Previous landmark scientific discoveries like the Higgs boson provide a better template for what it will take to confirm whether aliens have made contact with Earth.
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.
