Just Show Us the Spaceships Already

Spaceships. That’s all I’m asking for. Just one actual stinking spaceship. I’d also take an actual alien body—I’ve been told that the government has some of them as well. Instead, the first “alien files,” released yesterday, appear to be the same old, same old: stories but no hard evidence—certainly not of the kind I’d want to see as a scientist, or that could truly advance the debate about UFOs and their alien connection.I am disappointed.A lot of expectation led up to this document “disclosure.” Just a few months ago, former President Obama prompted wild speculation with a misinterpreted comment about the reality of extraterrestrial life. Not to be outdone, President Trump then posted on social media that he would direct the release of “Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs).” I’m an astrophysicist whose day job includes searching the cosmos for intelligent life. I was skeptical, though intrigued about the possibility of finally getting scientific evidence that extraterrestrials existed and are regularly visiting our planet.That’s not what happened. What I’ve seen so far of the website constituting yesterday’s release looks like more fuzzy images and retracted accounts of ordinary people and members of the military seeing “something.” Some of the documents—which the Pentagon has said that it will continue to release on a “rolling basis” every few weeks—go back decades. One image of a silver oval, an FBI employee’s “graphic overlay” on a picture of a field, intended to depict eyewitness accounts, is almost laughable in its simplicity. Low-resolution images of flying blobs cannot begin to answer the existentially important question of alien life.The history of UFOs and claimed government conspiracies hiding their alien origins goes all the way back to the Roswell incident, in the late 1940s, when the first UFO report made national headlines. Then in 1956, Edward Ruppelt