“Discovery or disclosure of alien visitation to Earth in the form of UFOs, UAPs, or any other technological artifact or alien biological form, as confirmed by major scientific institutions and government agencies, will not happen by December 31, 02030” Detailed Terms »

Since the founding of the Skeptics Society and Skeptic magazine in 1992, I have been documenting predictions by UFOlogists that discovery or disclosure of alien visitation to Earth is coming any day now. Believers appear in the media boldly predicting that by the end of the year we will have proof of alien contact—-33 years later I'm still waiting for said proof. More recently, proponents of UAPs as alien spacecraft have appeared before the U.S. Congress, confidently claiming that they know people who have seen and even touched aliens and/or their spaceships, back-engineered their technologies, and even communicated with the aliens. Yet when pushed for evidence, they always demur, saying that it's "classified", "top-secret", that Men-in-Black threatened them into silence, that their careers and even their lives are at stake if they disclose said evidence, that they could only reveal the evidence in a "SCIF" (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) but not in Congress, and that many people in the U.S. government, CIA, FBI, NSA, etc. (never named) have this information and evidence of alien visitation. The purpose of this bet, in keeping with the rules of Long Bets and the philosophy of the Long Now Foundation, is to reveal the actual confidence of UFO/UAP alien believers by getting them to put their money where their beliefs appear to be. You say we will have alien disclosure by the end of the year? O-kay, let's place a wager on that prediction. I say it won't happen. Will anyone take me up on this bet, with December 31, 02027 being the end of the bet? Criteria for disclosure: If the leading scientific institutions and government agencies confirm that alien contact has been made, analogous to the Chinese Spy Balloon incident of 2023. High resolution photographs and videos were taken of the object in U.S. airspace, it was confirmed by the POTUS, Pentagon, Secretary of Defense, covered by all major media, and then shot down and the debris collected. The bet cannot be resolved with grainy videos, blurry photographs, and anecdotes about spooky lights in the night sky. Actual evidence as required in all scientific investigations is necessary to resolve the bet.