmade was up there.

Her papers describe them as unexplained “transients” with a statistically significant correlation to nuclear test dates. While Villarroel stops short of saying the flashes are alien crafts, she has been a guest on various UFO-centric podcasts and said in a recent appearance, “I don’t think we are alone.”

Researchers have criticized the paper, but it has also attracted defenders recently. What’s playing out is the unglamorous, duel-of-academic-papers version of UFO science. For Villarroel, that is how disclosure will happen.

“Many people want extraordinary evidence, following the Sagan myth,” Villarroel writes in an email, referring to the legendary astronomer’s famous dictum that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. “In reality, we just need evidence.”

And the most realistic way for disclosure to happen is “that evidence will slowly accumulate over time,” she adds.

That means there might not be a disclosure day but instead an accretion of papers, critiques, and replications—the way humans discovered every other consequential thing about the universe.

Still, on June 12, audiences can watch Steven Spielberg’s vision of the moment humanity finds out, a moment people have been imagining for decades. It may not be real, but you can enjoy it with some popcorn, a sugary soda, and a candy bar.

Maybe a Milky Way bar would be fitting.