Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day gets one major thing wrong about the search for aliens

The new movie Disclosure Day is all about a big, alien secret. But SETI researchers behind the updated postdetection protocol say they aren’t in the business of secrets

After months of anticipation, Steven Spielberg’s new sci-fi flick Disclosure Day is now in theaters. Its fictional premise concerns a group of people planning to leak the long-suppressed news that aliens are real and visiting our planet.

Disclosure Day is far from Spielberg’s first encounter with the decades-old trope that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has already found aliens right here on Earth—and that a vast government conspiracy is preventing anyone else from finding out. But researchers at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., say this trope couldn’t be further from the truth: if scientists ever do find evidence of talkative aliens, transparency is actually in the official postdetection protocols.

“There’s no effort to keep it secret. If we [get] a signal, it’s going to be out there. The next step is transparency,” says Carol Oliver, a professor of science communication and astrobiology at the University of New South Wales in Australia and one of the architects behind the latest version of the SETI Post-Detection Protocols, set to be codified later this year . “The community in general has agreed that’s the ethical thing to do.”

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The first postdetection protocols were adopted by the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) in 1989 and mostly concerned searches for radio signals from other cosmic civilizations. The protocol document advises any scientist who believes they have evidence of a possible signal to first seek verification from other researchers. If a signal is independently confirmed, this news should be shared “promptly, openly, and widely through scientific channels and public media.” It also says that “international consultations” should occur before any response is sent back.

SETI researchers last revised these protocols in 2010 and say this year’s planned update is overdue. It would seek to account for the impact of the Internet and the proliferation of organizations with instruments turned toward the stars. The protocols aren’t binding but are rather guidance meant to coordinate researchers.

“Scientists are more available than they’ve ever been before via social media,” says Michael Garrett, an astronomer at the University of Manchester in England and a co-author of the 2026 protocols. One concern he and his fellow researchers have is that because so many more scientists now promote their work via social media, any controversial findings they post could make them more vulnerable to backlash, whether online or offline. Garrett says the new protocols acknowledge that academic institutions have the responsibility to take steps for the safety of their researchers and protect them from potentially dangerous interactions with conspiracy theorists and other reactionary zealots.