Are there existing military or diplomatic protocols in place in the event we make ET alien contact?

Just curious. Are there specific US government procedures set up for handling potential extra terrestrial alien contacts. Who would be in charge?

No matter what happens the president is in charge of the military and the diplomats.

The Pentagon has plans for lots of things so they probably have a plan for aliens too. Or at least they had one in the past.

The Air Force spent about 18 years looking into UFOs and for some they had no explantion.

Project Blue Book - Wikipedia

I vaguely remember reading about some kind of agreement that nation states would not keep contact secret, though could be remember wrongly (or remember sci-fi as fact).

As you’d expect googling this kind of thing puts you well into tin foil hat territory but found this treatyvia the SETI site (which has its own set of guidelines). The nearest it has is:

I’d imagine a Freedom of Information Act request would settle the question.

Of course, regardless of the information provided, someone will say there is some conspiracy to prevent the “true” infromation from being released through something as banal as a FOIA request.

There are are documented plans out there, I’m sure rated “Secret”, to keep “those pesky Commies” from determining what sort of scientific equipment we’d have to make/establish contact to shape the ET opinion to fit our wants. No, I’m not kidding. We plan for enough things, do you really think we want the Vulcans basing their opinions of the human race off of Carnivale down in Rio?

Seriously though, I’d put dollars to donuts they’d set up an Emergency Operations Center under the new National Incident Management System constructs. I mean, it’s not an emergency yet, but the panic of the national (if not worldwide) population would necessitate the standup of a Federal EOC.

Tripler
. . . or when the aliens pop out of the spaceship to eat our brains.

If they’re Risans instead, we should be a-ok. :smiley:

I think its important to explain that there’s a difference between not being able to come to a conclusion because lack of evidence (lack of photos/video, trained observers, complete lack of physical evidence, etc) and concluding this stuff to be ET. Blue Book errs on the side of the former, not the latter.

While I assume the world’s militaries have some kind of protocol setup, its not published. SETI has one here, if youre interested. There’s probably some level of folly even planning ahead as the event would be mostly unpredictable.

Funny, I just asked a guy associated with the Mars exploration what would happen if they found evidence of some sort of life on Mars; i.e., would they have to notify the President before saying anything to the public. He said that there were no protocols in place as far as he knew.

That’s for extraterrestrial life, not extraterrestrial intelligence. Nobody expects to find intelligence on Mars, but there’s a chance we just might find life. Our first contact with other intelligences will almost certainly be via electromagnetic radiation (e.g., radio).

That’s an interesting concept itself; if by contact is meant a conversation. Obviously several years between transmission and reception.

Yes.

Kill them and eat them.

If they can get here and we can’t get there, that proves they are more advanced than we are. And if our history has shown one thing, it’s that gentle and peaceable native peoples are wiped out, while vicious and cannibalistic native peoples survive.

Or, that indigenous peoples slay desperate immigrants, because they cannot understand them or their ways.

I’m an American. We know about wiping out indigenous people.

You’re an optimist. I vote for first contact being us on the receiving end of a phaser blast, or functional equivalent thereof.

Like I said, via electromagnetic radiation.

Yes, they should have killed Columbus and burned his boats. He recommended enslaving the folks he found.