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Disclosure was meant to be slow
Acclimatization
The logic is an anesthetization and acclimatization process. Everyone focuses on the topic, it gets normalized, the temperature cools, and then the shocking thing arrives. Current releases follow the same pattern, in small tranches of low-hanging fruit: videos and recordings first.
A sudden release
A sudden release has wide costs. It affects allies and adversaries alike, and adversaries have to decide what to tell their own citizens. There is possible theological distress, and the Vatican has studied the subject for a long time and stayed quiet. Some government think tanks wrote reports warning that revealing certain things could trigger a response from a third party, a Ghostbusters moment.
A slow rollout
A slow rollout has its own costs. Human factors, adversaries getting ahead, and other whistleblowers mean a rollout probably takes at least 12 months, yet China and Russia could take advantage of any American delay. China has publicly admitted a UAP task force, and a June 2020 South China Morning Post article reported that it analyzes encounters with AI.
Has any government studied how people would react?
In 1960 a NASA-commissioned report from the Brookings Institution, titled Proposed Studies on the Implications of Peaceful Space Activities for Human Affairs, included a short section on possible discovery of extraterrestrial life. It said the effects on society were hard to predict and that history showed some societies collapsing when confronted with a more advanced one. It is one of the earliest government-funded studies of the question. The report ran to over 200 pages on space policy more broadly.
How has the Vatican approached extraterrestrial life?
The Vatican Observatory has employed Jesuit astronomers for more than a century. In 2009 the Pontifical Academy of Sciences hosted a week-long conference on astrobiology, where scientists and theologians discussed the possibility of life elsewhere. The observatory's director, Guy Consolmagno, has said that a thinking being on another world would pose no problem for Catholic belief. The Vatican Observatory runs a telescope in Arizona.
Has a secret ever been released gradually before?
Britain's Ultra program, which broke German Enigma codes at Bletchley Park, stayed secret for about thirty years after World War II. Its existence reached the public only in 1974, when former RAF officer F. W. Winterbotham published The Ultra Secret. Historians then had to rewrite accounts of major battles. Britain released the Bletchley Park decrypts to the National Archives in stages over the following decades.
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