Spielberg revisits aliens, says circumstantial evidence changed his mind

Steven Spielberg says he is no longer willing to rule out alien visitation, arguing that the circumstantial evidence has become overwhelming. In a web exclusive conversation with Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz, the filmmaker said he spent years refusing to categorically say life from elsewhere had come here until he saw a UAP or UFO with his own eyes.

That shift lands just as Universal Pictures prepares to release Disclosure Day on June 11, a film that brings Spielberg back to extraterrestrial questions nearly half a century after Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977. Spielberg said it is the first film he considers science fiction that he does not personally consider to be science fiction, because he sees it as reflecting the world as it is evolving and the discoveries being made now.

The project itself leans directly into that tension between belief and evidence. Josh O’Connor stars as a cybersecurity whistleblower who has government material documenting a history of alien encounters, placing disclosure and institutional secrecy at the center of the story. That setup gives Spielberg a way to revisit a subject that has shadowed much of his career without simply repeating the emotional language of Close Encounters.

The film also opens with a classic Spielberg touch: a TV weather report predicting hail, followed by cereal falling into a bowl, a domestic image that recalls the director’s long habit of finding wonder in ordinary American life. Spielberg described the moment with nostalgia, and it signals a movie that is trying to feel closer to fact than fantasy even as it deals with alien contact.

Disclosure Day also marks Spielberg’s return to the summer movie calendar after about a decade away, a notable reset for a director whose biggest box-office peaks helped define the season’s commercial stakes. With early reactions already generating strong advance buzz, the film now looks like more than another genre exercise. It is a statement about where Spielberg’s imagination has landed after decades of probing what people believe, what institutions hide and how cinema can still make the impossible feel plausible.