If aliens made contact tomorrow: the actual protocol

The closest thing to a first contact protocol is a declaration by the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA), an independent, non-governmental body founded in 1960. Its SETI committee drafted the first version in 1989 and revised it in 2010. In June 2026 the IAA ratified the first major update in more than 15 years, written with input from more than 350 researchers and led by Michael Garrett of the University of Manchester.

It binds no one. It guides scientists and institutions that search the sky for technosignatures: radio or laser signals, waste heat from giant structures, or artifacts. It says explicitly that it does not cover UAP in Earth's atmosphere. No government has published a binding plan for contact, and no international treaty mentions aliens.

The 2026 declaration has eight principles. In practice they add up to this:

To keep headlines honest, SETI researchers use the Rio Scale, proposed in 2000 by Iván Almár and Jill Tarter and updated in 2018 as Rio 2.0. It scores a claim from 0 to 10 by combining how credible it is with how big its consequences would be. When Rio 2.0 was published, its authors wrote that no signal, not even the famous 1977 Wow! signal, scored above 1.

False alarms are the norm. In 2019 the Parkes telescope in Australia picked up BLC1, a radio signal from the direction of Proxima Centauri, and news of it leaked to the press. In 2021 the Breakthrough Listen team showed it was interference from human technology. The 2026 rules on rumors and quick retractions were written for cases like this. More in our SETI signal tracker.

Officially, no one. The protocol sends the news to the UN Secretary-General, and the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space would be the natural forum for talks, but no UN body has a mandate to negotiate with aliens.

The 2010 story that the UN had appointed Malaysian astrophysicist Mazlan Othman, then head of the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), as an "alien ambassador" was false; she said she would "categorically deny" it. The UN did discuss UFOs once: in 1977 and 1978 Grenada asked for a UN agency to research them, but its draft resolutions were never adopted.

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty, the basic law of space, doesn't mention aliens either. Two articles would matter: Article XI asks states to inform the UN Secretary-General, the public and scientists about the results of their space activities, and Article IX requires avoiding harmful contamination of other worlds and "adverse changes in the environment of the Earth" from extraterrestrial matter.

The no-reply rule only covers answering a confirmed signal. The 2026 declaration says it does not address messages sent before any detection (METI), and no law stops someone with a powerful transmitter. Earth has already sent messages, most famously the 1974 Arecibo message, aimed at the star cluster M13 about 25,000 light-years away.

In 2015 scientists and writers including Elon Musk, David Brin and Andrew Siemion signed a statement that any decision to transmit "must be based upon a worldwide consensus," not on the wishes of a few people with powerful equipment. Supporters of transmitting argue that our radio and TV broadcasts have been leaking into space for about a century anyway.

Distance sets the pace. A reply travels at the speed of light, so answering a star 50 light-years away takes 50 years one way and a century for one round of question and answer. The nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, is about 4.4 light-years away. As the Brookings Institution told NASA in 1960, a discovery would be followed by "years of silence."

If the contact is an object in our skies rather than a signal from the stars, the SETI protocol doesn't apply. UAP over Earth are a matter for militaries and security agencies, in the US the Pentagon's AARO, and no government has published how it would handle a confirmed visitor. What else would follow is in our day-after guide.

An interstellar object sits in between: if telescopes found that one was artificial, it would count as an artifact under the 2026 definition of technosignatures. The latest, 3I/ATLAS, discovered in July 2025, is a comet according to NASA, though Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb argued that a technological origin should be considered.

Samples fall under planetary protection rules. Under COSPAR guidelines that NASA applies, material returned from places that might host life, such as Mars, must stay sealed and be studied in containment until it is shown to be safe or is sterilized. And contact isn't illegal: NASA's 1969 Extra-Terrestrial Exposure rule, written to quarantine returning Apollo crews, was removed in 1991.