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To Understand Disclosure Day , You Have to Understand “High Strangeness”

Steven Spielberg’s many movies about aliens have always, really, been about something deeper. His latest is no exception.

June 10, 2026 4:55 PM

Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Universal Studios and Columbia Pictures.

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…