The air is thick with anticipation for Disclosure Day— an unspecified date fueled by the Trump administration’s promise to finally open the Pentagon’s vault on the existence of aliens.
As President Trump vows to declassify decades of military secrets while teasing “very interesting” findings, the nation is sounding off about the government’s take on extraterrestrial life—including the world’s most famous astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson.
For decades, Hollywood made movies about UFOs; from “E.T” to the haunting mother ships of “Arrival,” green screens, post-production and really good prosthetics made alien life social media fodder, alongside years of guaranteed grainy footage and unconfirmed eyewitness accounts of alien sightings. Now, the government is ready to tell all and shut down speculation for good with an unprecedented data dump that hopes to prove, once and for all, whether the truth is really out there or simply in our heads.
However, Neil deGrasse Tyson isn’t quite buying what the government is selling. Admitting in a New York Times op-ed how he had always “wanted to be abducted by aliens” since childhood, he said he expects Trump’s aliens’ files to be nothing more than anticlimactic. “After a parade of alien insiders and whistle-blowers testified under oath to Congress in 2023, 2024 and 2025, what’s left to learn?,” he asked.
The hearings transformed the UFO conversation from late-night conspiracies into Capitol Hill testimony. In 2023, former intelligence official David Grusch testified under oath that the U.S. government had been running a multi-decade reverse-engineering program for non-human craft, The Guardian reported.
The following year former Pentagon official Luis Elizondo testified that Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) performed maneuvers that defy human physics, often hovering over sensitive nuclear sites according to The Hill. That was enough to satisfy Tyson’s curiosity, as he explained what he prefers instead in order to really believe aliens are real.
“Personally, I’d be delighted if the files were accompanied by an actual alien. Alive or dead or undead. Preferably alive,” he wrote. “Is that too much to ask for?” For Tyson, the era of trust-me testimony has reached its expiration date, wanting a biological reality that requires no faith to accept.
“What’s clear, however, is that if an authentic alien walked out of the halls of Congress, nobody would ever again have to ask if you “believe” in aliens, just as nobody questions the existence of elephants. An alien of the alien files could become the literal elephant in the room. […] Without good evidence of what actual aliens look like, we’re stuck imagining them,” he wrote.
Tyson also called out Hollywood’s portrayal of UFOs resembling humans in movies.
“They’re humanoid, with a head, two eyes, a nose, a mouth, a neck, shoulders, a torso, arms, fingers and legs. Remember that most life on Earth, with which we have DNA in common, looks nothing like us or any vertebrate animal. So we should expect aliens with no DNA in common — or no DNA at all — to look at least as different from humans as humans and other life-forms on Earth (like jellyfish or termites) look different from each other,” he argued.
However, if aliens were to visit Earth, he suggested “it would probably want to meet the person in charge.”
He questioned, “Who exactly would that be? The president? The prime minister? The pope? Or would it be a multibillionaire or captain of industry? Not knowing anything in advance about human civilization, but picking up clues from our cultural norms before arrival from leaked radio waves, an alien might instead expect to meet Ryan Gosling, Taylor Swift or Oprah Winfrey.”
For Tyson, upon said-aliens seemingly unexpected arrival, they’d be quick to notice human’s “irrational ways.”
He wrote how, “Any visiting alien that might have accompanied the release of the alien files surely long ago escaped back home to report, ‘There’s no sign of intelligent life on Earth!’” Ouch.
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