Spaceships. That's all anyone is asking for. Just one actual, honest-to-goodness spaceship. An alien body would also be acceptable - apparently the government has a few of those lying around somewhere. Instead, the first batch of "alien files," released yesterday, delivered the same old cocktail of fuzzy images and retracted accounts that has been confusing the public since the 1940s. An astrophysicist who searches the cosmos for intelligent life as a day job was skeptical but intrigued; now they're just skeptical and slightly annoyed.

A lot of hype led up to this so-called disclosure. Former President Obama accidentally sparked wild speculation with a misinterpreted comment about extraterrestrial life. President Trump then hopped on social media to promise the release of "Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs)." What actually appeared on the website looks like more of the same: blurry blobs, retracted testimony, and an FBI employee's "graphic overlay" on a picture of a field that is, frankly, almost laughable in its simplicity. Low-resolution images of flying blobs cannot begin to answer the existentially important question of alien life.

The modern UFO saga has been a long, strange trip. It started with the Roswell incident in the late 1940s, then got a boost in 1956 when an Air Force captain claimed a top-secret document called "Estimate of the Situation" concluded UFOs were extraterrestrial. That document has never been found, but it set the stage for decades of fever-dream conspiracy mongering. Then in 2017, The New York Times published a detailed exposé on a Pentagon program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), releasing UAP videos shot from Navy fighter jets. The videos showed fuzzy blobs that some claimed were moving in ways no terrestrial vehicle could match. A handful of Navy pilots came forward with their stories. Suddenly, serious people were taking alien vehicles seriously.

But personal testimony is the worst form of scientific evidence, and the videos looked dicier the more scientists examined them. One famous clip, "GOFAST," which alien advocates claimed showed a tic-tac skimming the ocean at tremendous speeds, was later revealed to be an object moving at about 40 miles an hour - otherwise known as a balloon. A Pentagon program called the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) lists it as firmly "explained."

Then came the congressional hearings. In July 2023, former Air Force intelligence officer David Grusch testified under oath that the U.S. government had been retrieving "non-human" spacecraft and "biologics" (dead alien pilots, in plain English). He claimed a supersecret program involving military and private contractors existed, but when pressed for details, he responded, "It's classified." He had not personally seen any of the supposed secrets. Congress got no actual evidence of alien spaceships in garages or alien bodies in freezers.

Sean Kirkpatrick, the first director of AARO, suggested that people like Grusch stumble into a self-reinforcing belief system - a "textbook example of circular reporting." A real disclosure would look very different. It would involve actual physical spaceships on display, or at least pieces of crashed vehicles sent to laboratories for transparent scientific analysis. It would include real radar data with detailed system descriptions, high-resolution images with verifiable metadata, and pages of physiological test results for those alien bodies. None of this appeared in the pages released yesterday.

Instead, the new batch includes FBI records of eyewitness testimonies from June 1947 to July 1968, some already released; an FBI memo from 1958 about a Detroit man's UFO sighting; and lots of videos that seem profoundly unimpressive. Some documents - like a 1996 Air Force report on "Modeling of Unlikely Space-Booster Failures in Risk Calculations" - stretch the definition of "alien files" to its breaking point.

This latest trove feels like the John F. Kennedy assassination documents: endless releases that never resolve anything for the conspiracy-theory prone. Meanwhile, astronomers using ultrapowerful telescopes will continue the slow, steady work of looking for alien life where it actually lives - on alien worlds. That will be the only disclosure day history remembers.