What Should You Do In the Unlikely Event You Meet An Alien?

What do you do if you encounter an alien? It’s obviously fairly unlikely, but nothing is impossible—after all, you can’t spell meet without ET. If there’s a stray dog in your backyard, there’s a set procedure to follow. But what if, rather than a mere hound, it’s a creature from another world?

“If you meet an alien in your backyard, my recommendation is to get out of town,” Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, an organization seeking to explore, understand, and explain the origin and nature of life in the universe, tells Mental Floss. “If they have the technology to come here, they’re so far beyond us that whatever they want to do, they're going to do. If they’re here to take over the planet, it’s going to be pretty hard to stop them.”

A creature from another planet lurking on your property means not only that there is intelligent life elsewhere, but that it is at a significantly more technologically advanced stage than humanity. A species with the ability to not only travel the enormous distances involved (the closest star to our sun, which does have some potentially life-supporting planets, is 4.2 light years away), but also land undetected in your flowerbed would simply have us outclassed.

As you flee, however, you might want to contact the emergency services. If, for instance, the alien is aflame—and given that we know nothing about what form such a creature might take, there’s no real reason it wouldn’t be—you might want to give the fire department a call, for example. Moving up a notch, the FBI and Department of Defense are frequently contacted with flying saucer sightings, as are the UK’s Royal Air Force and Ministry of Defence and, well, pretty much every other emergency service in every country. This is because there is no set protocol, no universally agreed-upon decree of exactly what to do in the event of a close encounter.

“As far as I know, there is no policy for that, because that would be like Neanderthals having a policy for if the U.S. military decided to take them on,” Shostak says. “If aliens were actually landing here, we could have whatever policy we wanted and it wouldn’t be likely to help much.”

Whatever Hollywood might tell us, the likelihood is that any contact we have with beings from another world will be limited to picking up a signal from deep space, rather than encountering the long fingers and warm heart of a charming 3-foot-tall alien rustling around in shrubbery. As luck would have it, there is a protocol for that; it's known as the Declaration of Principles Concerning Activities Following the Detection of Extraterrestrial Intelligence [PDF] and was put together by the International Academy of Astronautics with input from Shostak.

The protocols are also entirely voluntary, with no force of law behind them and nobody under any obligation to adhere to them. What if you don’t want to tell everybody? What if you fancy keeping information about life beyond Earth to yourself for a while? You’re the one talking to aliens, after all—surely you can make a few bucks out of the situation ...

As Shostak points out, this kind of thinking is unlikely to get you anywhere. Given the distances involved, and the power required to transmit information that far, you aren’t going to be in any kind of dialogue. Secondly, revealing that you have detected a transmission is useless without it being verified and studied—the process of which, by necessity, involves making that information available to the world. Thirdly, interpreting any alien message will be a mammoth task involving a lot of work from a lot of people, a task unlikely to ever reach a definitive conclusion. “It would depend on whether they were trying to make it easy,” Shostak says.

Anything you discovered would belong to humanity as a whole, as we collectively tried to figure out what the signal meant, both literally and existentially, knowing we are not alone in the universe. You’d get to be the first person to prove there was intelligent life beyond Earth, which might be mildly less exciting in the short term than getting attacked by a little green man while taking the trash out, but at least you’d live to tell the tale.