"Disclosure Day": The Religious Longings Behind Spielberg's Belief in ETI Visitations

 

                                                  

                                               The Final Official Trailer for Disclosure Day

                          Steven Spielberg's Extended Interview with CBS Sunday Morning

                                                       Steven Spielberg's AP Interview

                                  The Trailer for The Age of Disclosure (2025) Documentary

                                  Three Declassified Videos of UFOs Released by the Pentagon

Stephen Spielberg's new movie, Disclosure Day, has had its first weekend in the theatres.  Spielberg directed and produced the movie.  He also wrote the story that was turned into a screenplay by David Koepp.  The music is by John Williams.

This is the fourth of Spielberg's science fiction movies on extraterrestrial intelligences (ETI) visiting the Earth.  It was preceded by Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), ET, the Extraterrestrial (1982), and The War of the Worlds (2005).  So this theme has stretched across Spielberg's entire movie-making career.

Disclosure Day has two sides to it--action and contemplation.  The New York Times reviewer--Manohla Dargis--describes the action side as "a feature-length chase involving some likable, enigmatically connected people who are racing toward a shared destiny while evading powerful forces."  But she also sees the contemplative side of the movie--"sober interludes that touch on belief, reason, trauma, self-governance, the common good, and higher powers."

This shows the cinematic genius of Spielberg in combining thrilling action that appeals to a popular audience and contemplative moments that appeal to those who like pondering the big questions of human life in the universe.  Dargis conveyed the popular excitement in the movie when she reports that she scribbled in her notebook I am having so much fun.  But she also saw in the movie that Spielberg "has something to say about the world and our place in it."

These two sides are presented in the final trailer, which moves between fast-paced action scenes from the movie and clips of Spielberg speaking about how the disclosure of ETI visitations to the Earth could deepen our understanding of the cosmic meaning of life in the universe.

Here I'll begin by saying something about the active and contemplative sides of this movie.  Then I'll raise four questions suggested by the movie.

ACTION

Spoiler alert: I'm recounting the plot here.

The movie begins in the middle of the chase that will stretch throughout the movie.  Cybersecurity specialist Daniel Kellner (played by Josh O'Connor) has been chased down by Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), the head of the Wardex corporation, who is leading his Wardex agents in trying to capture Daniel.  Daniel escapes and goes into hiding at a convent with his girlfriend Jane Blankenship (Eve Hewson).  

Later, we learn that Daniel has stolen a piece of extraterrestrial technology and extensive files of photos and videos of human-alien contact collected by the Pentagon dating back to 1947.  The Wardex Corporation is a secret arm of the U.S. government charged with holding these files and making sure they are never revealed to the public, because it is believed that if they were ever made public, this would create a mass panic reaction around the world that would undermine all social order.

From the beginning of the movie, we hear news reports in the background of military and political movements around the world that are leading to a nuclear World War III provoked by North Korea.  We see mobs of people at gas stations and grocery stores stocking up supplies in preparation for a global nuclear holocaust.

In Kansas City, television meteorologist Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) is preparing for work when a cardinal flies into her home, briefly observes her, and then flies away.  This stirs up her latent psychic abilities for intuitively understanding the thoughts and experiences of others and for speaking in languages she has never learned.  During a live weather broadcast, she begins speaking in an unknown language.  Footage of the broadcast goes viral.  People at Wardex identify the language as extraterrestrial, and so Wardex agents quickly go to Kansas City to chase down Margaret.  After she is hospitalized by people who fear she has had some kind of mental breakdown, Margaret is almost captured by Wardex agents, but she intuitively understands that the agents are out to kill her, and she escapes and goes into hiding.

Daniel reveals the stolen files to Jane.  He explains that Wardex has been experimenting on captive aliens to understand their mental and biological powers, and they have also been reverse engineering their technology so that humans can use it.  

And indeed, Noah Scanlon has learned how to use an alien device to give himself telepathic powers.  He uses this to get into the mind of Jane (Daniel's girlfriend) to discover that they are hiding in a motel.  Jane escapes with another alien device.  But Daniel is captured.

Margaret has visions of Daniel and follows him to the secret site where the Wardex agents are holding him.  Margaret and Daniel escape when Margaret uses her empathetically telepathic powers to persuade the agents to stand back and let them leave.  But one of the agents has not been controlled by Margaret.  He chases down Margaret and Daniel and rams his car into theirs, so that their car is lodged into the side of a passing train.  Daniel pulls Margaret out of the car just in time for them to climb onto the train and make their getaway.

Margaret and Daniel are rescued by a team of Wardex employees who have decided to become whistleblowers under the leadership of Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), who has been working with Daniel.  Hugo has brought Margaret and Daniel into a secret warehouse.  There's a reconstruction of Margaret's childhood home in the warehouse.  Hugo tells her that to understand what has been happening to her, she will have to go into the house and recover her suppressed memories of how the ETIs contacted her as a child.  Inside the house, Margaret remembers that she and Daniel were abducted by ETIs as children and subjected to experiments that gave them their supernormal powers.  She also learns that the unusual animals that have appeared to them throughout their lives are ETIs who assumed animal form so that they could observe them without scaring them.

Margaret also remembers that as a child she and Daniel entered a Gingerbread House, as if they were Hansel and Gretel of the Grimms' fairy tale.  My wife and I were confused by this scene when we saw it because it didn't seem to fit into the story.  But now I think it evokes a lot of themes in Spielberg's movies.  Children are open to the magic of fairy tales in a way that adults are not.  And for that reason, they are more open to empathetic contact with ETIs than are adults.  Remember that in Spielberg's ET, it's the children who befriend ET, and they save ET from the adults from the government officers who want to capture and exploit ET.  Moreover, the story of Hansel and Gretel, like many of the Grimm fairy tales, is indeed a very grim story of how children are vulnerable to being betrayed by adults--parents who abandon them in a forest to starve and witches who want to eat them--and therefore children must be clever and resilient in helping one another to escape the harm from adults.  

We also know from Spielberg's The Fabelmans that he suffered from his parents' divorce and his mother's betrayal of his father by having an affair with his father's best friend.  We also know from that movie that Spielberg became a "fable-man" through making movies as a way of working through some of his childhood problems.  He waited until his parents died to make The Fabelmans.

But let's get back to the ending of Disclosure Day.  Margaret and Daniel, along with the whistleblowers, break into Margaret's television studio in Kansas City to make a public broadcast of "Disclosure Day"--dumping all the photographic and video files that Daniel has stolen into a broadcast that can be sent out to news broadcast outlets around the world.  Noah Scanlon and his agents try to blow up the power grid for the television studio.  But Jane arrives and gives her special extraterrestrial device to Margaret, who uses it to restore the power.  Noah feels defeated, and he decides to stand back and watch.

The television transmission spreads around the world's broadcasting systems.  We see people in all countries stunned by the images of extraterrestrial contact with humans and the work of governments in covering this up.  We also see news that as an effect of this broadcast, political and military leaders are pulling back from nuclear war.

The whistleblowers roll into the television studio a cage that has one of the extraterrestrials, who is freed from the cage.  He is a humanoid figure--a large head on a thin bodily frame with two arms and two feet and walking bipedally.  He whispers something to Daniel, who passes it on to Margaret.  Margaret prepares to broadcast the message to the world by saying, "Listen."

CONTEMPLATION

That's the end of the movie--leaving us wondering what the message from the extraterrestrial could be.  But I'm sure many audience members were like me in picking up the hints in the movie that the extraterrestrials have been empathetically watching humanity become ever more divided by conflict and now moving towards nuclear war.  Presumably, the message from the extraterrestrials to the world would be the message that Spielberg himself has intimated--that the discovery that the universe is filled with extraterrestrial intelligent life that feels empathy for all of humanity should move us to extend that circle of empathy to make peace rather than war on the Earth.

Spielberg suggests this message in what he has said about this movie in the final trailer and in various broadcast interviews over the past few weeks.  In the trailer, he says:

I am much more inclined now than when I made Close Encounters to believe that we are not the only intelligent civilization in the universe.  How will this change us?  I think for the better.  It will remind us of the capacity for empathy and that there is something bigger out there than just ourselves.  I used to say to myself wouldn't it be wonderful if all of this turned out to be true?  Wouldn't it be wonderful for people to know all of this is true?

In his recent interviews, Spielberg has said that his sense of wonder about the universe--about what there is "out there"--began in his childhood.  He tells the story of sleeping in his bed in his New Jersey home when he was somewhere around 6-7 years old.  His father woke him up and told him he had to go somewhere in the middle of the night.  He was confused by this.  His father took him to a park where people had spread out blankets so that they could lay down and look up at the Perseus meteor shower.  Spielberg remembers this wonderful sky show of falling stars.

He also remembers his father's collection of science fiction magazines of the 1950s like Analog, which started his interest in science fiction.

Then, after his parents moved to Arizona, he had a telescope in his back yard where he could study the stars and the planets in the night sky.

Spielberg has said that what convinced him that eyewitness sightings of UFOs were conclusive evidence for ETI visitations of the Earth were the series of articles in The New York Times beginning in 2017 about how the Defense Department was hiding the evidence from the public, which led to testimony by military officers to Congress in 2023 about a secret government program to cover up this evidence (Cooper, Blumenthal, and Kean 2017).

Spielberg is silent, however, about the fact that in response to a congressional mandate, the Pentagon issued a 63-page report in 2024 that investigated all of the government programs for studying UFOs from 1945 to the present and concluded that these UFO sightings provided no clear evidence for ETI visitations of the Earth (Barnes 2024).  Now, of course, Spielberg might say that this report is part of the government's continuing cover-up of the truth.  But to substantiate that charge, he would have to show that there really is conclusive evidence for ETI visitations.

EVIDENCE?

Do you see a triangle here?  If you do, your brain is filling in the gaps in information to "see" a triangle where none exists.  This is the famous "Kanizsa illusion," named after the Italian artist and psychologist Gaetano Kanizsa.  This could explain some of the triangular-shaped UFO sightings that Spielberg takes as evidence for ETI visitations.  (Here my thinking has been influenced by Michael Shermer's new book Think [2026: 198-226].)

Leslie Kean was one of the co-authors of the 2017 New York Times article that so impressed Spielberg.  She is a journalist who has been one of the leading advocates for UFO sightings as evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence visiting the Earth.  In 2010, she surveyed this evidence in her best-selling book UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record.  Remarkably, she began the book by admitting that roughly 90 to 95 percent of UFO sightings can be explained:

Examples of phenomena sometimes mistaken for UFOs are weather balloons, flares, sky lanterns, planes flying in formation, secret military aircraft, birds reflecting the sun, planes reflecting the sun, blimps, helicopters, the planet Venus or Mars, meteors or meteorites, space junk, satellites, sundogs, ball lightning, ice crystals, reflected light off clouds, lights on the ground or lights reflected on a cockpit window, temperature inversions, hole-punch clouds, and the list goes on!  Yes, the vast majority of reports can usually be explained by one of the above, but of course it's only the ones that can't that we're interested in (12).

So she has to point to the few cases that cannot be explained in one of these ways as demonstrative evidence for UFOs of extraterrestrial origin.

She begins her survey of the evidence "on very solid ground" with "one of the most vivid and well-documented UFO cases ever"--a two-year wave of UFO sightings in Belgium that began on November 29, 1989.  Over two-thousand cases were reported.  Belgian Colonel Wilfried De Brouwer described the first night of the wave: "Hundreds of people saw a majestic triangular craft with a span of approximately a hundred and twenty feet and powerful beaming spotlights, moving very slowly without making any significant noise but, in several cases, accelerating to very high speeds" (17).

As Shermer suggests, there might have been three sources of light in the sky (such as small planes) that appeared triangular to people on the ground as their minds filled in the space between the lights, as happens in the Kanizsa illusion.  Kean does not consider this possibility.

Moreover, it's strange that with thousands of people reporting these eyewitness sightings, almost no one took a photograph of what they saw, even though film cameras were widely available to Belgians at that time.

Kean does report, however, that on April 4, 1990, at 10:00 p.m. in the town of Petit-Rechain, one person with a camera did take a photograph, which was published in a French magazine.  Kean reproduces that photograph in her book.  Here it is:

Kean reports that experts carefully studied the original color slide, and their major findings were:

• No effect of infrared radiation.
• No indication of any tampering with the slide.
• The camera was stable, but the craft was moving slowly and had approximately a 45-degree bank when the picture was taken.
• The rotation of the spotlights did not occur around one central point.
• The middle light is very different from the three other lights.
• The lights are positioned symmetrically with respect to the structure of the craft.

She also reports that the experts concluded that the picture could not have been faked (30).  This became one of the most famous pieces of evidence for extraterrestrial UFOs.

But then in 2011, one year after the publication of Kean's book, a man by the name of Patrick Marechal explained in an interview for a Belgian TV channel how he had created the photo as a hoax: he cut a piece of styrofoam into a triangle, painted it black, embedded flashlights in each corner, hung it from a string, and then photographed it. 

HAPLESS ALIENS?

In many of Disclosure Day videos of ETIs, we see ETI corpses being recovered from spaceship crash sites.  If the ETIs are so superior in their intelligence and their technology, why are they so often crashing into the ground?  It doesn't make sense.

And why is it so easy for the humans to capture them alive, hold them in captivity, and torture them through brutal experimentation?  The ETI at the end of the movie is brought into the TV studio in a cage.  If he's so smart and so powerful, why did he allow this?  Why didn't he kill the humans holding him captive?

This meek submission of the ETIs to their human captors in this movie is especially strange because of the contrast to Spielberg's War of the Worlds, in which the ETIs are aggressive in conquering and killing the humans.

In his recent interviews, Spielberg has said that he's changed his mind--that he no longer accepts H. G. Wells' depiction of extraterrestrials as bellicose enemies of humanity.  But he is vague in explaining why he changed his mind.  He does invoke his theme of empathy.  But he doesn't explain why we should assume that extraterrestrial intelligences will be empathetic in their caring for human beings--particularly, when they're so badly mistreated by human beings.

A THREAT TO RELIGIOUS FAITH?

Disclosure Day also raises the question of whether the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligent life coming from distant planets beyond the Solar System would threaten religious faith, and particularly Christianity.  I have written about this question in previous posts.

The question is whether the plurality of worlds in the universe can be reconciled with the central doctrines of Christianity--particularly, the Story of Creation and the Story of Salvation.

The Genesis account of Creation says nothing about extraterrestrial life in the universe, although it does of course speak of divinities and spiritual beings (such as angels) as living in the heavens.  The Earth is identified as the only planet in the universe.  And the Moon is the only moon in the universe.  The stars do not have any planets orbiting around them.  Moreover, Genesis seems to present a geocentric cosmology with Earth at the center.  That's why Galileo got into so much trouble with the Church in defending the Copernican heliocentric universe.

But then we could say that God gave us the Bible not as a science textbook but as a book to tell us what we need to know about salvation.  Or, as Galieo put it, the Bible tells us "not how the heavens go," but "how to get to heaven."

In Disclosure Day, Sister Maura (Elizabeth Marvel), the Abbess of the Monastery of St. Clare of the Dawn, is asked about whether the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence would contradict the Creation Story.  She responds by asking why God would "make such a vast universe, yet save it only for us," which seems to be speaking for Spielberg.  At the end of the movie, when the "Disclosure" is broadcast around the globe, we see Sister Maura watching the broadcast, and she smiles in an expression of wonder at God's creation.

And yet, many Christians--such as the creationists affiliated with Ken Ham's Answers in Genesis--will argue that the Bible clearly implies that the Earth is unique in the universe--that it was made for humans to inhabit and call home--and that God did not create alien life on any other planet (Faulkner 2015).

There is another theological question here that never comes up in Disclosure Day--whether the existence of alien life would be compatible with the Story of Salvation.  This is the story of how Adam's sin put a curse on all humans, how Jesus was incarnated to become the Savior, and how His resurrection creates the promise of redemptive salvation for all of humanity.  If Christians discovered that there really were extraterrestrial intelligences on distant planets, wouldn't they have to wonder how they could be saved?  Did Jesus go to those planets to save them?  Or is it possible that they don't need to be saved because Adam's curse did not affect them?

A SURROGATE FOR RELIGIOUS FAITH?

Rather than being a threat to religious faith, belief in extraterrestrial intelligences can be understood as a form of religious faith.  Disclosure Day suggests that in many ways.  For example, Margaret shows many of the traits of the Christian mystic--such as speaking in languages that she does not know.  On the Day of Pentecost, Christians filled by the Holy Spirit spoke in foreign languages that they did not know.  Margaret can do this because she is filled by the ETI Spirit.

If there is a natural desire for religious transcendence--as I have argued--then we should expect that even many atheists will long for some kind of religious experience--or what I have called atheistic religiosity.  This has been manifested in recent years in some surveys of religious belief where a growing number of people identify themselves as "spiritual but not religious."  They don't belong to any traditional religious institutions, and they don't believe in traditional religious doctrines.  But they still long for some kind of spirituality.  On Rebecca Goldstein's "mattering map," these people belong to the continent of the "transcenders": they believe that they matter because they matter to some transcendent intelligence in the cosmos.  For traditional religious believers, that transcendent intelligence is God or some kind of divinity.  For the believers in UFOs, that transcendent intelligence is the extraterrestrial intelligence that comes from a distant planet.

Clay Routledge is a psychologist who has studied the belief in extraterrestrial intelligence as an expression of the "religious mind" (Routledge 2017; Routledge et al. 2017).  Routledge argues that many studies have shown that traditional religious belief satisfies our natural longing for meaning or significance in the universe.  When we think about how small and unimportant we seem in the grand scheme of things, we look for some way to give our lives some cosmic significance.  Religious belief satisfies that longing by giving us stories about how supernatural beings are watching over us, and how they will rescue us from death and extinction. 

Studies have shown that traditional religious believers are less inclined to believe in extraterrestrial intelligence than are atheists and agnostics.  The likely explanation for this is that since atheists and agnostics lack the religious faith that gives their lives some cosmic significance, many of them will choose to believe in UFOs and alien visitors, because then they can say that "we are not alone" in the universe, and there are superintelligent beings out there who are watching over us, who feel empathy for us, and who will save us from extinction by delivering their message to all of us from a TV studio in Kansas City.

That would explain the revelatory way Spielberg speaks about Disclosure Day: "Wouldn't it be wonderful for people to know all of this is true?"

REFERENCES

Barnes, Julian E. 2024. "Pentagon Review Finds No Evidence of Alien Cover-Up." New York Times, March 8.

Cooper, Helene, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean. 2017. "Glowing Auras and 'Black Money': The Pentagon's Mysterious UFO Program." New York Times, December 16.

Dargis, Manohla. 2026. "'Disclosure Day' Review: Spielberg Plays His Greatest Cosmic Hits." New York Times, June 11.

Department of Defense. 2024. "The Department of Defense All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office: Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP)."  Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Defense.

Faulkner, Danny. 2015. UFOs and ETs: A Biblical and Cultural Exploration of Aliens. Petersburg, KY: Answers in Genesis.

Kean, Leslie. 2010. UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record. New York: Three Rivers Press.

Routledge, Clay. 2017. "Don't Believe in God? Maybe You'll Try UFOs." New York Times, July 21.

Routledge, Clay, Andrew A. Abeyta, and Christina Roylance. 2017. "We Are Not Alone: The Meaning Motive, Religiosity, and Belief in Extraterrestrial Intelligence." Motivation and Emotion 41:135-146.

Shermer, Michael. 2026. Truth: What It Is, How to Find It, and Why It Still Matters. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.