On 60 Minutes Bigelow Aerospace president Robert Bigelow said “there has been and is an existing presence, an ET presence” on or around Earth. “I’m absolutely convinced. That’s all there is to it,” Bigelow told Lara Logan.

Bigelow, whose company has partnered with NASA and Elon Musk’s SpaceX to test their immense, expandable spaceship habitats, inflated in orbit, has been a believer in UFOs as extraterrestrial phenomena since his grandparents reported encountering a craft that “sped up and came right into their face and filled up the entire windshield of the car.”

But Bigelow’s belief in extraterrestrials visiting Earth go far beyond conclusions reached from family anecdote and the public record, or so he implies. “I spent millions and millions and millions — I probably spent more as an individual than anybody else in the United States has ever spent on this subject.”

Through his now-defunct National Institute for Discovery Science, Bigelow collected hotline reports of UFO sightings and precipitated a minor scandal in UFO circles by allegedly buying Mutual UFO Network case files from an inside source. He’s even bought up physical evidence and worked it out so the FAA submits UFO sightings directly to Bigelow Aerospace, since there’s no government entity accepting them.

It’s likely the evidence Bigelow has amassed doesn’t conclusively prove extraterrestrials are visiting Earth, although it sure seems to have convinced him. When Logan asked if he’s risking anything by taking a public stance that UFOs are visiting Earth, Bigelow said, “I don’t give a damn. I don’t care.”

“It’s not going to make a difference. It’s not going to change reality of what I know,” he said. “You don’t have to anywhere… it’s just like right under people’s noses.”

If whatever Bigelow has found is so compelling, perhaps it’s time he share. Instead, Bigelow repeatedly hints at big secrets, sufficient for absolute certainty, that he’s simply not telling. The absence of evidence would be sufficient to dismiss most other UFO boasts of this nature. But in Bigelow’s case it’s not simply a naked claim, but one backed by an aerospace billionaire (perhaps the industry most entwined with government) who has spent years privatizing vast troves of UFO evidence.

Bigelow should make a choice between revealing what he knows — even if it means burning sources or leaking classified information — and relinquishing the rhetoric of certainty and insinuation. Otherwise we might be lead to the conclusion that Bigelow is deliberately withholding from the population of Earth the most important truth in the history of our species.

And if Bigelow won’t do it for us, he should do it for himself. In 1968 Daniel Ellsberg, who would later leak the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times, provided some advice to Henry Kissinger about the psychological toll classified secrets can take:

“It will have become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn't have these clearances. Because you'll be thinking as you listen to them: 'What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations?' And that mental exercise is so torturous that after a while you give it up and just stop listening.”

Kissinger didn’t take the advice. Bigelow now has the chance to make a different choice, by providing the transparency the public is owed on the UFO question, especially because the government won’t. Bigelow, it’s time to put up or shut up.

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