[Warning: Spoilers Ahead]
As I’ve mentioned many times in my writings, I am a child of the eighties and—as such—heavily influenced by the movies Steven Spielberg directed in those early years of his career. Perhaps more so than most… hence why you’re reading this.
When I went to the movies to finally watch Disclosure Day (DD) a few weeks ago, I understood that judging it through the rosy lens of nostalgia would be the wrong approach. I knew fully well Spielberg would not be repeating the tone of Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind or E.T. —in fact, I was counting on it—because DD was meant to capture the zeitgeist of its time.
The world has changed from the days when UFOs were relegated to the front pages of supermarket tabloids, and people who claimed to have seen them were met with scorn and suspicion—even from their own spouses. Now UFOs are taken seriously in the pages of the most respected newspapers in print, and witnesses are invited to speak before the representatives of the most powerful nation in the globe.
I expected DD would be a reflection of that, and a cinematic exploration of how the world of the 2020s would react to the news that we are, in fact, not alone. And not just by proclamation from a figure of authority (given how untrustworthy they have proven themselves to be nowadays) but by showing some incontrovertible proof—and what in fact could be considered ‘proof’ of such a paradigm-shifting revelation, in the age of post-truth and the slopification of mass media? I wanted to find out how Spielberg would open that Pandora’s box.
Whereas in Close Encounters… the allusion to real-life events is only vaguely implied, like the scene in which police patrols are chasing down the UFOs through interstate lines (based on the Portage County incident of 1966) DD makes the barrier separating fiction from reality even fuzzier, by bringing up in its plot the names of famous (and not-so famous) stories from the annals of UFO literature.
Spielberg and his scriptwriters showed they did their homework, as evidenced by the inclusion of not only Roswell—which anyone and their grandma have heard of by now—but even more obscure cases like the Kecksburg crash of 1965, the alleged Holloman UFO landing (not explicitly mentioned by name) or even the urban myth that Hollywood actor Jackie Gleason was once taken to see the preserved alien bodies at some highly secured military facility, by his longtime buddy and golf companion Richard Nixon—I audibly chuckled with that one.
The late UFO commentator Robbie Graham (author of Silver Screen Saucers) would have had much to say on how this approach renders DD into an exercise in ‘hyperreality’, coaxing the audience into moving from the accepted reality of known UFO cases (whether those cases are factual is beside the point here, what matters if they are now part of the real UFO historical milieu) to the two proposed main points of the story: (a) there’s a powerful, covert organization zealously guarding the UFO secret—which even includes the recovery and reverse engineering of crashed craft—and (b) that secret is directly related to human consciousness and psychic abilities.
Even more to the point of the hyperreality treatment, DD ends up solving the Disclosure debacle by resorting to one massive ‘data dump’ of videos directly into a live news TV broadcast. Not like the crappy dumps the Trump administration has recently released through their ‘Department of War’, mind you, but the real (unambiguous) shit said to be stored in the vaults of the secret keepers, if you believe the words of so-called ‘whistleblowers’ (more on that later).
And since that wouldn’t be enough in the age of fake news, Spielberg delivers the pièce de resistance with an actual deus ex-machina: a bonafide in-your-face live alien no one could deny—even more so, because it was shown on TV, ergo it has to be real.
That is how hyperreality works: by how our perception of what is real or not is heavily influenced by mainstream media—including movies like DD.
Whereas Close Encounters… was produced for a general audience, and E.T. was specifically targeted at children (and in fact may very well be considered a modern fairytale) DD’s tone is undoubtedly more mature, and shows no room for looking at the night sky in innocent wide-eyed wonder. DD keeps reminding the viewer of the serious social, ethical—and even religious—implications over the withholding of a truth the world has a right to know.
…And yet, just because you’re focusing on a problem that demands serious consideration, it shouldn’t deprive the audience from an equally meaningful emotional engagement with the topic you’re presenting. Amistad was also a movie that dealt with another serious problem—the abomination of slavery, and the fundamental nature of Man as inherently free—but Spielberg knew then that the movie wouldn’t be able to stand on its own just by the pure reasoning of its arguments, and so the movie is centered around the plight of Cinque and his allies who are trying to save the mutinied slaves of the Amistad, resulting in masterpiece of a film in which nary a moviegoer could leave the theater with dry eyes.
Although intellectually stimulating—especially to someone so vested in this particular topic— I thus found DD a film disappointingly devoid of the heart I’ve grown to expect from a Spielberg film. You have John freaking Williams at your disposal, for crying out loud! But Steven couldn’t even use the film’s music to emotionally engage the audience in the plights of Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) and Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor); the two protagonists who find themselves, under the most unusual circumstances, at the center of the quest to disclose the UFO secret to humanity.
It is almost as if DD was too afraid to actually dig deeper into the very issues it is supposed to be showing.
We learn for example (unsurprisingly, if you paid any attention to the promo trailers) that Margaret and Daniel are both ‘experiencers’; probably the first time a Hollywood major motion picture has ever mentioned that ambiguously euphemistic term, commonly associated in modern UFO parlance with experiences that include (but can go beyond) what is popularly referred to as ‘alien abductions’.
Same goes with ‘screen memories’, another vague label that denotes how experiencer/abductees consciously recall odd encounters with animals like deer, foxes, raccoons or owls (the totemic animal per excellence, strangely absent in the movie though) which are largely assumed by many in the UFO field—and mentioned as such in the movie—to be a mental concealment (comparativist author Joshua Cutchin would say ‘glamour’) used by the aliens as to not alarm the individuals they choose to interact with. My own personal interpretation is that screen memories are not the result of alien intervention (be that technological or otherwise) but are fabricated by the abductees’ own minds as a defense mechanism to safeguard their fragile psyche; the same way a rape victim would not be able to consciously remember details about their traumatic experience, because those are repressed by their subconscious and not a sophisticated ‘neuralizing’ beam.
Newsflash: abductions *are* indeed traumatic experiences—if you believe the accounts of abductees— *and* often involve some sort of sexual non-consensual act. The most famous abductee in the world, Whitley Strieber, claimed to have been anally violated with an instrument resembling a cattle prod in his book Communion, which cemented the stereotype of the grey alien in the popular Imaginarium. But DD opts instead to stay clear of those thorny phenomenological angles—not mature enough to deal with UFOs as fully grown-ups are we then, Steven? —and thus DD ends up becoming a sanitized version of the UFO phenomenon, that nitpicks some elements and leaves behind others:
Crop circles? Okay!
Cattle mutilations? Ix-nay!
Abduction of children? Why not?
Hybridization of children? Ahem, let’s not?
These are some of the many ways in which the movie ends up undermining its message, even to the point of trivializing it.
The main antagonist in the movie, Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) is reduced to a cartoon villain for resorting to weak “You can’t handle the truth!” excuses, in order to justify why his Deep State organization would resort to all sorts of extreme tactics—including cold murder—to preserve the coverup.
Here Spielberg lost the opportunity to augment the character’s dimensionality, by validating the coverup using other arguments which have been speculated over the years; like how the aliens’ reported treatment of abductees is, in the eyes of many, suggestive of a nefarious—or perhaps just indifferent—attitude toward humankind (why would you care if an alien is ‘tortured’ or even killed by human experiments, when they purportedly do the same in their own experiments with abductees?); or how the secrets of the quasi-magic alien technology must be kept highly classified, because other competing nations are in a covert race to unlock its secrets, through the crashed remains recovered in their own territories. The American-centrist way DD portrays the UFO phenomenon feels almost insulting, considering what pains Spielberg took in Close Encounters… to depict its universality; from radiation-burned old men in the Sonoran desert, to chanting devotees in India.
DD places religion at the center of the Disclosure debate—and why wouldn’t it? Even E.T. got to resurrect from the dead, and that was a movie for children! But (again) it fails to fully address why the revelation of alien intelligences could threaten the dogmas of some (maybe most) religious institutions: it’s not just acknowledging the vastness of Creation beyond the only world mentioned in the Bible (although the passage “there are many rooms in my Father’s house” has been often cited by UFO enthusiasts as a veiled endorsement to the multiplicity of life) but how the replacement of an invisible superior being with visible (albeit rarely so) superior beings from elsewhere would upend our believed position in the universe.
Did these beings directly interfere in the evolution of our species, as assumed by ancient aliens proponents? Were saints and other religious leaders of the past— ‘gifted’ with extraordinary psychic abilities, like Margaret— emissaries sent by the aliens to fulfill some transcendent agenda? Are the aliens closer to the angels (or the demons) of our forefathers? DD chooses car chases instead of pondering these metaphysical questions properly.
(And why these ‘living gods’ keep crashing their magic saucers like drunken teenagers on spring break, is another issue DD does not even bother to address)
During the production of Close Encounters… Spielberg counted with the assistances of J. Allen Hynek and Jacques Vallée—the biggest names in UFO research in the 1970s—as script consultants. For DD I strongly suspect Steven hired the services of both Diana Pasulka (the mention at one point of ‘bilocating nuns’ is a dead giveaway for anyone who read her book American Cosmic) and maybe someone like whistleblower David Grusch, who claims to have found evidence of ‘legacy programs’ and real-life crash retrieval programs.
Trying to mix together these two dissimilar aspects of the modern UFO narrative—the nuts-and-bolts allegations of recovered craft, and the psychic aspects suggestive of a phenomenon that transcends our current understanding of space and time—leaves you with a confusing emulsion where alien metamaterials turn into slag, and the alien themselves communicate through insect-like clicking sounds. A subtle reference to the concept of the ‘Imago’ as proposed by Henri Corbin and Frederick Myers, who interpreted psychic powers like telepathy as emerging ‘super-senses’, that would become more predominant in a future metamorphic stage of our species; the same way a caterpillar cannot comprehend that one day it will obtain the wings of a butterfly—hence the obvious references to butterflies throughout the movie.
But one shouldn’t be too harsh on Spielberg and his scriptwriters, because the truth of the matter is that the *real* UFO phenomenon is not governed by logic—not even Hollywood ‘logic’. The phenomenon floats in the murky waters of ‘metalogic’—what students of Forteana call High Strangeness. And high strangeness does not respond well to test screenings and target audience.
DD is a motion picture with a reported budget of $115 million dollars. Thus it has to be curated for mass consumption—aliens are extraterrestrials instead of interdimensional like in Indiana Jones 4 (an idea Spielberg seems to have reluctantly accepted) or time-travelers from the future (a theory he seems to personally be partial to); it’s PG-13, meaning no messy alien/human sexy innuendos (even though the Bible doesn’t shy away from mentioning angels and humans doing the dirty in Genesis) or gory mutilation references. In other words, DD has to follow the blockbuster formulae—which Steven Spielberg himself helped to write—and in doing so it is doomed to fail in capturing the true essence of the phenomenon.
Of course, there’s a reason why people like yours truly do not get to be consultants to Hollywood moguls. Had I been asked, I would have suggested the real reason why the UFO cover-up has been kept, is not so much to guard forbidden sciences, but to conceal embarrassing ignorance: the refusal to admit that, after all these years, the powers that be still don’t understand what’s going on.
(I bet Spielberg wouldn’t like that answer one bit. But I kind of suspect David Lynch would have groked it)
Perhaps it is, after all, my unfulfilled nostalgia what makes me judge Steven’s 2026 movie more severely than his 1977 movie. How would I have reacted, had I watched Close Encounters… in my 50s (instead of 5) knowing all the things I know today? Maybe I would have bickered and moaned about how the movie shied away from including the Travis Walton abduction, or any references to Betty and Barney Hill.
But what distances Close Encounters of the Third Kind to Disclosure Day in my mind, is the impact the former had in my heart. DD didn’t have to bring its audience all the answers of life, the universe and everything, in order to make it a good movie. It only had to make them care about seeking those answers.
I’ll say this much in favor of DD, though: The best part of the movie is that deep down it is deeply humanistic. The ‘gods’ will not descend from the heavens to save us from ourselves; only to reassure us that we’re not—and have never been—alone.
…Perhaps that would suffice.
