Spoilers follow for Disclosure Day.
In the new Steven Spielberg movie, Disclosure Day, it’s probably not too much of a stretch to expect that there is some sort of disclosure. In fact, the closing act of the movie is all about how Kansas City meteorologist Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) and cybersecurity expert Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) blow open a nearly century-old conspiracy by the US government to suppress the truth about the existence of extraterrestrial life among us. But did you know there are actual protocols for the real Disclosure Day?
It’s true! Spielberg didn’t come up with the title out of thin air — Disclosure Day is a real thing that organizations like the SETI Institute (which stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) have been preparing for all these years. Not only that, but for the first time since 2015, the SETI Institute recently released an updated version of their protocols (on June 5, 2026) for how to reveal the existence of alien life. In a document dated June 1, 2026, and ratified by the International Academy of Astronauts (IAA), the new protocols take extra precautions for our modern world that is steeped in AI fakery, and will be taken to the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Türkiye this October. If approved there, they’ll “establish a permanent Post-Detection Sub-Committee to address legal, ethical, and societal implications of a confirmed discovery.”
Meanwhile, Margaret and Daniel blab the whole thing on Kansas City television, live on the air. Look, Disclosure Day is an action movie (mostly) that has good guys, bad guys, and in-between guys. There’s a vast difference in what the SETI Institute is dealing with, which is a possible signal from an alien civilization making its way to Earth. By comparison, the movie has aliens walking around, experimenting on people, and getting dissected and experimented on themselves. One is fact, the other is fiction.
But that’s no fun. So instead, let’s have some fun, why don’t we, and break down how close Disclosure Day (the movie) compares to the protocols for Disclosure Day (the real thing).
(Note: For organizational purposes, we’re going to go through “Position Paper on Declaration of Principles Concerning the Conduct of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) – (2026 Update)” which lays out the before, during, and after of Disclosure Day — the real event, not the movie. It would be pretty annoying if they spoiled the whole movie the week before it came out.)
Handling Candidate Evidence
According to this section of the SETI protocols, if there is “putative detection of extraterrestrial intelligence,” the first step is that the discoverer needs to authenticate it themselves using any resources they have on hand. However, those resources can include multiple “facilities” and “more than one organisation using different instrumentations and methods.” In addition, any information needs to be “handled with extreme care” and “uphold the highest standards of scientific responsibility and integrity.” That includes conveying the “importance and significance… to non-specialist audiences.”
This gets into a murky area with the movie, because we only really get the highlights of first contact thanks to the footage from the 1947 Roswell crash that’s broadcast on TV once Daniel dumps the complete files on the worldwide media (we’ll get to that in a second). Also, it’s important to note before we get any further that Spielberg began developing Disclosure Day in 2023 and filmed it in 2025. So despite the movie coming out after these revised protocols, the film isn’t able to incorporate them because that’s not how time works.
Anyway, there’s actually a good chance that the first part of this was accurate, though much more hands-on than SETI is likely expecting. We see multiple scientists carefully gathering and cataloguing evidence of the crash, and clearly they’ve built an entire organization (called Wardex) to handle the continued study of aliens and alien artifacts.
The second part? Not so much, as the whole plot of the movie is based on first the US government, then Wardex independently, keeping the existence of aliens secret. Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) argues that he’s thinking of Humanity’s interests by keeping this secret, but that’s definitely not what SETI is implying or saying in their protocols.
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