Up-to-date from Steven Spielberg movie Reveal day imagines the moment when 8 billion people learn that we are not alone in the universe.
The film, which hits U.S. theaters on June 12, is a fictional account of the government’s cover-up and subsequent “reveal” of evidence of alien contact with Earth.
The UFO community has been chasing these types of massive movie discoveries for 80 years. More likely, however, monumental scientific discoveries such as the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 and the confirmation of gravitational waves in 2016 provide a better indication of the likelihood of information being revealed in the real world: through long-term research and verifiable results. This approach would be less flashy, but would still make a massive impact.
The prospect of the U.S. government making a high-profile disclosure that alien life exists and has contacted Earth has seemed increasingly likely in recent years, even as the results have been disappointing. From 2023, a non-partisan group in Congress conducted three hearings presenting whistleblowers regarding unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), calling whistleblowers who alleged: several decades of hiding by government and private industry. In May, the Pentagon began releasing the most ambitious tranche of UFO files in American history under a program called REALIZE: Presidential system for unsealing and reporting UAP meetings.
For many UFO believers, it looked like a tidal wave they had been waiting 80 years for, but no hearings or documents made any mention of it.
“Blurred films, unverifiable testimony” – this is what Adam Frank, a Carl Sagan Medal – winner astrophysicist from the University of Rochester and author of the book The Little Book of Aliensdescribes the evidence. “In light of the explosive claims being made publicly, this is not enough. It’s just more of the same.”
It’s a verdict shared to some extent by one of the few people who actually claim to have flown past the unexplained phenomenon.
“We’ve accepted some 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 three witnesses at the landmark House oversight hearing in July 2023. “And the information we’re getting now is devoid of any real context, analysis or understanding.”
At that hearing, he testified that his squadron had repeatedly encountered objects off the U.S. East Coast that were performing maneuvers that exceeded the capabilities of known aircraft. He has since founded Americans for a safe aviation industrya non-profit organization 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 a cultural and institutional phenomenon, 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 not even tell the co-pilot about it,” he says, adding: “It’s really become institutionalized.”
This makes “it clear that there are a large number of objects that exhibit capabilities that we do not understand,” Graves says.
But this lack of understanding hasn’t stopped whistleblowers and former government officials from continuing to make bold claims during congressional hearings, UFO conferences, and podcast interviews with the likes of Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson. Strenuous data is missing.
“If even a fraction of what these guys claim is true, there should be terabytes of data from experiments conducted on spacecraft and alien bodies. Since this data is not released, I don’t think it exists,” Frank says.