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SETI Panel Revises Recommendations for Dealing With ‘Disclosure Day’

An international committee of experts says it has updated its rules for evaluating and revealing the detection of extraterrestrial intelligence.

The revisions to the decades-old Declaration of Principles, created and maintained by the International Academy of Astronautics’ SETI Committee, come just days before the release of “Disclosure Day,” a movie about alien visitation directed by Steven Spielberg.

This is the first major update to the committee’s protocols in more than 15 years. “The information environment we operate in today is vastly more complex than it was in 2010,” committee chair Michael Garrett, an astrophysics professor at the University of Manchester, said in a news release. “In an era of deepfakes, automated misinformation and instant global connectivity, a single unverified claim could trigger confusion or panic. These new protocols ensure that scientists maintain the highest standards of evidence before making announcements to the world.”

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence, more widely known as SETI, has become just as vastly more complex. At first, SETI primarily involved monitoring radio emissions for patterns that could point to intentional signaling. Now the search has widened to watch for excess infrared heat signatures, optical laser emissions or even anomalous gravitational waves.

Don’t be quick to shout ‘aliens’

In its revised protocols, the IAA SETI Committee acknowledges the new modes of SETI research as well as the emerging challenges facing SETI researchers. It calls for the organizations that support those researchers to shield them from harassment, doxing, intense media scrutiny and other “negative professional repercussions.”

The guidelines confirm that SETI practitioners and their institutions should be able to report their activities and share their results publicly. They should be free to respond to reasonable inquiries from news outlets, social-media platforms and other information channels. But the guidelines stress that no public announcement confirming alien contact should be made until a signal or an artifact has been authenticated by independent organizations using different instrumentation.

“We do not shout ‘alien’ the moment we see a strange blip,” Garrett said. “The scientific method demands we check, check again, and then ask others to check. Only when we have reached a consensus that a signal is credible do we bring it to the world.”

If the evidence of extraterrestrial origin is deemed credible, the discoverers or their institutions should promptly report their conclusion to the scientific community and the U.N. secretary-general — and be given the opportunity to make the first public announcement.

If E.T. phones, don’t rush to answer

A formal verification report should be distributed to relevant organizations including the IAA, the International Astronomical Union, the Committee on Space Research, the International Telecommunications Union and the U.N. Office of Outer Space Affairs. Verification data should be stored in at least two tamper-proof repositories in different geographic locations, and open-access publication of the data is encouraged.

The IAA SETI Committee says it will set up a Post-Detection Subcommittee that can engage with news organizations and social-media platforms to help disseminate accurate information. And it says no one should try to reply to an extraterrestrial signal until there are appropriate international consultations, with the United Nations and other broadly representative international organizations playing the leading roles.

The revised declaration was ratified by the full board of the Paris-based IAA, and a technical presentation is scheduled for October at the International Astronautical Congress in Turkey.

“The release of these updated rules and protocols marks an important step in acknowledging both the radically different media landscape that science functions within today, and the vastly expanded efforts in terms of technology and resources being deployed in the search for intelligent life beyond Earth,” said committee member Bill Diamond, president and CEO of the California-based SETI Institute. “We applaud Professor Garrett’s leadership in developing these new protocols, and the IAA for their ratification.”

Balancing rigor and candor

Douglas Vakoch, president of METI International, said in an email that the updated protocol “tries to strike a balance between letting SETI scientists conduct their research in a rigorous fashion and the competing demand to keep the public informed about what would be one of humankind’s greatest discoveries.”

“The better the public understands the complex process of confirming whether a signal from aliens is real, the better they will understand the vital need to foster one of the hardest of human virtues: patience,” he said.

Vakoch said the updated protocol recognizes that “everything changes once we detect a signal from alien intelligence.”

“Finally we will be able to gain the attention of the United Nations and other international bodies that so far have refused to make this a priority. Once we have a confirmed detection, we’ll finally be able to convene a globally representative assembly to decide how best to respond,” he said. “Until then, we need to move ahead with our attempt to make first contact in the same way SETI scientists always have — by recruiting experts who recognize the importance of these issues even before we know for sure there’s other life in the universe.”

Vakoch, who has studied the options for communicating with aliens since his high-school days in the late 1970s, noted that the protocol specifically avoids addressing “the separate and distinct subject of messaging to extraterrestrial intelligence in advance of a confirmed detected extraterrestrial signal,” a strategy known as METI.

“Though METI scientists have always sought a broad-based, global discussion of how best to communicate with other technological civilizations, including the ethical and practical issues of how best to represent humankind, they face the same challenges as SETI scientists in gaining access to organizations like the United Nations,” Vakoch said. “The new protocol explicitly recognizes that sending messages to the stars before we make first contact requires a different process than the one that’s laid out for sending a response to a signal we receive from space.”

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ICE shootings protested in Pasadena on National Day of Action

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Approximately 50 demonstrators gathered Saturday morning in Pasadena as part of a national action to honor lives lost during immigration enforcement operations and in detention centers during the Trump administration.

They wore fliers around their necks, hung with yellow thread, bearing the smiling faces and names of some of the 75 people who have died since January 2025.

“Killed by ICE” was printed above a photo of each person, including local resident Roberto Carlos Montoya Valdez, a 52-year-old killed while trying to flee immigration agents who descended on a Home Depot in Monrovia last year.

The Los Angeles residents, part of the San Gabriel Foothills Indivisible group, carried American flags and held signs that read “No ICE No War” and “Stop ICE Murders.”

“Good morning, Pasadena,” Betsy Hanger, an organizer with the group, boomed into a megaphone as she walked through an intersection. “Honk for democracy. Honk if you want ICE off our streets now.”

A chorus of horns sounded as drivers signaled their support.

Organizer Andra Clarke held a banner in each hand that read “Neighbors Say ICE Out.” The sign around her neck carried the name and photo of Francisco Gaspar-Andrés, a 48-year-old who died in a Texas detention center in December.

Clarke, 61, said the group has been gathering at the intersection of Colorado Boulevard and Fair Oaks Avenue every Saturday since March. Last weekend, they celebrated civil rights activist John Lewis.

This Saturday, though, their focus was aimed at ICE.

“Now 75 people have died at the hands of ICE,” Clarke said. “We were originally told, ‘Oh they’re going to go after the criminals, the people who are the worst of the worst.’ That’s a lie; that is not what’s happening.

“They’re targeting communities, they’re targeting people of color. It’s fascism. … Anybody who cares about humanity should care about what’s happening.”

Clarke said it hit her hard when she learned of the two recent deaths at the hands of ICE.

The event was also a vigil honoring 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, who was killed by an ICE agent in Houston on July 7 while driving his construction crew to a job site, and Johan Sebastian Guerrero, 25, who was fatally shot by an ICE officer in Maine during a traffic stop earlier this month.

“It’s like, again? It just doesn’t end. It feels like it never ends — the evil.”

Shortly before noon, Clarke used a megaphone to read aloud the names of the dozens who have died. After each name read, Hanger struck a singing bowl, the vibrations sounding out in the corner where they stood. At times, she read “unidentified man” or “four unidentified women.”

Next to them was a poster board with a photo of Daphy Michel, a 31-year-old woman found unresponsive at a bus shelter in Pittsburgh after ICE released her “into cold winter conditions and no care for mental health episodes or notice to relatives.”

“Let’s take a moment of silence for all those who were taken,” Clarke said, bowing her head.

Among those gathered to listen was Leticia Lopez, a 65-year-old South Pasadena resident whose voice trembled as she talked about the impact of hearing about another arrest or death tied to enforcement operations.

“It gets me to the core,” she said, striking her chest. “It’s not getting any better, it’s getting worse. I just feel like I need to do something.”

Lopez, who wore a shirt that read “Immigrants are not criminals but the president is,” said her mother and grandmother were forcefully repatriated from Arizona to Mexico.

Her mother, who was raised in Mexico, later met her father there. He moved to the U.S. in the 1950s as a bracero. Hearing the stories of today, she said, “triggers everything that they went through.”

“When I see it happening, it’s a generational trauma that I feel,” she said. Lopez said people around her are carrying passports and documents in public to prove they’re citizens.

“Because they’re afraid they might be profiled, picked up, kidnapped by ICE. When my son goes out, I worry,” she said of her 28-year-old.

Later that afternoon, about four miles away outside of Home Depot in Pasadena, organizers staked in the ground dozens of white crosses that bore photos of the dead — the majority of them men. Attendees of the vigil laid flowers at the crosses in a makeshift cemetery.

“Shot dead by ICE,” read one with a photo of Keith Porter Jr., who was killed by an off duty ICE officer in California.

Several of them contained details of how the deaths unfolded. A man killed after a tractor trailer struck him as he fled an ICE raid in Florida. A Cuban immigrant who died in a detention center (his death was later ruled a homicide). A Mexican national who fell 30 feet to his death during a raid in California.

Among the photos on crosses were Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

“Are we going to wait until 70 more die to do something?” asked Marlom Portillo, an educator with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, as he staked more crosses into the ground.

“What they want us to do is forget them,” Portillo added. “We will never get tired of denouncing this atrocity.”

“There are more people who died than there are people here protesting,” Kathleen Vallee, a Monrovia resident, observed to her friend. “And that says a lot about us.”

Vallee said when she attended the “No Kings” protest, it was “jam-packed.” Only a dozen people had gathered around 20 minutes into the vigil.

“It turns my stomach,” Vallee said, hands clasped. “This just seems to be seeping up from the sewer into our democracy and that motivates me.”

As the small crowd assembled, demonstrators carried signs that read “Every person is sacred,” “we keep us safe” and “neighbors say ICE out.” One woman carried a handmade sign that read: “Who will they come for next?”

Sheri Lochner, a 64-year-old Monrovia resident, is part of East Pasadena Community Defense Corner, a small group that “provides support and a sense of community” for day laborers.

Lochner said she watched as immigrant agents took six or seven men at an Oct. 1 ICE raid at the Monrovia Home Depot.

“So un-American,” Lochner said, as she scanned the rows of crosses. “This isn’t right.”

She added that her mom, who voted for Trump the first time, agreed with her.

“I speak up, I will not be silent,” she added.

News

Inside the Rushed Effort to Get Trump His New Air Force One

A New York Times investigation found that President Trump’s push to speed delivery of the aircraft led to ballooning costs and trade-offs in safety features.

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Lucky 13! Starship Deploys Starlink Satellites and Splashes Down Intact

SpaceX’s Starship super-rocket deployed operational next-generation Starlink satellites for the first time during its 13th flight test, which addressed snags that arose in the previous test.

The 407-foot-tall, two-stage rocket rose from its Starbase launch pad in Texas at 5:51 p.m. CT today (10:51 p.m. UTC), with all 33 Raptor engines firing on the Super Heavy booster. On the way up, the rocket set a record for maximum dynamic pressure, also known as Max-Q.

Minutes after liftoff, the Starship upper stage — known as Ship — separated to continue on the flight test’s trajectory, and then the booster relit its engines for a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. SpaceX launch commentator Dan Huot noted that not all of the engines fired up as planned — making for a splash that was a bit spicier than expected but still safe.

During the next phase of the test, Ship sent out 20 operational Starlink V3 satellites from a deployment system that’s been nicknamed the “Pez Dispenser.” For about 20 minutes, SpaceX’s engineering team ran a series of tests to check the deployment of solar arrays and see how the satellites were able to communicate with other spacecraft in the telecom network using laser systems.

“Not only were we able to make contact with all 20, but we also made comms over lasers with all of them as well,” SpaceX engineer Kate Tice said. “So, that is awesome.”

The satellites weren’t meant to stay in orbit. After the tests were completed, all 20 re-entered the atmosphere and burned up. But the data gathered during the tests will help SpaceX ensure that future batches of Starlink V3 satellites work properly.

Starlink V3 satellites are built to download data at speeds of up to 1 terabit per second, which marks a substantial technological advance over the V2 satellites that make up the bulk of the Starlink constellation. Adding V3 satellites to the network will upgrade Starlink’s capacity for direct-to-device services.

After satellite deployment, the upper stage executed a relight of one of its six Raptor engines in mid-flight, and then descended through the atmosphere to a splashdown in the Indian Ocean. On the way down, Ship’s heat shield weathered fiery flashes of plasma that made for quite a fireworks show on the in-space video transmitted down to Earth via Starlink. At the very end, the upper stage settled down intact in the water, spouting flames as it floated.

“That is a first. That is the softest splashdown we have ever had with a Starship there in the Indian Ocean,” Huot said. “This is a dream scenario for the team that’s trying to get this heatshield data.”

This marked the second test of SpaceX’s beefed-up Starship V3 rocket. The previous test in May followed a similar flight profile and was rated a success, but SpaceX made some modifications to systems on the Super Heavy booster as well as on the upper stage to address engine performance issues.

SpaceX’s initial attempt to launch the 13th flight test was aborted a week ago, at the moment of ignition, when four Raptor engines failed to start up for launch. After the scrub, SpaceX found six booster engines that raised concerns and replaced them for today’s second try.