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Worldview Watch issue #84 posted 06 /18 / 2026     

  Scientists and a future "Disclosure Day"   

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in the news: Released on June 12, Steven Spielberg’s latest film, Disclosure Day, is about a whistleblower’s attempts to thwart the supposed government conspiracy to cover up what it knows and its refusal to reveal supposed unquestionable evidence of extraterrestrial visitations. While the overwhelming scientific consensus is that no such evidence exists, anticipating the film's arousing public interest in supposed alien visitation, on June 9 Michael Garrett, writing for The Conversation, reported that, as his headline puts it, "Scientists Just Updated the Rules for What Happens When We Find Aliens." He writes, "In reality, the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence is far more likely to emerge as a faint anomaly in astronomical data, followed by a slow, painstaking process of verification, peer review, and intense international deliberation. There might be no single Eureka moment and no lone scientist with the answer. " 

Days earlier, a Disclosure Party post  recalled a disagreement between Jacques Vallee—scientist, UFOologist, and advisor on Spielberg's earlier (1977) film "Close Encounters of the Third Kind"—and Spielberg over what UFOs represent. It reports that Vallee believes, "the phenomenon might be stranger than 'aliens from another planet' and potentially reveal unknown aspects of consciousness, reality, time, and space."  

worldview related analysis by Stephen P. Cook, Managing Director, project Worldview 

The Wikipedia article about "The Disclosure Movement describes it as "a social movement that argues in favor of various conspiracy theories which allege that governments generally, or the US government specifically, have secret information regarding UFOs and non-human intelligence..." The project Worldview theme #36B: Conspiracies. describes a conspiracy theory as beginning with people "imagining a few evil individuals with a hidden agenda conspiring to infiltrate institutions, manipulate events and shape outcomes to their liking " It ends by noting that "While occasionally a conspiracy is real—the typical internet spread conspiracy is mostly fiction." 

US government involvement with studying reports of UFOs began in 1947 with J. Allen Hynek, then chair of the Northwestern University Astronomy Department, serving as a scientific advisor. In this role, Hynek became one of the first people to have access to trace evidence purportedly left by UFOs. By 1963, French astronomer and UFO enthusiast Jacques Vallee began working at Northwestern with Hynek—the man who was later described as his mentor. Valle is an interesting character—someone whose ideas I've been following since the late 1960s when his association with  Hynek became known. Despite  his own impressive scientific credentials, Vallee's UFO research has resulted in his being labeled a heretic by mainstream scientists. Given his opposition to the idea that UFOs represent space travel visits by an advanced extra-terrestrial civilization, Vallee is similarly an outcast in the community of UFO enthusiasts. Thus he refers to himself as "a heretic among heretics." 

His ideas took decades to develop. They were undoubtedly influenced by his association—some of it in a professional consulting capacity— with those involved in remote viewing experiments and with psychic celebrities, including Uri Geller. By 1990 he had advanced five arguments as to why the UFO evidence does not support the extra-terrestrial visitation hypothesis, and formulated instead what has been called the "Interdimensional UFO Hypothesis". This posits that UFO sightings are "the result of experiencing other 'dimensions' or 'portals' that coexist separately alongside our own."  

Given the serious challenge they pose to mainstream science, such beliefs are most likely anathema to physicist and author Sean M. Carroll. I recently finished reading Carroll's (otherwise excellent) 2024 book Quanta and Fields, when, at its conclusion, I encountered a surprisingly strong statement: "We have excellent reason to believe that the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely known." Surprising in that the scientific conceptual framework —while wildly successful in making sense of reality— is nonetheless associated with being a work in progress, and scientists are thought of as being open-minded, curious and ready to go wherever the evidence takes them. 

In this regard, with respect to the 104 project Worldview  themes paired to define 52 choices, consider seven key theme choices (marked "Selected") associated with a generic "Pro Science" worldview: 

I'm not the only one trained as a scientist disturbed by this and similar statements Carroll has made. Emerson Green, in a July 2024 substack post "The Core Theory and Strong Emergence :Responding to Sean Carroll's argument against everything", writes "He (Carroll) uses this argument – I’ll call it the argument from the core theory – in a million different contexts, many of them related to consciousness. He uses it to argue against the afterlife, the soul, psychokinesis, levitation, panpsychism, and against far more specific philosophical views like the idea that rationally responding to one’s value judgments or conscious inclinations is a fundamental form of causation." 

Carroll's seeming comfort with instantly dismissing various difficult to explain / paranormal things and closing the door on certain possibilities for extending the scientific conceptual framework is in sharp contrast to what Nobel Prize winning mathematical physicist Roger Penrose has written. Near the end of his 1100 page 2004 classic The Road to Reality–A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe, he writes, "I do not believe that we have yet found the true 'road to reality'. He goes on to cite "the role of the mind in physical theory" and "the question of conscious mentality"— noting that it "must ultimately be an important one in our quest for an understanding of physical reality." Note: Penrose is essentially acknowledging what has been called "the hardest problem in science"—that is finding an answer to "What is consciousness?" (see note #1 below) 

My encountering Carroll's statement came at a time when I had recently experienced perhaps the single most outrageous, difficult to explain synchronicity (see note #2) of my whole life. In groping for an explanation—and thinking about a future sort of "disclosure day" when scientists announce something of a breakthrough in the quest for answers to questions along the road to reality—I found myself re-reading something I'd written (note #3) years earlier:

“Is the universe something like a hologram, with the whole contained in every part? If so, does this provide information that informs both evolution and choices individuals make? If so, how is information that we might say is elsewhere in space / time—in the distant future, once stored inside the brain of someone who lived in the distant past, in a Cosmic Mind, etc—transferred?  I can imagine waking up to stunning experimental confirmation of some physicists’ theory of everything—one built around a holographic principle, spacetime emerging from quantum entanglement, and pointing to information transfer mechanisms. .This too would be a key transition in the human experience. While marking a stunning triumph of (choice #1 and choice #10) evidence-based methods and science, it could also validate something quite different: the (choice #6) mystical, (choice #7) magic, (choice #9) vitalistic, and (choice #10) non-rational experiences that have long informed peoples’ spirituality".

Confirmation of the existence of something like "a Cosmic Mind" could conceivably explain mysteries associated with synchronicities and various paranormal phenomena (telepathy, reincarnation, etc.) that science is currently struggling to deal with. This—if it ever occurs—could be far in the future. Today the path of least resistance for many paranormal phenomena debunkers is simply to question their existence by noting that attributing reality to them would violate the laws of physics. Sometimes the debunking will extend to challenging the supposed evidence and pointing to other motives (besides getting at "the truth") driving the principals—such as their financially profiting. (See issue #75 posted 12/3/2023 of this blog, titled  Bashar of Essassani and Bashar al-Assad: UFO Religious Celebrity and War Criminal, for one example.) Often a hasty debunking of paranormal reports and "run of the mill" sightings of unexplained sights in the night sky is entirely appropriate—but occasionally it is not.  

As for explaining the weirdest, most difficult to explain cases of the last eight decades associated with UFOs, I can imagine that Jacques Vallee would love to see disclosure of unquestionable evidence validating his Interdimensional UFO Hypothesis. Given the earth-shaking effect this would have on the foundations of science, such disclosure will again require slow, painstaking process of verification, peer review, and intense international deliberation involving a significant part of the scientific community. Conceivably, a single well-defined "disclosure event" might never occur, since decades—and the death of especially vocal skeptical holdouts—might be required for eventual acceptance! Is this deplorable? Absolutely not! This is how science—with its built-in self correcting mechanisms, need for reproducible results, etc—advances in its quest for truth. Given that the scientific method based quest for knowledge has really had just (roughly) 400 years (a small part of human history) to slowly build its current framework, one wonders what that framework will look like 400 (or 4000) years from now? I think that it will eventually include provisions that facilitate explaining many (seemingly very real phenomena) that it currently can't accommodate. I could be wrong!  

notes:

#1 see the previous issue of this blog: issue #83 posted 2/20/2026  Consciousness, Worldviews, Artificial Intelligence, Quantum Physics  

#2 a synchronicity refers to events that occur either simultaneously or nearly so in meaningful fashion, but yet they have no evident cause and effect connection.  Psychology notable Carl Jung popularized the term. His followers believe that such events occur much more often than would be expected if they were due to mere random chance coincidence.  Synchronicities, they add, provide evidence of a collective unconscious, the existence of connectedness at a higher (normally unperceived) level, and that consciousness contains a "reality structurer" which psychically affects Reality.   
       

#3 from pages 369-370 in my 2022 book Choices We Make in the Global Village 

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