By Noel S. Williams

There’s a lot of hullabaloo about space aliens. “Disclosure” seems to be the buzzword. It is in the documentary “The Age of Disclosure,” which purports to disclose an “80-year global cover-up of non-human intelligent life.” It features testimony from some very sober and circumspect sources who witnessed UFOs and non-human bodies. Still, I wonder if that just reflects the “Intelligence Trap,” a phenomenon wherein smart people succumb to biased and “motivated reasoning.”

There’s also a highly anticipated movie due to be released next summer by Stephen Spielberg titled “Disclosure Day.” It’s essentially a “UFO movie,” though the precise plot is tightly guarded. The official logline of the sci-fi movie asks, “If you found out we weren’t alone, if someone showed you, proved it to you, would that frighten you?”

With all this renewed fuss, including congressional hearings, about the provenance of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (and the potential of aliens from outer space instigating some of it), I dare to proffer a slightly different question: Can you handle the undisclosed truth? There is no “disclosed” evidence — yet — that intelligent extraterrestrial beings are piloting the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UFOs) that have been spotted.

Pending “disclosure,” the truth (in regards to intelligent aliens) is elusive. Our advanced techniques have discovered numerous exoplanets, but no tell-tale signs of organic life contributing to their atmospheric compositions. Nevertheless, our brains may have a Jungian psychological imperative to believe in something bigger, something with a numinous nature that inspires awe and mystery. Intelligent Design may fit the bill.   One of the characters in Spielberg’s upcoming movie exclaims “people have a right to know the truth.” So, let’s consider the truth “as we know it,” starting with the 80-year cover-up proposition.

We’ve been leaking radio signals into outer space for about 100 years. However, those signals are weak and diffused. Presuming they rippled past Proxima Centarui b (the closest discovered exoplanet, about 4.2 light-years distant), they would be attenuated and likely indecipherable.

If they’re capable of sophisticated planet-hunting techniques, like transit and spectroscopy, and discover our atmosphere is infused with excretions from organic lifeforms, they haven’t acknowledged it. The numbers don’t look good — they haven’t sent us any detectable signals.

The first deliberate, directed message sent to space was the Arecibo Message sent in 1974, well after the supposed 80-year cover-up began. The message was beamed towards the M13 star cluster about 21,000 light-years away (a light-year being the distance that light travels in one year), so it has a long way to go. As an aside: the SETI “wow” signal has an astrophysical rather than alien explanation.

We should acknowledge the Voyager 1 and 2 space explorers, which are remarkable testaments to human ingenuity; however, they are only 15 billion and 13 billion miles from Earth (give or take, as of late 2025), respectively. Though they have maps that use pulsars to point the way to us, it is unlikely they’ve been intercepted by space cowboys (we still get occasional signals from them).

If one indulges in a little whimsy and entertains the presumptuous notion that alien lifeforms care enough about us to descend into Earth’s environs and toy with our fighter jets and ships, then why wouldn’t they introduce themselves? One congressional testimony exclaimed “It’s coming right for us,” but even rational, highly-functioning people can succumb to perception deception. Is what you see real?

Why come all that way to surveil our nuclear facilities, as some speculate? Their radiation potential is minuscule compared to what our own, average star emits every second, so from a cosmic perspective there’re no alarm bells.

The late astrophysicist Stephen Hawking contemplated that an advanced alien civilization might be inclined to treat us harshly. Irrespective of their interstellar intentions, why not make their presence undeniable after 80 years? There are quicker ways to conquer us.

Let’s consider one more unlikely scenario. Without even knowing we exist, the advanced extraterrestrial civilization happened upon us during their cosmic journey via a theoretical wormhole. Apparently, theoretical physicists have discovered that the tunnels, which could provide shortcuts by bending space and time, could be stable. In theory, someone could travel through it without the tunnel collapsing. Perhaps the physicists are enmeshed in their own “Intelligence Trap.”

Without such exotic wormholes weaving across and through the fabric of the cosmos, time-dilation better kick in big time if they are to make it here before perishing. The Parker Solar Probe is the fastest man-made object — it would take it about 7,200 years to reach Proxima Centauri (our most proximal star). Going at Voyager 1 speeds, about 76,000 years. Even if alien technology were magnitudes more advanced, they’d still be constrained to propulsion methods way below the universe’s speed limit.

Per Pew Research, atheists tend to be more likely to believe in intelligent alien life; religious Americans are less likely to believe intelligent life exists on other planets. Perhaps nothing evokes the numinous qualia of spirit and mystery more than the concept of Intelligent Design — the remarkable realization that the laws and numbers of nature are exquisitely calibrated, against all odds, to tolerate life. It presupposes a purposeful creator. If we are the only intelligent instantiations of that, it would be more astonishing than the prospect of other intelligent lifeforms flourishing. Indeed, perhaps one “solution” to the Fermi Paradox is that intelligent alien life is scarce. Perhaps we are truly “special,” and the moral and religious implications are momentous; indeed, it’s likely we are the only humans in the universe.

If God’s laws of nature (as we know them) are immutable throughout the universe, then the “truth” may require a tolerance for ambiguity. While awaiting disclosure, perhaps we should look down, not up. Much of the ocean remains undiscovered; indeed, we have better maps of the surface of Mars than the ocean bed. There’s plenty of alien-looking life down there.