Are we alone? Spielberg does not think so
Updated: Oct 25
When it comes to UFOs will life imitate art?
This piece is less a critique of Disclosure Day, the new UFO movie by Spielberg, and more of a discussion on why Spielberg made the movie – although I do critique it at the end. If the interviews of the legendary director are anything to go by, the man is a true believer. Judging by his body of work in the alien genre, perhaps he always was. What has become clear, however, is that he caught the same bug I did back in 2017. The difference is that I moved on while Spielberg made a blockbuster movie about it …
Recent history of UFO disclosure
To the uninitiated, the event I speak of is a groundbreaking publication by The New York Times in 2017 that all but confirmed that the Pentagon had credible reports of sightings of 'unidentified anomalous phenomena' (UAPs which are in effect UFOs) by US military personnel.
The reporting included leaked video footage of the UAPs that have come to be known as 'Tic Tac' and 'Gimbal'. These UAPs appeared to be performing physics-defying movements, including stopping mid-flight, changing direction at huge speeds and even appearing to be trans-medium, i.e., capable of transitioning between space, air and water.
The Pentagon finally confirmed that the leaked videos were authentic in 2019, nearly two years after the initial reporting.
In 2023, UFOs were back in the headlines when whistleblower, David Grusch, went public with his allegation that classified information regarding a secret crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program for UAPs was being illegally withheld from Congress.
Before coming forward as a whistleblower, David Grusch was a high-level, decorated U.S. intelligence officer with a 14-year career across the military and federal intelligence agencies. Grusch had been responsible for identifying and evaluating classified UAP-related information across various federal agencies.
Grusch later testified under oath before the House Oversight Committee, repeating his claims alongside former Navy pilots Ryan Graves and David Fravor.
Told you so
UFO mythology has been around in popular culture for a very long time.
In our recent history, reports of 'mystery airships', reminiscent of UFOs, first emerged during the industrial revolution. The conspiracy was that Edison had made an artificial star, which he categorically denied, laying the stories to rest. It resurged again during World War II, when Allied pilots started reporting glowing, fast-moving spheres following their aircraft, which they dubbed foo fighters.
The modern era however began in 1947 when a civilian pilot, Kenneth Arnold, reported seeing nine crescent-shaped objects flying at high speeds near Mount Rainier, Washington. When describing their movement, Arnold famously stated that they skipped like a saucer across the water. Reporters coined the phrase flying saucer, triggering a national media sensation and hundreds of copycat sightings across North America.
Just weeks after Arnold's sighting, metallic debris was recovered near a ranch in Roswell, New Mexico. The Roswell Army Air Field initially issued a press release stating they had recovered a flying disc, before quickly retracting it the following day to clarify it was a downed weather balloon (later revealed to be Project Mogul, a secret nuclear-monitoring balloon project).
Though largely forgotten for decades, the Roswell incident was revived by ufologists in the late 1970s and eventually became the cornerstone of UFO crash-retrieval mythology.
The interest in UFOs, however, has been largely confined to amateurs, enthusiasts and self-styled ufologists. Although first person accounts of sightings and abductions have been around for a long time, it has mainly come from people who, lets just say, were not perceived as being very credible. The topic has also long been regarded as taboo in serious professions like journalism, science or the military.
Having any interest in studying or reporting UFOs or even suggesting having witnessed one, has largely been a career-limiting move.
The series of reporting since 2017 changed things, as highly credible people were now coming forward with what appeared to be harder evidence. It was a field day for ufologists who had long maintained that credible UFO sightings and covert programs to investigate them were in existence, often to derision and ridicule. Most hoped that further disclosure would prove them to be categorically correct.
Still waiting for a pay-off
Unfortunately Grusch's testimony did not produce a 'wheeling out of the alien' moment that UFO enthusiasts had been hoping for–but it did transform UFOs from a fringe cultural topic into a legally mandated national security and government accountability issue.
In response to the public outcry, the Pentagon’s official UAP office (AARO) issued major reports to address Grusch’s allegations directly, releasing a comprehensive historical review of all government UAP programs dating back to 1945.
The report concluded that the Pentagon found no evidence of extraterrestrial technology or reverse-engineering programs, arguing that rumours of secret programs were likely misunderstandings of genuine, highly classified conventional military test craft.
AARO publishes regular tracking reports on hundreds of unresolved military sightings, consistently resolving the vast majority as balloons, drones, space debris, or orbital satellite flaring.
As one can imagine, this satisfied neither the UFO enthusiasts nor the whistleblowers who maintain that the government is obfuscating the truth, selectively declassifying lower-tier reports while keeping core Special Access Programs concealed, even from congressional oversight.
The tug of war continues …
Wanting to believe
I am not one to don the 'tinfoil hat' but the prospect of there being other advanced and intelligent civilisations out there is hard to resist. Indeed, one of my most deepest and dearest wishes is to see us Earthlings become part of an interstellar civilisation within my lifetime–and I didn't even grow up watching Star Trek.
In spite of indulging such thoughts, I still find it hard to buy into the UFO mythology. This is mostly because I do not believe that governments nor corporations would be capable of keeping such a fantastical thing a secret–certainly not for this long.
'They have not!' is the loud interjection I usually hear at this point from my partner, Darren, the one who really wants to believe. 'What do you think all these whistleblowers are if not a series of massive leaks?'
'The most obvious explanation is usually the correct one,' I reply, invoking Occam’s Razor. 'It’s a psyop.'
'Why would they need such an elaborate psyop?'
'It's probably a deterrence strategy. The goal is to keep formidable military foes like Russia and China guessing. It suggests that the US government has some futuristic weapon up its sleeve so they better not get any funny ideas. Given the US's history with the Manhattan Project (where they developed the atom bomb under the cloak of secrecy), it is plausible that they would do something like this. In fact, if the alternative was risking World War Three, I'd probably not only advocate for this strategy but also be a willing participant in it.'
Like Spielberg, Darren has gone deep into the rabbit hole. At this point in the conversation (we've had this chat a few times now) he points to the incident at a school in Zimbabwe, which Spielberg also invoked in his New York Times interview, where many children and their teachers witnessed not only a UFO landing, but actual aliens stepping out of it–some reported interacting telepathically with them.
'How do you explain that? Kids don't lie and they can't all be hallucinating!'
'One–kids are highly impressionable. Two–memories are highly fallible. Three–the only reason you think kids don't lie is because you've never raised any.'
I am not positing that kids are sociopaths who lie without remorse–rather they are humans who are wired for social connection, and at a stage in life where they haven't developed a very strong sense of their own self. Even if they don't lie with bad intentions, they would tell a fib if it means they get to fit in with the rest of the crowd.
Besides, no one wants to be left out of an extraordinary experience. Most kids will just go along with what is being said, and even start to believe that they too witnessed this incredible event (comes back to being impressionable).
This sort of behaviour is not exclusive to children either. You see it play out in group dynamics with adults as well. Just look at how Wall Street traders and analysts behave in the lead up to bubbles: a whole bunch of people start believing and inventing reasons to keep believing in an obvious fantasy (which right now revolves around AI).
The case for public disclosure
In his interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson, who was unusually restrained on the topic, Spielberg also pointed to the sheer volume of 'circumstantial evidence'. He reveals what drove him to make Disclosure Day–the possibility that there was a small group of people who knew the 'unknown' and yet chose to keep it from the public, describing this to be an injustice.
'The existence of UFOs should not be kept from the public–we have a right to know,' is Spielberg's impassioned plea and the message that resonates through his latest movie.
Many UFO enthusiasts would vehemently agree with Spielberg here. Those in the scientific community including Tyson, seeing the calibre of the whistleblowers have somewhat softened their stance towards UFOs–instead of dismissing it altogether they have tried to engage with it from a scientific perspective. It would be heresy for the government to conceal such consequential news from the public, let alone the scientific community!
How is a disclosure likely to go down
Say there really were UFOs visiting our planet, why would governments choose to withhold this fact from the public?
It's unlikely that the UFOs are hostile. If they were, we would have heard about it by now. Our governments would be scrambling to invest in weapons, armies and spaceships to fight these things.
They are probably more concerned about what will happen to the society: Will work, economy and government come to a standstill? What about religions–what will happen to belief and faith and god? Will society just descend into chaos?
My considered perspective is that these fears are greatly exaggerated. Remember the first few weeks of COVID? It was all a bit scary and stunning at first, but when we realised that the vast majority of us will be fine, we all carried on, carrying on.
Hollywood movies have been preparing us for this possibility (of the existence of other intelligent life forms) for many years. Whilst most movies revert to doom-and-gloom scenarios of invasion and death of humanity, if news of aliens visitation does break out, most of us will probably be curious, if not welcoming of the visitors–especially if the aliens don't need us to give them food, housing and jobs…
As for religions, if all the sexual abuse scandals and violence of these last few decades have not been able to dismantle the believers' faith in their given churches, gurus, clerics, priests and pundits–UFOs and the existence of aliens certainly won't. If anything the fanatics will double down.
Coming from the ultra-pluralist religion and culture of Hinduism myself, I can guarantee you that it will take all of two seconds for Indian gurus to claim the UFOs as their very own gods, maybe even avatars. We have a long history of appropriating everyone else's gods (even the monotheist ones) as our own …
A cynical public
Public sentiment on the whole UFO saga has shifted in recent times. Apart from UFO enthusiasts, the public at large are viewing ongoing UFO disclosures very cynically as being yet another 'distraction' by the Trump administration: from the ill-conceived war on Iran to the ongoing tariff saga, the blatant fraud being committed by the Trump family and his cronies, and the Epstein files, there is a lot to distract from.
Belief in governments and institutions were already at an all-time low following the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and the COVID Pandemic. Appointment of Trump's incompetent cronies into senior public sector roles has not helped the situation.
At this stage, even if the Pentagon were to wheel out an alien, most would dismiss it as 'fake news'.
For his part, Spielberg made it clear that although the movie was inspired by the real-world revelations, his script was entirely fictional; even the Hollywood heavyweight is not privy to any insider information on the topic. I was excited by this possibility.
Critique of Disclosure Day * Spoiler Alert *
Creating something that is entirely fictional meant that Spielberg could have gone anywhere he wanted to with this movie. Each time he has tackled this genre, he has found imaginative new angles and visuals with which to tell the story. Whether it was ET, Close Encounters of the Third Kind or War of the Worlds, each was a memorable cinematic experience.
Unfortunately Spielberg fails to accomplish the feat in Disclosure Day. The plot felt familiar to the point of being clichéd. To me at least, it fell flat on its face.
It seemed what Spielberg had set out to do was to make a deeply moving piece of cinema that would talk to the merits of disclosure, invoking empathy for the aliens themselves. But because he is in the business of producing blockbusters, he had to make the whole thing entertaining as well …
Disclosure Day ended up being (yet another) plot-driven narrative that spent more time on nonsensical chase scenes and action sequences than it ought to have. These are punctuated with clumsy attempts at DMCs (deep and meaningful conversations) on the case for and against disclosure.
Teenage boys won't mind the movie but given what Spielberg wanted to achieve, it would have made more sense to give more airtime to the characters themselves; giving them space to tell their backstories, explain their world views and then demonstrate how it credibly shifts through the course of the movie. All these elements were there but covered at such a rushed pace, that the attempt itself came across as being half-hearted.
Jane (played by Eve Hewson) and Margaret (played by Emily Blunt) for example, go through a 360 degree transformation in their belief systems, which sees them conquer deeply entrenched fears and convictions. All this happens too quickly, if not conveniently, for it to be believable.
Even Colin Firth and Emily Blunt's valiant efforts at breathing life into their characters failed to do the trick; they too came across as being contrived, especially towards the end. Acting cannot substitute for bad writing; it never has.
It was also irritating to see someone of Spielberg's calibre resort to a fairly sexist trope insofar as it relates to the female lead.
The male chosen by the aliens grew up out to be a math savant and a brilliant cyber security expert. The female, a weather girl for a local TV network who does shimmies …
Sure, Margaret was pretty and fun, but could she not have been a formidable anchor for the nightly news, feared by politicians and business tycoons? I can attest to many such female characters existing in real life in Australian Television!
There was also a glaring hole in the plot: Having chosen the weather girl to be their spokesperson, the aliens instilled in her the ability to converse in every language in the world and speak the alien tongue – yet she was not able to comprehend the alien language. That power lay with the male lead.
Why wouldn't you just instil this power in your hand-picked weather girl?
The explanation offered in the movie is confounding: The alien language was based on maths and so needed a maths savant to decode and understand. This is why the aliens abducted the boy (alongside with the girl) so they could teach him the the requisite mathematics.
This again evokes an unfortunate trope–Girls aren't good at math.
I will give Spielberg and his screenwriter, David Koepp, the benefit of the doubt; they probably bear no ill will towards women nor had intended to imply women are not good at maths. It was just lazy storytelling on their part: they needed a male lead so they invented a role for him, upping his importance by making him one of the chosen ones, the one who could do maths and would be pivotal in translating the alien language.
The plot holes did not stop there: the narrative also had a tendency of veering into dead ends with no plausible way out, at least not one that could be considered credible. Had it not been for the liberal use of a multi-purpose alien gadget there would not have been a movie at all: this magical device not only seemed capable of enabling telepathic communication, but also mind control, swallowing people whole, deploying an invisibility cloak (the heights of its power), acting like a remote energy source and even performing non-invasive brain surgery. Another lazy storytelling device.
Then, there's the believability factor. We all go into these movies knowing it to be fiction, with a willingness to suspend belief for the hour or two whilst we are being transported to another world. Even so, the plot needs to be believable in context of the fictional world that it is set in. I found myself feeling incredulous throughout. The ending was especially difficult to digest.
The outpouring of emotion at the revelation that we are not alone and had tortured innocent, well-meaning aliens in our past was meant to be an emotive climax–but in a world where people scarcely care about children getting blown up by states and terrorists, it was hard to believe that most people would care about the fate of aliens or even find the revelation to be tear-inducing. There may be fear, anger and disbelief at the seismic shift in our notion of reality–but tears?
Perhaps this is why the backdrop of the movie was some impending nuclear war. Humanity needed a reason to come together and reminded that in spite of our difference, we all are same species, sharing the same planet. Perhaps the tears were not about the aliens and how we had mistreated them. Perhaps it was remorse for the way we have been treating each other all these years ...
Harsh but fair
My critique no doubt comes across as being fairly harsh, especially since it is being directed at a legend. For what it's worth, it's written with the sincerity of a Spielberg fan, who in her 40s was hoping for something with more depth in the UFO and alien genre–if such a thing is possible. A creative of Spielberg's calibre may even appreciate the candour.
In the NYT interview, Spielberg lamented that his success and fame had stopped him from getting what he valued the most in the creative process–honest feedback from the creative team around him.
This feedback was invaluable to him in the early days to push the quality of his films to be the best they could be. But due to his success and fame, people that worked with him felt too intimidated to speak up, even if their better judgement told the them otherwise. Spielberg said that the way he has countered this is by surrounding himself with the same people, presumably because he trusts that they will speak their mind.
Judging by Disclosure Day, I'd say that even they are probably not speaking up as much as they ought to; it's a very natural human tendency not to feel too critical towards people you know and probably, at some level, love. Spielberg is probably left to resolve everything himself and receives very little push back on his ideas–and as Disclosure Day shows, that does not bring the best out of even the legendary director.
I could not help but notice that movie critics also treaded rather carefully; few dared to call out the obvious deficiencies with the screenplay. This is a wider issue in the Arts.
Like the children in that school in Zimbabwe who likely went along with the tale of an alien spaceship, critics and gatekeepers are also prone to propping up fantasies especially as it relates to the superstars in the field.
However, even the greatest artist can have a bad day, and we should not shy away from calling it out; their art will be better for it.
For my part I hope Spielberg tackles the topic and genre again. As much as I disliked the movie, I very much enjoyed listening to all the interviews he gave in the lead-up to the movie and agree wholeheartedly with his premise: If there are aliens in storage, the public deserves to know.
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Written by Reeta Dhar. Cover Art by Darren Pryce.
Written and illustrated at Piraeus, Greece
First published by Vitalis Magazine in September 2026
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