What Would Falsify Belief in Aliens? A Response to Émile Kinley-Gauthier

I appreciate the thoughtful critique by Émile Kinley-Gauthier of my review of The Age of Disclosure, which is unusual in the UFO/UAP community in my experience—most of my challenges to believers in aliens go unanswered.

Émile identifies a “quiet assumption” in my demand for tangible evidence of aliens, namely a body, a spaceship, or unmistakable evidence clear for everyone to see, comparable to the Chinese Spy Balloon encounter over U.S. airspace in 2023—acknowledged by the Pentagon, the Department of Defense, the POTUS, and all major media outlets to be real. But Émile wonders if perhaps any nonhuman intelligence (he means extraterrestrials, inasmuch as there are lots of nonhuman intelligent species here on Earth, such as great apes like chimps and gorillas and cetaceans like whales and dolphins), are perhaps not detectable in the manner scientists expect. “If we’re dealing with advanced, maneuverable craft … that can outfly F-18s and play tag with carrier groups, it is hardly obvious that iPhone videos from 30,000 feet should be abundant” and that I treat “our existing sensorium and consumer devices as the default epistemic filter of the universe.” 

Likewise, Émile suggests that if government programs to retrieve and back-engineer alien spaceships are truly secret—“sequestered behind unacknowledged special access programs, contractor firewalls, and classification regimes that exist precisely to prevent specimens from becoming public”—then we should not be surprised that evidence of such is not forthcoming since that’s the whole point of keeping secrets! 

Okay, then how do we know about such programs and their purported dealings with extraterrestrial intelligences? Eyewitnesses and whistleblowers, who hitherto have been unwilling or unable to show us what they purport to have seen. Why should we take their word for it? Because, Émile contends, there’s a convergence of testimony (“once you put the pieces together”) from credible figures like David Grusch, Christopher Mellon, and Luis Elizondo who seem to tell the same story. 

Eyewitnesses and whistleblowers … why should we take their word for it?

These are all fair points, but history shows us that a great many people can be deceived—or self-deceived—on any number of claims, including and especially those in the sciences, which is how we ended up with heliocentrism, the germ theory of disease, the theory of evolution by natural selection, the geological theory of plate tectonics, the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe, etc. A great many credible scientists and scholars believed in things we now know to be false. 

What then should we believe about the claim by UFOlogists and UAPers that contact with alien intelligences has been made and that disclosure is coming soon? As far as I can tell, by Émile’s argument here, the answer is “nothing” or “withhold judgment” until further evidence is forthcoming. Fine. Agnosticism on the alien question—along with that on the God question—is respectable, but that is not at all what is being claimed by the many ETI proponents in The Age of Disclosure: 

• “They’re real, they’re here, and they’re not human.” 
• “Nonhuman intelligences are here and have been interacting with humanity for a long time.” 
• “We are not the only intelligent life form on the planet. There’s something else here.” 
• “This is the biggest discovery in human history.” 

In invoking Carl Sagan’s ECREE principle that Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence, the biggest discovery in human history cannot rest solely on eyewitness testimony coupled to grainy videos and blurry photographs. If Émile is right then perhaps we’ll never know if we’ve been visited, but I am more than willing to change my mind if the evidence changes, and I have put my money where my mouth is in my $1,000 Long Now bet with Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, who took me up that disclosure or discovery of alien life or technology will not happen by December 31, 2030. 

With this dialogue and special issue of Skeptic devoted to the subject (Volume 31, Number 1, March 2026), I am encouraged that meaningful progress can be made in determining the truth about aliens, or, at the very least, the truth about government secrets, conspiracies, and cover-ups.