Steven Spielberg’s career has been an alien crusade culminating in ‘Disclosure Day’

CNN, UNIVERSAL PICTURES

By Alli Rosenbloom, CNN

(CNN) — Whether he meant to or not, Steven Spielberg has been trying to convince the world of alien existence for over 40 years. He’s donated money to research programs. He’s discussed the issue with presidents. And now, with “Disclosure Day,” his first directorial offering in four years, which is expected to bring in more than $90 million globally in its opening weekend, he’s made yet another pitch to the moviegoing public.

“I always had a core belief that we are not alone in the universe,” Spielberg said in an interview about the film. “I came into this world really believing that it would be impossible to think – and rather conceited to think – that we are the only intelligent life in the universe.”

“Disclosure Day” takes that idea and runs with it — literally — in a breathless sci-fi thriller about the day the world learns that a government entity has had decades-long contact with extraterrestrial beings. Josh O’Connor and Colman Domingo play whistleblowers who try to outrun those who aim to keep the secret. Emily Blunt stars as a local meteorologist who finds herself at the center of the action.

In the process of filming, some of its stars were even convinced of Spielberg’s point of view, including Domingo, who told CNN he’s fully on board.

“I feel like it’s kind of a beautiful belief for me, the idea that there’s more out there than just us,” Domingo said. “I look up into the stars every night and I hope that there’s more out there, that someone’s looking out at me as I’m looking back at them.”

“Disclosure Day” lands in a country rife with conspiracy theories, including ones about aliens after the White House released decades-worth of video footage and declassified files outlining various investigations of reported UFO sightings. On Friday, the day the movie was released, the Department of War dropped its third tranche of UFO-related files. Some tin foil hat-wearing believers were even convinced that the release of “Disclosure Day” was part of a larger plan for alien lifeforms to reveal themselves for the first time to humans on Earth, and that Spielberg was in on it. Google it. Or don’t.

“Disclosure Day” showcases a modern presentation of classic Spielberg ideas: We’re not alone, and that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. In fact, there’s maybe a lot we can learn about our own faith and human nature by embracing the unknown.

Setting a standard

Spielberg revolutionized the way Americans think about alien life.

Prior to 1977’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” alien encounters were largely represented as hostile experiences, mirroring the Cold War dynamics of the time. From the original “War of the Worlds” to “Five Million Years to Earth” and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” stories about evil alien invaders dominated the genre.

All that changed in the late 1970s, according to Ray Morton, a film historian and author of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind: The Making of Steven Spielberg’s Classic Film.”

“Spielberg was the first one to do fiction in which the possibility of encountering life from another planet could be a positive experience,” Morton told CNN. “Now, that’s kind of standard in a lot of pop culture stuff.”

“Close Encounters,” starring Richard Dreyfuss as a father who becomes obsessed with finding answers after encountering a UFO, won the Oscar for best cinematography in 1978 and earned over $300 million globally at the box office — a staggering success for a film at the time.

Spielberg was inspired by the work of the late J. Allen Hynek, an American astronomer who worked as a scientific consultant for a UFO investigation unit within the U.S. Air Force. Spielberg named the film after a chapter in Hynek’s book “The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry,” which examines and analyzes the authenticity of reports of UFO sightings.

With “Close Encounters,” Spielberg didn’t initially set out to make a big statement about what people should believe. He approached the film more pragmatically, telling the British Film Institute’s “Sight and Sound” magazine in 1977: “If you believe, it’s science fact; if you don’t believe, it’s science fiction. I’m an agnostic between the two beliefs, so for me it’s science speculation.”

Spielberg’s next blockbuster was 1982’s “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,” the kid-geared tale of a lost friendly alien that became one of his most beloved films to date.

At an “E.T.” screening at the White House for a theater full of esteemed guests — including astronaut Neil Armstrong and Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor — then-President Ronald Reagan thanked the director for bringing the film to Washington, looked around the room and said, “And there are a number of people in this room who know that everything on that screen is absolutely true.” Everybody laughed, Speilberg recalled, but Reagan didn’t.

“The whole room laughed because he presented it like a joke, but he wasn’t smiling as he said it,” he said at the time.

In 1985, Spielberg made a real-life attempt to find answers when he donated $100,000 toward a Harvard program that studied radio signals.

Declassification

The government’s declassification of UFO-related files has informed Spielberg’s storytelling in the past, and a 2017 New York Times report that revealed the Pentagon had been secretly researching the possible existence of UFOs since 2007 was a huge inspiration for “Disclosure Day.”

Spielberg told CNN this tranche of information sparked more questions about whether we have been visited here on Eearth.

“That’s when I started to think maybe there’s another story to be told about what’s happening today, right now,” he said.

The storyline for what became “Disclosure Day” further took shape when congressional hearings calling for the government to be more transparent about UFO sightings were held in 2022 and 2023.

“It wasn’t just sensationalized,” he told the “Today” show in an interview earlier this month. “But this was something being taken very seriously by the major news media.”

Spielberg has been attached to several other sci-fi films during his Hollywood tenure that touch on alien invasions, not all of them starry-eyed, “we come in peace” representations. He served as an executive producer on “Men in Black” and veered from his usual with his 2005 remake of “War of the Worlds,” which Spielberg said was more a commentary on 9/11.

When premiering the trailer for “Disclosure Day,” Spielberg teed up the footage with a message.

“I used to say to myself, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all of this turned out to be true? I now say to myself, ‘All of this is true,’” he said.

“Disclosure Day” asks us embrace the idea of other intelligent life and imagine how we’d react to it, prompting us to do so with empathy. As he’s shown us many times, not only does Spielberg believe that we share this universe with cosmic beings, he wants to believe in us.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.

CNN’s Leigh Waldman contributed to this report.