This article is part of Spielberg Week, Slate’s seven-day celebration of Steven Spielberg.
It is some sort of wild blessing that Steven Spielberg, one of the greatest movie directors the world has ever produced, is also a bona fide UFO nerd.
If you’ve been deep in the weeds of contemporary UFO conversations, the details and allusions that pepper Spielberg’s new movie Disclosure Day will seem somewhat miraculous. It’s as though the director of Jaws and Saving Private Ryan has been watching all the same YouTube documentaries you have.
Maybe he has. Spielberg was born in 1946. The first stories about “flying saucers” broke into the American media in 1947. Americans of his generation grew up swimming in a sea of movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still and 2001: A Space Odyssey, but according to his friends, it was Spielberg who memorized the plot of the 1956 alien epic Forbidden Planet. Lots of Americans glanced into the sky after hearing news reports about flying lights, but it was Spielberg who was devastated when his Boy Scout troop came back from a camping trip he had skipped buzzing about a strange crimson sphere they saw hovering over nearby trees. By his 20s, Spielberg was reading the classics of UFO literature. And now in his late 70s, he’s been making movies about UFOs for more than 60 years.
(A note: In the past decade, government investigators began using the acronym UAP, for “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” and the legions of podcasters, documentarians, and journalists who monitor them have begun to do likewise. That aside, the older UFO remains by far the best-known term, so I’ll use it here. More on this in my book about the history of alien-abduction stories.)
It’s possible to argue that to really understand Spielberg’s movies, you need to understand UFOs. And, in fact, maybe the reverse is also true—to understand why so many Americans have become so obsessed with enigmatic shapes in the sky, you’ve got to understand what the most popular American artist of the past half-century finds so compelling about them.
In the fall of 1963, Steven Spielberg was a weedy, confident 16-year-old who made off with his father’s 8 mm home movie camera. He marshalled a cast of several dozen around the hospitals, airports, and college campuses of suburban Phoenix, shooting with and without permission. The next spring, his first feature film, Firelight, premiered at a local theater Spielberg rented for the occasion. A full audience watched as aliens from Altaris (a variant on the titular Altair IV from Forbidden Planet) transplanted the inhabitants of suburban Arizona to their own planet.
Most of the film that made up Firelight has been lost, but from all reports, it was a Cold War relic. It presented UFOs in the same way as most 1950s science-fiction movies, giant hunks of metal with light bulbs and engines, the extraterrestrial equivalent of jet fighters. The Altarians worry about the dangers of nuclear warfare and the conflict between communism and capitalism. Their abduction spree in Arizona is designed to solve those problems.
Six decades—and a few movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and War of the Worlds—later, Spielberg and veteran screenwriter David Koepp have produced Disclosure Day. The two have collaborated before, most famously on Jurassic Park, but this movie belongs to the director as much as Firelight did. Spielberg began thinking about the idea nearly a decade ago and eventually wrote a story treatment. Then he and Koepp hashed through 42 drafts of the script together before it crystallized into what Spielberg wanted it to be.
Both Firelight and Disclosure Day are chase movies. In the former, it’s aliens after humans. In the latter, people who don’t want the truth about aliens revealed to the world are after those who do. This time the conflict is not between us and them; it’s within, and among, us. And that makes all the difference. In Firelight, the weapons the aliens wield are their advanced ships and their abduction technology. In Disclosure Day, the battles happen in human minds, in arguments, persuasion—and often, in psychic struggle. Its mystical overtones make it a far weirder movie than the 1950s-era invasion flicks Spielberg grew up with, but it reflects the director’s maturing sense of what stories about UFOs can tell us about ourselves.
As news of the movie has spread, UFO believers have come out in favor. Even though few have seen it yet, they have confidence in Spielberg. Ross Coulthart, a journalist convinced the government possesses alien technology, trusts Spielberg to “cover the issue of nonhuman intelligence in an intelligent and provocative way.” Jeremy Corbell, a documentary filmmaker and one of the most prominent online voices in the UFO community, said, simply, “I hear art imitates life.”
Spielberg’s journey feels genuine to these people because it mirrors their own. The earliest U.S. government investigations into the late-1940s wave of flying-saucer reports assumed that, if they were real, these things must be nuts-and-bolts, better versions of human spaceships, probably piloted by aliens who wore spacesuits just like John Glenn and the cosmonauts did. Spielberg thought so too. At the time of Firelight’s release, an Arizona journalist said it was—to a degree that was impressive, given that it came from a teenager—conventional 1950s UFO fare, right in line with the wave of recent “science fiction movies seen by the late-late television viewers.”
But today, an easy way to show that you’re a newbie at a UFO convention is to start speculating about how many light-years away the aliens’ home planet is. By the late 1960s, UFO investigators realized the assumption that these things were spaceships was in fact an assumption. They started taking other possibilities seriously. By 1972, J. Allen Hynek, an astronomer and Air Force consultant who was probably the leading UFO researcher of his time, coined a phrase to articulate the point: high strangeness. In his more than a decade of research, Hynek found that UFO witnesses often encountered more than just strange craft. He gathered stories of telepathic communication, missing time, objects moving themselves, and strange visions. Eventually Hynek concluded UFOs had more in common with psychic manifestations, premodern myths, and everyday glitches like déjà vu than they did with jetliners.
Perhaps UFOs were not alien ships from Altaris at all. Perhaps they were from another dimension, or inhabitants of Earth who exist on a frequency higher than our own, or time-traveling humans from millennia in the future. Encounters with them shake human beings up but also sometimes leave us spiritually transformed. Today, many UFO believers will tell you the real question isn’t about “UFOs.” It’s not even about “UAPs.” Instead, it’s about “the phenomenon.”
In short, UFOs matter less because they possess advanced technology than because they can teach us about what it means to experience the universe. They are not merely a scientific problem; they are a religious problem.
It’s obvious that Spielberg has followed this conversation. After Firelight, Spielberg’s next UFO movie was 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Spielberg cast Hynek in a small role, based a much larger role on Hynek’s friend and fellow high strangeness theorist, the French computer scientist Jacques Vallée (the character was played by none other than François Truffaut), and took the title—a term for physical contact with a nonhuman intelligence—from one of Hynek’s books.
Spielberg did more than just nod. Close Encounters is positively drenched in high strangeness. There are remnants of Firelight in the movie’s plot: Both films feature an abducted child and frantic parent, a couple with a strained marriage pulled to the breaking point by eerie visitations. But the most wondrous aspect of Close Encounters and the films that follow is how Spielberg manages to leverage the heavy weight of high strangeness lore to turn clichéd tropes into profound human stories about abandonment and safety, being lost and found.
UFOs are one of Spielberg’s obsessions, but another is the hard work of sympathy and communication, how our attempts to understand one another often end in painful failure but occasionally can produce unmatched joy. These themes are all over his work, from the diplomacy thriller Bridge of Spies to the autobiographical family drama The Fabelmans, but they are the very soul of his UFO movies. E.T. is built around the poor creature’s literal quest to phone home. Close Encounters opens with the UFO investigator Lacombe’s scramble to find a Spanish-language translator and closes with him helping to orchestrate an operatic communion with extraterrestrials. And in Disclosure Day, Colman Domingo’s character Hugo explains that the psychic feats the aliens seem capable of are rooted in radical empathy, which Hugo calls a profound evolutionary advantage. It’s maybe the first time Spielberg has been so blunt.
High strangeness sits exactly at the intersection between Spielberg’s twin fixations. The story of UFOs in American history is about nothing if not misperception and misunderstanding. But if you believe Hynek, these fumbling attempts at communication extend past other human beings to whatever peculiar intelligence it is guiding those lights in the sky.
Close Encounters, like E.T. and Disclosure Day, is about meeting a civilization that has better spaceships than we do. But it also offers new ways of imagining what it means to understand other beings. In Close Encounters, Melinda Dillon’s character Jillian Guiler is riven when she loses her toddler son, Barry, to an uncanny red glow that envelops her home—and her torment is all the more devastating because her boy seems seized by a weird ecstasy and willingly steps into the light. At one level, Guiler’s anguish is about witnessing an alien kidnapping; at another level, it’s about the universal experience of children and parents growing apart.
Richard Dreyfuss’ character, Roy Neary, develops his own psychic bond with dancing lights he sees over the road. It affects him mentally, physically, and emotionally. Hynek and other high strangeness writers—most notably Harvard psychiatrist John Mack—identified these symptoms in many of those who experience UFO contact. It tears Neary apart. At the end of the film, he is overcome with awe at the sight of actual extraterrestrials, and steps onto their craft as though into a grand cathedral. He rises into a slow awareness that these beings are benevolent. But hovering over this majesty is the fact that Spielberg has made sure we understand that Neary has abandoned his small children to follow the lights that haunt him.
In E.T., three children of divorce (as is, famously, Spielberg himself) build a friendship with a childlike extraterrestrial who can heal their pain. Sometimes this is literal. E.T. closes a gash on the boy Elliott’s finger with a touch. But he also satisfies Elliott’s hunger for reliable and unconditional love. The two develop a psychic bond reminiscent of that Barry Guiler or Roy Neary share with their extraterrestrials, but in E.T., the bond is more personal, a deeply moving friendship. And yet, the paradox of so many of the relationships in Spielberg’s stories still emerges. Elliott’s bond with E.T. eventually threatens them both. One sickens when the other does, and eventually both learn they must part so each can flourish. They leave each other in sadness, but also matured.
These psychic bonds are at the heart of Disclosure Day too, but the great twist of the movie is that they are rarely established between alien and human. Instead, over and over, humans build them with each other. Some characters can do this because aliens have gifted them with extrasensory perception that grants them extraordinary insight, validation, and catharsis. But other characters in the movie have ripped these powers away from the extraterrestrials for their own gain. When empathy is forgotten, these bonds become poisonous.
In 1994, Mack published Abduction: Human Encounters With Aliens, based on his work with dozens of people who believed they had encountered extraterrestrials. It was a controversial bestseller in both the popular press and in the UFO community—in the former because Mack took his subjects’ claims seriously, and in the latter because Mack suggested that after initial panic, abductees often experienced a dazzling transcendence, a psychic sensitivity to other intelligence, and visions of the human race’s potential that leave them at peace.
It is astonishing how well Mack’s book describes the arc of certain heroes in Disclosure Day, or would be if the movie were not persuasive evidence that Spielberg knows the impact the book has made on the contemporary UFO community. The movie uses the term experiencer, today the common descriptor for those who report contact with nonhuman intelligence. It dramatizes many of the details experiencers report. Extraterrestrials cloak themselves in familiar animal form. Experiencers feel as though massive amounts of data and emotional impressions have been implanted in their minds, an overwhelming affair that’s sometimes compared to a “download.” They struggle with “missing time,” gaps in their memories that dreams sometimes seem to fill. And when they recover those memories in a therapeutic act of recall, it is intensely emotional. Many UFO researchers in Mack’s time were suspicious of the influence and intentions of alien intelligence; they feared infiltration and subversion. Mack’s book, however, is populated with a whole host of Elliotts. And so is Disclosure Day. Perhaps they are scarred, but they are also, somehow, sanctified.
The simultaneous pain and wonder of these encounters marks what Spielberg finds most compelling about the lore of high strangeness. On a recent podcast, he explained that he found Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (a high strangeness film if there ever was one) so powerful precisely because it refuses to answer questions about the alien intelligence that drives the plot: what it wants, why it uses the methods it does, whether it cares about humanity at all. Kubrick’s movie is chillier than anything Spielberg has made, but Spielberg’s UFO movies also embody its deep conviction that even as we savor human relationships, there is something fundamentally unknowable and therefore perhaps unstable about how they work—and that high strangeness is an ideal metaphor for the problem.
That great frustration suffuses both Disclosure Day and the UFO movement that gives the film its title. A strong faction of UFO believers are activists for what they call “disclosure.” They are convinced that the federal government has been aware of the phenomenon for decades, has been trying to manipulate it, and is probably teetering dangerously over its skis.
In 2017, the New York Times gave a tremendous jolt to the movement by uncovering the fact that the Pentagon sponsored an office investigating evidence, videos, and testimony about unexplained craft. In the years since, whistleblowers have claimed, variously, that government agents have recovered nonhuman technology, operate a “crash retrieval program,” and are in custody of non-Earthly bodies. The film references many of these stories: the famous case of Roswell, the lesser-known supposed 1965 crash in Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, and a legend about Richard Nixon showing alien cadavers to Jackie Gleason. It also nods to important figures in UFO lore, such as the Air Force officer Nathan Twining, who called for an investigation into flying saucers in 1947 and shares a name with a noble minor character.
There are members of Congress who take these claims seriously—or at the least believe that the nation’s intelligence and military communities are hiding money and programs from oversight. And yet, “disclosure” always seems to be six months away; there is always another, shadier agency that has the real evidence; whistleblowers emerge, are hailed, and then fall under suspicion (often labeled “grifters” after they invariably publish books). There are, in fact, heated debates about whether this very movie has been planted to either mislead or prepare the American public about the truth.
Disclosure Day understands these frustrations. The New York Times story and the Pentagon videos that accompanied it inspired Spielberg to write the story treatment he and Koepp turned into the screenplay. And the debate at the heart of the movie is about whether the big reveal might tip the world into chaos or whether the basic goodness of humanity can be trusted. These are the arguments UFO whistleblowers claim are happening in the Pentagon today.
But Disclosure Day is, even more, about the more fundamental question that UFOs have always raised for Spielberg. Disclosure is simply one way to ask it. Can we be brave enough to be kind to one another? Spielberg, as always, is optimistic. The iconic image in E.T. is that of Elliott’s finger touching the extraterrestrial’s. At the culminating moment of extraterrestrial contact in Disclosure Day, one human reaches for the hand of another.
In 1959, the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung published an American edition of his short book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky. Jung argued that the “flying saucer” was not the thing in the air. The “flying saucer” was a story that could be applied to anything someone did not recognize, whether it was a bird or a cloud or even an actual spaceship. (Jung insisted he did not know whether aliens were visiting Earth.) That story, Jung said, was about replacing instability and dissatisfaction with hope for a coming wholeness.
The year before that, Steven Spielberg’s father, Arnold, took him into the Arizona desert late one night. The two lay down on a blanket in the sand and gazed up at a massive meteor shower. Twenty years later, Close Encounters shows Roy Neary doing the same thing with his family. Instead of a meteor shower, the Nearys watch UFOs. Spielberg recalled being alternately terrified and fascinated by the display. Six years later, Arnold and Leah Spielberg divorced. But nearly 70 years later, their son still has faith that those strange lights in the sky maybe, somehow, can help heal humanity’s pain.
Read the rest of Spielberg Week, with more publishing every day.
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