What is Open Contact?
“Open contact” refers to aliens (extraterrestrial intelligent beings) appearing openly before the people of Earth and beginning interaction with humanity, and to the theory that this day is approaching. A related term is “disclosure,” the release of information on aliens and UFOs that governments have supposedly hidden.
In Japan it became widely known after the urban-legend storyteller Seki Akio repeatedly took up the theme on TV Tokyo’s program Yarisugi Toshi Densetsu. It was also discussed in an autumn 2026 special along with topics about AI and space.
What is actually happening
Behind the buzz about open contact are real developments. The U.S. Department of Defense set up an office to investigate unidentified flying objects, calling them “UAP” (unidentified anomalous phenomena), and in 2023 the U.S. Congress held a hearing on UAP. A former intelligence official’s testimony that “the government has recovered crashed craft and the bodies of non-human beings” caused a stir. In Japan, too, a cross-party parliamentary group to study UAP was launched in 2024.
Has the existence of aliens been confirmed?
However, the Department of Defense’s investigative office stated in a 2024 report that none of the cases it examined had produced evidence of extraterrestrial technology or aliens. The congressional testimony also consisted mainly of secondhand accounts, not things the witness saw directly, and has not been verified. For now, open contact is told of as “a future that may come someday.”
Images of aliens
The best-known image of an alien is the Grey, with its large head and black eyes. Many stories of encounters with aliens have been made, starting with the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
