What would happen if the whole world, 7 billion people, learned all at once that they are not alone in the universe?

That’s the premise of Steven Spielberg’s recent movie Disclosure Day. Two factions with different answers to this question battle it out across multiple chase scenes in cars, trains, and buses that stretch across the United States. (The movie’s theatrical run is almost over, but there are very few spoilers below.) On the one hand, a private intelligence firm called Wardex, in league with world governments, assumes that such a disclosure would cause worldwide panic and lead to total societal collapse. On the other, a group of former employees of Wardex, led by a man named Hugo, believe that the power of empathy and instinct for emotional connection would allow humans to handle it gracefully. Raising the stakes, Hugo and his defectors believe that a revelation of such cosmic proportions could shrink global conflict to a footnote and forestall impending World War III.

Spielberg’s film debuted just as transparency about alien life became a hot topic on Capitol Hill. In May, the U.S. government began publicly releasing 80 years of classified files related to extraterrestrials, UAPs (unidentified anomalous phenomena), and UFOs (unidentified flying objects), including Cold War-era reports of rotating saucers, recent sightings of metallic elliptical objects hovering in military airspace, an archival Apollo 17 photo with three unexplained lights enlarged above the lunar terrain, and a one-hour, multi-witness UAP encounter observed from a military helicopter in late 2025. 

Some of the videos and photos seem genuinely puzzling, but most experts say they have down-to-earth explanations: sensor anomalies, optical diffraction, highly advanced drones, unmarked research balloons, and space debris. So far, none of the files has provided any actionable scientific data or offered any conclusive evidence of alien life or non-human technology.

Read more: “Why Haven’t We Heard from Extraterrestrials Yet?”

Of course, it’s possible something revealing is still hiding in government files, which will be released in batches as they’re identified, or that something new will come to light. And anyway, alien life has always been popular fodder for conspiracy theories. Whatever is out there, some people think authorities need a plan for how to communicate it to the public to protect against the potential psychological shocks of UAP disclosure. In June, a Capitol Hill event called the Disclosure Forum brought together sitting members of Congress, scientists from institutions such as Harvard and Yale universities, whistleblowers, and former national security officials in the same room where the 1973 Watergate hearings took place to discuss the matter of disclosures about potential aliens and UAPs. Organizers cited polling showing roughly 89 percent of Republicans and 88 percent of Democrats want more government disclosure on UAP.

In a policy brief published the following month, The Disclosure Foundation, which sponsored the Capitol Hill event, wrote that the need for a plan arises in part because such disclosures could require individuals and societies to “reconsider long held assumptions about humanity’s place in the universe and the nature of reality itself.” In their brief, called the National Preparedness Framework for the Human Consequences of Disclosure, the foundation proposes a strategy that would address not just planned releases of files, but “inconclusive or disputed evidence, abrupt or unauthorized disclosures, disclosures by foreign governments or private actors, credible confirmation of nonhuman intelligence, mass UAP or extraterrestrial sightings, and information suggesting benign, unknown, or threatening intent.”

It’s a reasonable concern. Historically, humans haven’t always behaved well when asked to reconsider long-held assumptions about humanity’s place in the universe or the nature of reality. Recall the ridicule, torture, and death that paradigm-shifting scientists have had to endure over the centuries for their observations. The Catholic Church put Galileo Galilei on trial in 1633 for his view that the sun was at the center of the solar system, not the Earth. It then forced him to recant his position and sentenced him to house arrest for life. Italian philosopher, Dominican friar, and cosmologist Giordano Bruno proposed an infinite universe with many worlds in 1600 and was burned at the stake for it. Charles Darwin, whose theory of evolution challenged creationism, was mocked in political cartoons and his sanity debated.

Or take a much more recent example: the COVID-19 pandemic. It suddenly and radically altered our understanding of reality, and the combination of high threat and high uncertainty provided a fertile breeding ground for conspiracy theories, with dangerous consequences. One eight-country comparative study published in Frontiers in Psychology in 2021 by Belgian sociologist David De Coninck and colleagues documented some of the consequences of these pandemic conspiracy beliefs, including more than 200 reported attacks on United Kingdom telecom workers and arson against Dutch mobile masts associated with 5G conspiracy theories. And how can we forget about those who refused to get vaccinated or comply with public health measures like wearing masks, which helped the disease to spread.

But are aliens different?

Read more: “If You Meet ET in Space, Kill Him”

Over the past couple of decades, scholars have increasingly turned their attention to the specific psychology that might attend disclosures about extraterrestrials. One 2018 paper in Frontiers in Psychology authored by psychologist Michael Varnum and other researchers from Arizona State University provided the first empirical study of the question of how humans would react to revelations about alien life. Varnum’s team used linguistic text analysis on past “false alarm” events as well as surveys to find that most people had more positive than negative emotions related to news of such discoveries. In later work, Varnum found that how people react depends a lot on culture and personality. Religious people, those high in conspiratorial thinking, and people who are fearful of disease, he found, were more likely to have negative responses.

Other work has come to similar conclusions. A study of American and Chinese undergraduates, for example, on beliefs about extraterrestrial intelligence following a hypothetical contact message found that religious Americans were less likely to believe that extraterrestrial life exists at all, while optimists were more likely to think extraterrestrials were benevolent than people who generally felt alienated from others. Chinese students, meanwhile, were more likely than Americans to be able to view extraterrestrial life as simultaneously having the potential for benevolence and malevolence. That paper was published as a preprint without peer review in 2000.

How risks get communicated matters. This is the premise of a chapter published in the Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union by German communications researcher Andreas Schwarz in 2024. When people hear a threat message, how they respond depends on two things, Schwarz writes: how threatened they personally feel and whether they feel like they can do something about it. If they don’t feel like they can take protective action, they shut down and tend to avoid the message instead. 

As a result, communications about extraterrestrial life should include information about what it means for the public, what is being done about the matter, and how they can respond, according to Schwarz and his team. That helps to avoid triggering panic. They also recommend thinking ahead about how media and social networks might blow a finding out of proportion or downplay a real risk and plan their messaging accordingly.

There are, though, reasons to feel hopeful. American sociologist Henry Quarantelli, a major figure in disaster studies throughout the 20th century, was one of the first to push the idea, based on his own empirical work, that humans generally respond to disaster or emergency with prosocial responses as opposed to selfish and irrational panic, looting, and breakdown. His 1957 paper, “The Behavior of Panic Participants,” and his 1994 “Disaster Studies” retrospective in International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters are classic examples of this work.

Besides, recent polling suggests that up to three-quarters of Americans believe that other life exists in the universe, half believe aliens have visited Earth, and 4 out of 10 believe that some UAPs are alien spacecraft. All of which is to say that, at least in the U.S., a large swath of the public wouldn’t be forced to radically alter their worldviews or belief systems if it were revealed that intelligent life exists beyond Earth.

For everyone else, If Quarantelli and Varnum are right, the data suggests we should probably bet on Hugo, not Wardex: While there are some exceptions, modern-day humans seem to have a habit of rising to the moment, not running from it. The bigger question is whether we’ll get the chance to find out.

Lead image: unlimit3d / Adobe Stock