“Just show the alien”: Neil deGrasse Tyson urges greater transparency from government after UFO files release

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson had a strong message for the U.S. government following the release of the third batch of the infamous UFO files on June 12.

During his appearance on ‘The Fox News Rundown' last month, Tyson bluntly argued that after years of speculation surrounding alien life, the public is more than ready to see some actual proof, if it exists.

This is the image of Neil deGrasse Tyson at an event in New York City on December 18, 2019.

The U.S. Department of War began releasing the UFO files back in May as part of the Trump administration's "historic transparency effort."

The files contain documents, images, and recordings that provide a look at how the government has tracked and investigated unidentified aerial phenomena over decades. But they do not contain the kind of proof that Tyson has been seeking.

The Department of War released the third tranche of records under PURSUE on June 12, 2026. The image shows a collection that includes correspondence between FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Rev. Charles Barnes. It concerns Barnes’ reported incident of what was believed to have involved unidentified anomalous phenomena.

Tyson thinks that the public has been exposed to alien movies so much that their reaction to an actual extraterrestrial being would be "anticlimactic."

“Is it too much to ask at this point for them to just show the alien? That’s all. I don’t think I’m asking too much here,” the 67-year-old said. “We’ve already been told this, so to say if they rolled out an alien, we’d somehow freak out given the century of alien movies we’d been treated to and alien stories… I don’t see that we’d freak out at all.”

This is a 3D-generated image of a friendly first contact between humans and aliens.

While he argued that the public would have a lukewarm reaction to actual aliens, Tyson also revealed that there is one thing that would genuinely surprise him—a humanoid extraterrestrial being.

"I would only be shocked if the alien were in fact humanoid because of just the statistics of biological variation on Earth, where we have DNA in common with all other life, and most life is not humanoid on Earth," he said.

In this image, Neil DeGrasse Tyson can be seen hosting StarTalk at New York Comic Con in October 2018 at the Javits Centre in New York City.