Spielberg's UFO Obsession Finally Explains Why We're All Losing Our Minds Over Aliens

Steven Spielberg has been thinking about UFOs for longer than most of us have been alive. A 16-year-old cinephile in 1963, he borrowed his father’s 8mm camera and made Firelight, a feature film featuring aliens from Altaris abducting Arizona suburbs. Decades later—after Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and War of the Worlds—Spielberg has returned to the obsession that’s defined his entire career with Disclosure Day, a film that reveals something crucial: the director doesn’t just make movies about aliens. He makes movies about what aliens teach us about being human.

The fascinating part? Spielberg’s journey mirrors the actual evolution of UFO belief in America. His early work trafficked in Cold War sci-fi tropes—flying saucers as advanced spaceships piloted by intelligent beings from distant stars. But by the late 1960s, researchers like J. Allen Hynek began identifying something researchers called“high strangeness”—accounts of telepathic communication, missing time, and spiritual transformation that didn’t fit the spaceship narrative. Spielberg watched this conversation unfold, cast Hynek himself in Close Encounters, and built a character based on French computer scientist Jacques Vallée. The director wasn’t just making movies; he was translating the intellectual and spiritual revolution happening in UFO communities into cinema.

What makes Disclosure Day different—and why UFO believers are genuinely excited about it—is that Spielberg has finally made his alien film explicitly about empathy. His character Hugo explains that the psychic abilities aliens possess are rooted in“radical empathy,”which Hugo calls a profound evolutionary advantage. It’s Spielberg being as direct as he’s ever been: the real contact between species, and between humans, happens through understanding. E.T. healed Elliott’s finger, but more importantly, E.T. healed Elliott’s loneliness. Close Encounters showed Roy Neary discovering transcendence, but also losing his family in the process. These aren’t just alien-encounter stories. They’re stories about the gap between what we want and what we need, and whether we can bridge it.

The movie also directly engages with contemporary UFO activism. The 2017 New York Times revelation that the Pentagon had sponsored an office investigating unexplained craft energized a movement demanding“disclosure”—the public revelation of what governments supposedly know about nonhuman intelligence. Spielberg threads references to Roswell, the 1965 Kecksburg incident, and the rumored Nixon-Gleason encounter throughout Disclosure Day. But his real argument isn’t about whether the government is hiding alien bodies. It’s whether humanity is brave enough to be kind to one another. The climax doesn’t feature first contact with extraterrestrials. One human reaches for the hand of another.

This matters because Spielberg’s artistic DNA has always contained both obsessions—UFOs and the hard work of communication. Bridge of Spies, The Fabelmans, his entire body of work circles back to the same question: Can we understand beings (alien or human) who aren’t us? And can that understanding transform us? UFO believers aren’t losing their minds over Disclosure Day because they think Spielberg will confirm alien conspiracy theories. They’re excited because he’s spent 60 years proving he understands what those lights in the sky really represent—the possibility that we’re capable of growth, connection, and grace.

In 1958, Spielberg’s father took him into the Arizona desert to watch a meteor shower. Twenty years later, Roy Neary did the same with his family—except the lights weren’t meteors. Nearly 70 years later, that moment still defines Spielberg’s cinema. He believes strange lights in the sky can heal us. And somehow, after a lifetime of making movies, he’s convincing audiences to believe it too.