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Sci-Fi Movies

As 'Disclosure Day' Premieres, Steven Spielberg Says He Believes Aliens Really Have Visited Earth (rollingstone.com) 97

Steven Spielberg grants that his 1977 UFO film Close Encounters was "speculative," writes the Associated Press, but "Disclosure Day, he insists, is the real deal." "It's my first film that will be considered science fiction that I do not consider to be science fiction," Spielberg said in a recent interview. "It's much more reflective of the world as it is evolving and discoveries that are being made as we speak." Spielberg, at 79, is trying to revive and reconsider the alien wonder that's long lingered in his mind, from "E.T." to "War of the Worlds." "Disclosure Day," Spielberg's first summer movie in a decade, is already being hailed as one of his best in years. But this time, Spielberg is testing whether he can conjure some of his trademark movie magic less with imagination than with conviction. "I've been a believer since I made 'Close Encounters' 50 years ago," Spielberg says. "But I would always say: Until I've seen a UAP or a UFO with my own eyes, I'm not going to categorically state that life from out there has come here. But I've changed that," he adds. "I'm now willing to change my mind because of the circumstantial evidence which is overwhelming..."

Spielberg, having long followed reports of alleged alien encounters, was inspired by the 2023 House Subcommittee on National Security hearing on UAPs: Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena. Among the witnesses was whistleblower and former Air Force intelligence officer David Grusch, who testified that the government concealed a program investigating UAPs. The Pentagon then denied it... Those 2023 testimonies and others so fueled Spielberg that he produced a 50-page treatment on what would become "Disclosure Day." During the writing process with Koepp, he texted him more notes, he says, "than I've ever sent to anyone in my life."

"There was a period in there where I believe he re-read the script every single day for a year," Koepp says. "We'd be in different time zones and I would wake up to 30 or 35 texts from his most current reading of the script. When the leader of the project has that level of commitment, it tends to bring along everyone. You up your game."

The article calls it "a grand bookend for one of the most cosmically-minded moviemakers of our time." But the man who filmed some of the world's first summer blockbusters also shared his thoughts on the future of movies. "Even though the numbers are still not pre-COVID level numbers for any films being released now, it's more robust than it has been for many years. The audience gives me belief that people still want to congregate in a dark space in the company of strangers to share an experience of a film made by storytellers. And that gives me faith to continue making films."

Rolling Stone wrote that "There's a lot to love in Disclosure Day." Though they also offer this pithy summary of its plot. "Remember when Steven Spielberg digitally replaced the guns in the hands of government agents for the 20th anniversary of E.T., then expressed regret about the decision? Imagine that he not only restored the weapons but crafted an entire two-and-a-half-hour feature around that one sequence as a mea culpa. That's Disclosure Day." The filmmaker may be staging a pulpy campaign with this sci-fi throwback, but he sincerely seems to believe the truth is out there — and will set us free... [W]hile the quality of his output can vary wildly when you look at the big picture of his career, there's still a baseline of love — for filmmaking, for storytelling through images, for giving people an experience that pushes emotional buttons and taps adrenal glands — that gives his work a sense of vitality and displays the sensibility of an artist at work...

There's also a weird full-circle feel to it, and not just because he's returning to the fertile ground of Close Encounters and his other science fiction spectacles. You can see traces of everything from Duel to Minority Report show up, to the point where this almost doubles as a career retrospective in miniature... Yes, Spielberg does believe that we are not the only game running in the cosmos. But he also believes that our better angels have not left the building, and that movies still have the power to communally blow minds and open hearts.

The Associated Press calls it "a grand bookend for one of the most cosmically-minded moviemakers of our time" and "a distant answer to the final notes of Close Encounters."

As 'Disclosure Day' Premieres, Steven Spielberg Says He Believes Aliens Really Have Visited Earth

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  • by memory_register ( 6248354 ) on Sunday June 14, 2026 @04:22PM (#66191970)

    It makes for good marketing for his rather mediocre film if he says that this is his way of disclosing aliens for real. Does he really believe this, or is it just spin?

    • by jhoegl ( 638955 ) on Sunday June 14, 2026 @04:29PM (#66191976)
      Dreaming is always a great thing. Sci-Fi has given us versions of what we see now. Most referenced is Star Trek from the 1960s. how much of that is real now in some form or another?

      Who cares if he believes it, just like who cares if people believe in their religion. it doesnt matter, as long as you dream of a better future and world.
      • Most referenced is Star Trek from the 1960s. how much of that is real now in some form or another?

        Not aliens with lumps of rubber glued to their heads.

      • by Rujiel ( 1632063 )

        "Who cares if he believes it, just like who cares if people believe in their religion"

        Ufology is not a religion. and I resent attempts to contrive one out of it. This encapsulates how Hollywood has been a marginalizing force against ufology, and still is today even while taking the appearance of embracing it. This isn't just the realm of dreams, there have been real conspiracies around deliberate fabrications (majestic 12 for example), and this film willy likely attempt to rewrite some of it.

        Anyone who is

        • by jhoegl ( 638955 )
          This isnt a one to one correlation, I was using another example of something that has little change to lives if its real or not.
      • by Powercntrl ( 458442 ) on Sunday June 14, 2026 @06:00PM (#66192090) Homepage

        Most referenced is Star Trek from the 1960s. how much of that is real now in some form or another?

        Transporters? Nope.
        FTL space travel? Nope.
        Post-scarcity society where people work to better themselves rather than in the pursuit of personal profit? Definitely nope.
        Food replicators? Nope.
        Energy-based weapons? Mostly still not practical, and the real-world versions (lasers, masers) predate Star Trek.
        Androids? We're pretty close.
        VR addiction? Has been known to happen. If extended to addiction to any technology in general (smartphone addiction, doomscrolling, etc.), widely common.
        People falling in love with AI characters? Rare, but does happen.

        • Energy-based weapons? Mostly still not practical, and the real-world versions (lasers, masers) predate Star Trek.
          If you think that, you are completely out of the loop.

      • Dreaming is always a great thing. Sci-Fi has given us versions of what we see now. Most referenced is Star Trek from the 1960s. how much of that is real now in some form or another?

        Precious little, and never the really impressive bits: faster-than-light travel and transporters still remain firmly in the sci-fi realm.

        • Of course you are going to reach for the absolute extreme examples in order to try and feel smart for arguing. Everyone already knows we don't have faster-than-light travel, and we also don't have magic ships that reorient gravity without thrust or ever saying how they aren't all floating in zero-G.

          But we do have things that were portrayed in science fiction today, that we did not even come close to when they were portrayed:
          1. voice interfaces for computers
          2. personal portable computing
          3. personal wireless

      • Most referenced is Star Trek from the 1960s. how much of that is real now in some form or another?

        Tablet computers, voice interfaces to computers... What else, exactly?

    • He's talking about E.T. :-)

    • i think it is highly likely that "aliens" exist but it is highly unlikely that any of them have managed to get anywhere near our little solar system. there seems to be no conclusive proof that any ever did, and our current understanding of physics makes this a near impossibility, but our understanding isn't perfect so it's impossible to prove that they didn't so ... all this talk out of the blue about ufos now sounds very suspiciously like a new religion is being brewed. given that the foremost purpose of a

      • by Rujiel ( 1632063 )

        The attempt to forge a religion out of it is I think not accidental. The huckster Dr. Stephen Greer's not-really-a-documentary Sirius, which was advertised as another "this is it" disclosure moment that in retrospect was yet another in a series of letdowns, was front-loaded with alien telepathy and drum circles. That really helps people decide not take the topic seriously just in the case that they were maybe going to.

      • by Bongo ( 13261 )

        Yes, by all means, identify myths and blind beliefs and wishful thinking where that occurs.

        On the point of reason, though, humans have had our advanced technology for, say, a couple of hundred years.

        The universe is billions of years old. We've basically just learnt enough to realise that technology can do things we can't imagine, and we've only just started. Say a civilization started out a billion years ago. How would we even begin to comprehend what they're capable of? In fact, the human mind, our brains,

        • by znrt ( 2424692 )

          well, that's a very open question with a lot of daring assumptions. the universe is so vast and the likelihood of a species making it out of their solar system is so small that 2 species ever meeting in real time (whatever time is) is really remote. my current understanding (or belief) is that species in the universe are sparks destined to glow and fade away in the dark, forever "alone". unless ofc two of them appear right next to each other, which doesn't seem to be our case (or our neighbors are hiding re

        • To see a well dramatized version of what you're touching on, go watch / read The Expanse show / novels.

          The show is fantastic, but the books (as always) are even better.

      • IF aliens exist...
        IF aliens that exist are anywhere near us in the universe...
        IF aliens that exist are anywhere near us in the universe at the same time we exist...
        IF aliens that exist near us in the universe at the same time we exist have developed any form of technology...
        IF aliens that exist near us in the universe at the same time we exist have developed any form of technology capable of broadcasting their own existence in a form we can detect...

        This is why we have the Drake Equation. It describes find

      • sounds very suspiciously like a new religion is being brewed

        A religion that would also happen to appeal to uneducated adherents of technocratic authoritarianism.

    • The real question is, does it really matter?

      Unless it's about filmmaking or storytelling, I try not to worry about what anyone in Hollywood believes.

    • Obviously he wouldn't know unless has had personally seen them.

      One of the alien rumors is that Nixon wanted to impress his buddy Jacky Gleason and showed him some proof of aliens, and presumably if that did happen then the military would have learnt their lesson (as the public did) about the untrustworthiness of politicians and presidents, and kept them out of the loop in the future. I would not be surprised if the president is kept out of the loop on the most secretive black projects. You'd have to be an i

    • Of course it's spin. You don't get to his position without knowing how to spin your films or wanting to maximise revenue. What seems odd is using the entirely public domain evidence gathered by the UAP sub-committee as a justification. David Spergel, the guy who ran that investigation is one of the most hard-nosed, talented and data-driven scientists around. Now, their brief was NOT to confirm or deny the existence of aliens, and they had no access to classified information, and they did indeed conclude th
  • K, but no... no (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jhoegl ( 638955 ) on Sunday June 14, 2026 @04:26PM (#66191974)
    Odd that they keep saying "we will release" and never do.
    Odd that people keep putting up video that constantly gets debunked. Not one valid "Alien UFO" has come up.
    Everything related to this is fake.
    And it is likely "alien life" has visited earth via meteoroids/asteroids/space debris as it has been proven and shown life will survive in space.
    But intelligence of alien origin visiting us? No... no...
    People now use "Alien" as a way to discount or disparage peoples actual contributions to humanity. Pyramids, computers, stealth tech, radar, etc. It seems more a lack of understanding of these things and a lack of care to understand them than it is anything else.
    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 )

      Odd that they keep saying "we will release" and never do.

      Simple explanation for multiple files not completely released: Epstein was an alien.

  • s[pimnvsot pvo ptoj vpsoejrt vpsoejt vpoerjt v

  • Just because you are famous. does not make your opinions on other subjects any more valuable than anyone else's.

    Physics rules it out.
  • by Randseed ( 132501 ) on Sunday June 14, 2026 @04:59PM (#66192024)
    Soon we will discover that "covfefe" is the Grey's greeting that is the equivalent of Vulcan's "life long and prosper."
    • Nah they'd rather turn us into nutrient paste.
    • by twosat ( 1414337 ) on Monday June 15, 2026 @02:47AM (#66192596)

      A bunch of people are convinced that the appropriate greeting when meeting a space alien is "Gnorts."
      Why "Gnorts", you ask?
      It's simple. In the heavily-orchestrated, government-disinformation-rich Apollo Moon landing program, what was the name the government used to refer to the first man who landed on the Moon?
      "Neil Armstrong."
      Yeah, right, as if that's his real name. Turns out it was in code.
      Backwards, it is:
      "Gnorts, Mr. Alien!"

      • Hah! I did a Google search for this conversation, to see where the idea originated, and Google AI helpfully supplied

        Additionally, the phrase "Gnorts Mr. Alien" ("Strong Mr. Alien" backward) ...

  • by RightwingNutjob ( 1302813 ) on Sunday June 14, 2026 @05:02PM (#66192028)

    says ftl isn't a thing and the answer to Fermi's paradox is that everyone is out there but too far away to hear.

    Alienz! would imply necessarily that there is quite a bit about the way of things that we don't even know that we don't know.

    Possibly it is discoverable in the foreseeable future or just as possibly it requires an inordinate amount of dumb luck to stumble on the conditions of time and place in space where such a discovery (if it even exists) is possible.

    Whole lot of very big ifs. Not a whole lot of reason to just believe the way one might just believe that a better chatbot is just around the corner or a vaccine for the common cold is sitting in a test tube somewhere just waiting to be tested and commercialized.

    The latter extrapolates within the known unknowns. The former is predicated on the existence of specific unknown unknowns.

    • I'm quite sure the answer to the Fermi Paradox, at least for Earth, is that we will be to short-sighted not to fuck ourselves from being able to become a spacefaring species.

      I do think we'll upload our sub-conscience into androids though. We're making great strides on so many fronts with all the different technologies required for it. It wouldn't be human anymore and that's maybe how we vanish.

    • If the rest of our existence as a race, for the next however many years until we go extinct, is entirely based on what we know currently about physics, and there is nothing left to learn, no short cuts, no loop holes, no new approaches, then.... fucking hell, the future is going to be boring.

      I refuse to believe that our future abilities have been set in stone by scientists who barely knew atoms existed when they came up with their rules about how the universe operates - I fully expect future generations to

    • A simple explanation of Fermi's paradox is that the first step in the process that lead to life is extremely rare, so rare it only happened once. Imagine that it requires hundreds of specific molecules as exactly the right position and distance from each other when a lightning strikes, that must be of the exact right power. It isn't hard to require circumstances that are so rare they will only happens once during the whole lifespan of the current universe. And then Fermi is no longer a paradox.

      • The universe is too big for anything that is extremely unlikely to nonetheless have occurred billions/trillions of times, and for all we know there may have been (or still be) multiple forms of life in our own solar system that have independently arisen. We have barely started looking.

        As far as advanced life that may be trying to contact us, or at least be detectable by another civilization close-enough by, there are all sorts of reasons why we may not have detected it, such as making a whole bunch of wrong

        • I meant NOT nonetheless.

          • Not too big!?!? Or what do you mean?

            There are "infinitely" more possible chess games than atoms in the Universe so if life requires just a couple of dozens of atoms and molecules at just the right time and position it is EXTREMELY unlikely that that combination has happened more than once.

            https://www.reddit.com/r/IsItB... [reddit.com]

    • says ftl isn't a thing and the answer to Fermi's paradox is that everyone is out there but too far away to hear.

      Crucially, too far away in space and/or time. Because of this we might never be able to detect any alien advanced civilizations before becoming extinct.

    • says ftl isn't a thing and the answer to Fermi's paradox is that everyone is out there but too far away to hear.

      It really doesn't, though. Even without FTL, given enough time any technological species should eventually spread to all space.

      Cool Worlds on You Tube covered this recently:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

      With sublight speeds it takes millions of years to spread, but we've had those millions.

  • by gurps_npc ( 621217 ) on Sunday June 14, 2026 @05:03PM (#66192032) Homepage

    Keeping aliens secret is political suicide. People do not trust the government already, you just declare yourself to be an untrustworthy liar - worse than Trump (who if we were keeping aliens secret would immediately tweet it out).

    The claim is we do this to.... prevent panic?????

    Mankind has never 'panicked'. Not the way this stupid conspiracy myth implies. We created nuclear weapons and there was no panic. We created and used nasty poison gas and nobody panicked.

    You know what get people in the street and calling for the government to resign?
    Slavery (Sparticus, Civil War, etc.)
    Preventing women from Voting (multiple times in multiple countries)
    Kicking black women off a bus because she took a seat
    Treating civilians so badly they set themselves on fire (Jasmine Revolution)

    While I am sure a few morons will panic on hearing aliens exist, but no one cares when a few MORE lunatics buy all the guns and dig a bunker.

    • Pssst -here's the secret they are hiding. There ARE NO aliens. No crashed UFOs, no ETs. But nobody can MAKE MONEY by telling us the speed of light keeps aliens from reaching us. So they do the "Alien Strip Tease" burlesque. A liitle flash here, a little glimpse there. But there will never be a "big reveal". The stripper doesn't love you, you're not going to sleep with her, and there are no aliens.
      • The aliens are obviously inside machines that can turn at G-forces that humans couldn't tolerate. That's why we see these UFOs doing impossible physics as it's "more impossible physics with a human onboard that we need to keep alive and conscience". They collected all the data, indexed us so to speak and decided to let us just stay in the nursery for a while longer.

    • by taustin ( 171655 )

      And yet, we created (or didn't) covid, and the entire world panicked in the most insanely stupid, suicidal way possible for better than a year, causing economic damage that nobody alive today will live long enough to see the full recovery from.

      • by evanh ( 627108 )

        There's no shortage of spin doctors, just the same as with this ET stuff. Great for a bit camp-side story telling but yet there is still those that swear the conspiracies are real.

      • No we did not.

        We waited until it was too late, had entered the US and spread.

        Then we put in reasonable precautions. Most followed it, a few did not and called us stupid.

        Covid death rate for those over 75 was 17% ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] )

        Yes, the rate was only 2.3% for the over 50 and less than 1% for those under 50. 2.3% is scary high death rate, That would mean everyone would know someone that died. 17% is a horrifying number that justifies the cost.

        Peru had over 6,600 deaths per million peo

      • Government panicked and mishandled it - the public just responded in as logical a fashion as they could given the misinformation that was being fed to them (due to government incompetence).

    • Who knows the motivations for keeping things secret (which they certainly have been doing, regardless of what the UFOs are) - it may be more about potential military secrets rather than spooking the public about the existence of aliens.

      Even if the military suspects this is foreign (not alien) military tech that they don't understand, and can't replicate, that could also be seen as reason not to tell the public.

  • by diffract ( 7165501 ) on Sunday June 14, 2026 @05:45PM (#66192076)
    Let's get you to bed
  • with them at all times, there's no decent pictures of aliens.

  • There have been dozens of alien contact movies since "Close Encounters" and the subject has been done to death. If aliens have contacted humans the VERY FIRST question any scientific person would ask is "How did you get here, how did you exceed the speed of light?" I am sick to the point of vomitting of these poofy stories of aliens who come to tell us we need more group hugs. It is time for real scientists to stop pandering to the mentally ill and indulging their fairy stories. Show me a phaser, show me a
  • The speed of light prevents aliens from reaching us. Tell us how they overcame that or your story is just imaginary. And remember, "Zero point energy" or "They're from another dimension" are proof that your story is bogus.
    • by jezwel ( 2451108 )

      The speed of light prevents aliens from reaching us. Tell us how they overcame that or your story is just imaginary.

      They take many years to get to Earth and return in their home planet timeframe. If they can boost to a good % of c the apparent time is less.

      Is there a problem with those statements, or is it because we live a measly 3-4 score and 10 years that a decades long journey is a problem?

      • Fair point! If a species lives for thousands of years, a century-long flight might not be an issue. Hell, what if they're effectively immortal?
    • We don't understand dark matter, don't understand black holes due to not understanding physics in that realm (no unified theory), don't know how to interpret quantum theory. We know that entangled quantum particles act in synchrony over arbitrary distance without any signal between them being transmitted at all ... there's a lot we don't know (including not knowing the full extent of what it is that we don't know).

      Even if did know it all, what if the thing traveling has a lifetime of millions or years, or i

    • by schwit1 ( 797399 )

      Yes. Basically a remake of Close Encounters

      One big nit — trailers gave away too much of the main plot. If you’ve seen the 4-5 different trailers you know what’s going to happen and when it’s going to happen and who it’s going to happen to.

  • You have enough wealth. Don't ruin your name with cheap AD work for the orange wannabe dictator. We still waiting for another disclosure.
  • This is one of the most unknowable questions there are. There is absolutely no reason to think that they have, and there is absolutely no reason to think that they haven't. I imagine an intelligent anthill trying to work out whether any other intelligences have ever come to their island by looking for unrecognised pheromone trails.

    No aliens, ever, is obviously possible, it's the simplest way of explaining why none have ever said hello or left behind stuff which has no other explanation. There are huge dista

    • "There's a tendency for people to think of official representatives visiting now and doing secret deals with governments, but when someone talks about aliens having visited Earth, I imagine things like a group of scientists and thrill-seekers coming down to collect organic material samples and have fun back when mammals weren't really a thing yet."

      This.
      Space aliens have come to Earth...and were immediately eaten by dinosaurs, because it was 100 million years ago.
  • Sometimes being wealthy just means you get to have wealthy person hobbies.

  • Beings that have evolved to pull off interstellar travel would certainly possess traits of inquisitiveness and sociability. They would not come all this way and not seek to communicate with us. I say humans have never been visited by aliens.
  • Love his older movies, Close Encounters being the best by far, but I wish actors and movie producers would stop expressing their opinions on politics and science. Because, well, they have spent their entire lives in a career that exists around make believe. I spent my youth obsessing about UFOs, The Bermuda Triangle, Peruvian alien runways and so on. It was all explained by science. Yes, it's possible intelligent life visited us in the past, but not in the last 1000 years or so. Not a single viable iota of
  • That does not change the fact that there isn't a shred of objective evidence that such has been the case. Even more: taking into account the vastness of space and time, the speed-of-light limitation, and the comparatively short life span of individual biological species, the most likely scenario is one in which humans will go extinct without ever finding out whether any other advanced civilizations exist, or have ever existed, out there.
  • ....and neither exist here on planet earth. No evidence of either.

    Seems like many need to have some kind of deity, sci fi buffs will lean towards aliens.

    But we've only got us folks. Deal with it.

    • The whole premise of the movie is that aliens are real, and that the evidence has been covered up ... It could be made into a good movie without being true, but wasn't!

      It's inconceivable that life doesn't exist elsewhere in the universe, whether it has visited us or not. Given that humans have gone from gaslight and horsedrawn buggies to electricity, radio and space travel in about 100 years, it's would be expected that another species who started this technological journey sooner than us (even a 1000 years

  • Spielberg may be a genius film producer and director, but it turns out that outside his field of expertise, he is just another moron. Also, too stupid to know when to keep his mouth shut. "Best to let people think you a fool than to open your mouth and confirm it." --Twain.

  • Meanwhile, we have neither observed nor been contacted by aliens, and the proof is incredibly easy... presuming you've actually taken and paid attention in science class when you were in school.

    • Who knows. Some of the UFO reports are certainly intriguing - air force pilots recounting flying objects seemingly disobeying the laws of physics with massive acceleration, changes of direction, etc.

      The thing with science is that it only predicts what you've previously observed and understood - it doesn't say what's impossible. Imagine discovering quantum behavior like entanglement at arbitrary distances for the first time - science fiction stuff that turns out to be true. Some of the UFO reports certainly

      • by whitroth ( 9367 )

        You want the *proof*? Ok.
        There have been NO breakthroughs, stuff that literally came out of nowhere, in the last century and a half. We *know* where every bit of math and engineering came from.

        So, no, we have neither seen or contacted them.

        • What are you referring to by "no breakthoughs"?

          If you go back a century and half then most of modern physics has not been discovered yet!

  • It's a long movie - 2.5 hours, and the time went by quickly enough, so somewhat entertaining at least, but I was hoping for something much better.

    What spoiled the movie other than a lame single-dimensional plot (it's basically a chase movie - government hunting down a leaker) are (mild spoiler alert) :

    1) It's utter reliance on a magical alien device that gives whoever holds it a bunch of superpowers.

    2) Some really poor CGI of bug-eyed aliens (their only appearance for maybe 1-2 min out of 2.5 hour movie)

    Wha

  • "I would wake up to 30 or 35 texts from his most current reading of the script."
    I have a friend who does this. I'll get a dozen texts when I wake up and yep, it's like "when do you sleep"
    We have a name for it, and that's crazy.

    You'd think that people looking for life in the sea or life in the stars would have come to a conclusion by now, but we've been listening to radio for a long time (SETI) and sending submersibles in to the twilight zone and down to the trenches for a while now.
    In the deep ocean where t

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