Why NHI Disclosure Might Break You Before It Changes the World

Are you as ready for disclosure as you think you are?

Studies and public opinion polls suggest a significant portion of Americans believe in life beyond Earth. But the more you dig into the data, the more nuanced the picture becomes. It seems our beliefs are as varied as our identities.

A 2021 survey by the Pew Research Center, for example, found that 65% of Americans believe in intelligent life on other planets. Other polls, like one from Gallup, show a growing number—41% in 2021—who believe some UFOs are extraterrestrial spacecraft, a notable jump from 33% just two years prior. But the devil is in the details. The Pew study also found that highly religious Americans are considerably more skeptical, with only 44% of those who attend religious services weekly believing in extraterrestrial life, compared to 75% of those who seldom or never attend. The data also shows that while a vast majority of atheists believe intelligent life exists (85%), far fewer (31%) are convinced that military-reported UFOs are proof of it. The consistent finding is that a majority is open to the idea, but our individual beliefs and identities—religious, political, or otherwise—shape how ready we are to accept the evidence.

This brings us to the truly terrifying part: the confirmation, the revelation, and our individual response to that moment might tell each of us more about ourselves as individuals than we’re ready to accept.

Words and phrases like “reality bending” and “ontological shock” are often thrown around casually. These terms were born from the psychological and sociological study of how humans cope with a profound, paradigm-shifting event. The research tells us that an ontological shock isn’t a shared, simple epiphany; it’s an event that can unground a person's prior framework for understanding reality, leading to what some psychologists call ontological fracturing. This can result in persistent distress, confusion about one’s existence, and a profound struggle to make meaning of the world. It’s a crisis of self-identity. And I’ve noticed one main thing: a significant number of people are so certain about their conclusions that these conclusions have become core components of their identity.

I saw something similar when I entered the business side of the opera world. And I’m going to pick on an icon to illustrate my point. When in casual conversation people learn my wife, Natalja, is an opera singer, we'll often hear, “Oh, I love Andrea Bocelli!” It’s a ubiquitous experience for many singers, I’ve learned. They all smile politely and express gratitude that yes, he’s certainly been “a great voice for the art.” I picked up on their choice of words and their structure. "A great voice for the art." Voice, in this sense, is an amplifier, not necessarily that his voice is great.”For” the art carries a connotation of being an outside advocate rather than an insider.

As I learned more about opera singing and pedagogy, even I found myself thinking, "This guy isn’t as good as everyone thinks." Opera critics and musicologists have a litany of specific critiques: Bocelli's voice lacks the resonant power and projection to be heard over a full orchestra in a large opera house without a microphone. He struggles with the technical demands of full operatic roles, such as sustaining a steady breath and maintaining the pure, open vowels essential to the art form. In the words of one opera insider, his voice has a "lack of true vibration on the low notes" and his technique is better suited for the "popera" genre he pioneered, not for the traditional operatic stage.

If you’re a fan, you’re likely already fuming. Trigger warning- it’s going to get worse.

As I stripped away the facade, I came to a poignant, albeit ineloquent, conclusion: Bocelli is to Opera what Olive Garden is to Italian Cuisine. People get the feeling, just not the authenticity. Not that it’s a bad thing. The Bellagio in Las Vegas delivers the exact same thing. It’s a viable commercial model, and I imagine there are a bunch of folks who stayed at either or both in Vegas and found themselves utterly disappointed when they took their dream trips to the real Venice and Paris. When I use this analogy (and I actively use it because I love the visceral reaction to it) people are ready to throw down. But as our friend, comedian Mike Marino says, “let that marinate” as we move-on.

What is it we REALLY want out of disclosure?

We want to be right; dare I say, validated. That’s the bottom line. What does a spouse want when infidelity is discovered after years of gaslighting? They want the truth. We can break-up with our government officials by not re-electing them, but were they ever really the problem? At one point, yes, certainly. But today? They’re victims of their predecessors’ secrecy, and there are a ton of actions they can take to correct it for the future. We have a near-instinctual drive to fixate on betrayal. And in doing so, we sometimes lose sight of the future we still have time to shape.

Healing our shattered egos

It’s going to be uncomfortable, but gain some perspective, fast. This isn’t just a scientific revelation. It’s nature revealing itself to us in many ways.

Prepare for the answers not to be the ones you want. Become a forward thinker. Get excited about the possibilities.

Also, prepare for the possibility that even within the extraordinary nature of this revelation, there are likely some much more logical and much less sexy and intriguing answers to phenomena. Some of my own less-sexy reinterpretations have often earned me a “talk to the hand” response, but they are grounded in a more logical, rather than fantastical, view of the phenomena.

• Ancient structures: Just outdated infrastructure that originally supported their exploration.

• Alien civilizations under the ocean: Just refueling points.

• Nukes turned off and on, appearances over nuclear bases and facilities as a warning for us to stop: Maybe they were just researching, collecting data, connecting into our much less advanced networks, and caused it to crash. Following the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, where there were increased sightings reported prior to and one during over reactor 4, there is a significant drop in interferences as compared to before 1986. Maybe it was a big oops, and they said, "better just watch," because that’s what it appears they’ve been doing since.

Not that any of it still isn’t fascinating, but it’s less fantastical and more necessary. Someone recently asked me with regard to Dr. Beatriz Villarroel’s discovery of 100,000 transient satellites, “if aliens are so advanced, why would they need so many? Why would they need any at all?” My answer was, "to be advanced means to have been not so advanced at one time." Look at us: since Sputnik 1 launched on October 4, 1957, humanity has placed an incredible number of satellites into orbit. The European Space Agency (ESA) reports that as of July 2025, approximately 22,740 satellites have been launched, with about 12,300 still functioning. A huge portion of those are commercial constellations like Starlink, which alone has over 8,000 satellites in orbit.

This number is set to explode. Novaspace forecasts an average of over 3,700 satellites launched annually between 2024 and 2033. Projections from Goldman Sachs suggest that as many as 70,000 low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites could be launched by 2030 alone. The numbers are hard to fathom.

Extrapolating our own current trends to 100 or 1,000 years yields a truly astronomical number of satellites. So, 100,000 might be quite conservative if considering the grand scale of the universe and the numbers of NHI species accepted. The point is, even for a civilization that has achieved a Type I status on the Kardashev scale—meaning they can harness all the energy available on their home planet—managing a civilization across a star system or multiple systems would require a complex and vast network of infrastructure for communication, resource management, observation, and defense. Our own rapid expansion of space infrastructure serves as a perfect, less fantastical model for what we might be seeing from others.

Cautious Optimism & restoring faith in government

By all indications in our research, the government has been getting its proverbial arms around whatever it is they DO know which is either very little or a lot. They’ve developed systems that we assess can disrupt the type of craft they’ve recovered (which did not indicate any type of weapon system). Yet, it seems there is an insistence to limit or defeat it. The idea that we don’t want them stealing our technology is laughable, so let’s take that off the table. Popular theories suggest some NHI want to help us, some destroy us. So perhaps it’s for the latter. The other end of that spectrum is the genuine possibility that no one really knows.

Concerns about civic disruptions while valid are not necessarily justifiable; but in our quest to be right, we also require some serious introspective self-examination first and openness to changing our own preconceptions and notions of how we individually identify ourselves, which shapes our own sense of reality. We need to sense-check ourselves that we’re not so caught up in the fantasy of disclosure that we might be prepared for its realities.

Postscript: The Challenge Ahead

So here’s the challenge, one that no government can prepare you for, and no whistleblower can answer for you:

Are you ready to meet the version of yourself that emerges when your worldview breaks?

Disclosure, whatever it looks like, won’t just reshape what we know - it will reshape who we are, both individually and collectively. That means our work begins now, not when the press conference happens. Start by asking:

What am I hoping to be right about?

What part of my identity is built around certainty?

Am I prepared to lead others through confusion, not just celebrate vindication?

Thoughtful citizens will shape the post-disclosure world is not just informed ones. So let’s stop treating disclosure like a spectacle and start treating it like a mirror.