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Cultural Apologetics Column

Note: This is a Feature Film Review and Social Commentary

This article was published exclusively online in the Christian Research Journal, Volume 49, number 02 (2026).

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[Editor’s Note: This review contains spoilers for Disclosure Day.]

Disclosure Day

Directed by Steven Spielberg

Screenplay by David Koepp

Story by Steven Spielberg

Produced by Kristie Macosko Krieger and Steven Spielberg

Starring Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, Colin Firth, Eve Hewson, and Colman Domingo

Feature Film (PG–13)

(Universal Pictures, 2026)

Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day (2026) is ostensibly a science-fiction thriller about extraterrestrial contact. On the surface, it follows a familiar premise: evidence comes to light that humanity is not alone in the universe, powerful institutions attempt to control that information, and a small group of individuals struggle to make that truth public knowledge. The film contains all the expected ingredients of modern UFO fiction, from classified programs and government secrecy to whistleblowers and the possibility that reality itself may be larger than humanity has been led to believe.

Yet to describe Disclosure Day as a film only about aliens would be to miss what makes it interesting, because the extraterrestrials here are almost beside the point. What Spielberg has produced is less a movie about visitors from another world than a movie about a distinctly American obsession, which is the suspicion (and eventual disclosure) of truths about reality being hidden from ordinary people. Unlike many “alien invasion” films, the central conflict is not between humanity and extraterrestrials, but between disclosure and secrecy, revelation and control, public knowledge and institutional authority.

The title itself reveals the film’s true concern. “Disclosure” has become one of the defining words of contemporary UFO culture.¹ It refers to the belief that governments, intelligence agencies, corporations, or other elites already possess knowledge that has been withheld from the public. The question is not so much “Do aliens exist?” as it is “Who knows the truth and who has the right to control the narrative of reality itself?”

This idea has become so familiar that audiences scarcely notice how striking it is. Few modern films about extraterrestrials focus primarily on astronomy or biology or engineering. Instead, they focus on secrecy and hidden files, suppressed evidence and cover-ups. The unknown becomes frightening because somebody else may already know. Disclosure Day draws heavily upon this cultural inheritance. The film assumes that viewers are already fluent in the language of modern UFO mythology. We know what a disclosure event might look like. We know why intelligence agencies are suspicious. We know why the public distrusts official explanations. We know that somewhere in the background there are competing narratives about what is really happening.

But that fluency is not innate, and these assumptions did not emerge from nowhere. They are, in fact, the product of nearly eighty years of American folklore and myth-making. From the “flying saucer” reports of the late 1940s to Roswell, from Project Blue Book to congressional hearings on UAPs, from Cold War paranoia to internet-era conspiracy culture, Americans have developed a unique mythology populated by extraterrestrials, government agents, secret technologies, and hidden truths. It is a mythology shaped as much by Hollywood as by any documented “sightings.” And it is a mythology that Spielberg himself helped create.

To understand Disclosure Day, then, we have to understand something larger than the film itself — and that is the strange cultural history through which aliens became one of America’s most persistent religious symbols.

As American as Apple Pie. The modern UFO phenomenon is, in many respects, one of the most distinctly American mythologies ever created. While reports of strange lights and unusual aerial phenomena can be found throughout human history, the specific constellation of ideas we now associate with UFOs (flying saucers, alien abduction accounts, government cover-ups, Men in Black, crashed spacecraft, secret military programs, whistleblowers, impending disclosure, etc.) is overwhelmingly a product of American culture. These days, aliens are as American as baseball and apple pie.

The roots of this mythology stretch back at least to New York in the late 1800s. One of the most important early figures is Charles Fort, an eccentric writer who spent the early twentieth century collecting reports of strange and anomalous phenomena. Fort was fascinated by unexplained lights, mysterious objects, unusual atmospheric events, and incidents that seemed to resist easy scientific explanation. He was not really interested in extraterrestrials. Rather, he maintained a posture of skepticism toward “official” explanations and encouraged readers to consider the possibility that reality might be stranger than conventional wisdom allowed.² That instinct — the suspicion that important truths are being concealed or suppressed — became one of the foundational impulses of modern ufology.

The phenomenon as we know it truly begins in 1947. That year, pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing several unusual objects near Mount Rainier.³ Describing their movement as resembling “saucers skipping across water,” Arnold unintentionally gave birth to one of the most important cultural images of the twentieth century: the flying saucer. The timing could hardly have been more significant. America had just emerged from World War II. The atomic bomb had transformed humanity’s understanding of technological power. The Cold War was beginning, and radar systems, experimental aircraft, rockets, satellites, and intelligence agencies were becoming central features of modern life. Ordinary Americans were becoming more aware of the fact that governments possessed technologies and information not readily available to the public. The sky itself had become mysterious, a canvas upon which new fears could be projected in the years leading up to the space race.

Roswell followed shortly thereafter. Whatever actually happened in New Mexico in July 1947 matters less, culturally speaking, than what Roswell eventually became. Roswell provided the UFO phenomenon with its foundational myth. Something extraordinary occurred, authorities intervened, and the public was not told the whole story. Whether one believes that story or not is beside the point — the narrative itself proved irresistible.⁴

As sightings continued, the U.S. Air Force established a series of investigative programs, culminating in Project Blue Book (1952–1969). Here again, the popular imagination tends to reduce history to simplistic categories. Blue Book neither proved extraterrestrial visitation nor conclusively debunked the UFO phenomenon. Most reports received ordinary explanations, others did not. More importantly, however, Blue Book transformed UFOs into a matter of national attention. Astronomer J. Allen Hynek was a skeptic working with Blue Book who grew dissatisfied with the tendency to dismiss every unusual report out of hand. He argued that some cases deserved serious investigation, and in doing so, helped create the image of the UFO researcher (ufologist) as someone occupying the uneasy middle ground between credulity and dismissal.⁵

At the same time, another institution was shaping the American imagination even more powerfully than newspaper headlines: Hollywood. The explosion of science fiction cinema during the 1950s gave UFO media its visual language. Films such as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1952), Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) translated Cold War anxieties into extraterrestrial imagery. Aliens became stand-ins for invasion, infiltration, atomic-age anxiety, and technological uncertainty. The UFO phenomenon and science fiction entered a feedback loop. Reported sightings inspired films; films shaped expectations; expectations influenced future reports.

Over time, the alien acquired a face. The now-familiar “grey,” with its oversized head, large black eyes, and slight frame, emerged through decades of interaction between science fiction literature, television, film, alleged abduction accounts, magazine illustrations, and popular culture. In this sense, the extraterrestrial as imagined in Disclosure Day is less a hypothetical biological entity than a cultural artifact.

Appalachian Folklore and Hollywood Magic. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the UFO phenomenon became entangled with distrust of institutions. The Vietnam War, Watergate, intelligence scandals, and growing public cynicism toward government aided in transforming the meaning of UFO stories. This shift gave rise to some of the most influential figures in American ufology.

Gray Barker, a West Virginian writer, helped popularize stories about mysterious Men in Black who allegedly appeared after strange sightings and discouraged witnesses from speaking publicly. Whether Barker intended these stories as journalism, folklore, satire, or something in between remains debated. What matters is that they introduced a new character into the mythology, that of the shadowy guardian of forbidden knowledge.⁶

Around the same time, journalist John Keel was pushing the conversation in other directions. Best known for The Mothman Prophecies (Saturday Review Press, 1975), Keel eventually became skeptical of the “extraterrestrial hypothesis” itself and argued that UFOs, apparitions, so-called “cryptids,” and paranormal encounters (including religious visions) might represent different manifestations of a broader phenomenon. His concept of the “ultraterrestrial” shifted the focus of ufology from astronomy toward ontology.⁷

By the time Spielberg released Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977, the UFO had become a symbol of transcendence. Spielberg’s genius was recognizing that extraterrestrials did not have to function only as monsters or invaders, but that they could also function as objects of wonder. The visitor from beyond the stars began to occupy a narrative role once reserved for angels or divine messengers in ancient literature.

This is the cultural inheritance that Disclosure Day draws upon. To say that this film merely employs established science fiction tropes would be reductionistic. Rather, it inhabits an entire modern American mythology. Flying saucers, government secrecy, extraterrestrial intelligences, Men in Black, whistleblowers, and disclosure movements all converge into a single narrative framework.

Seen in this light, the alien functions as more than a science fiction character. It has become one of modern America’s most recognizable cultural — even religious — symbols, and this has very little to do with people worshipping extraterrestrials. Instead, it has more to do with the fact that the UFO phenomenon increasingly serves many of the same functions religions once served, from offering revelation to suggesting that humanity is not alone in the cosmos, hinting at powers beyond human understanding. Above all, it invites us to believe that reality is larger than we immediately perceive.

Which brings us back to Disclosure Day. The film is not really asking whether aliens exist. That’s a given within the film’s narrative framework and, frankly, is an old question from a cultural perspective at this point. Instead, it asks if the veil were finally lifted, if the truth were finally disclosed, what would we do with it?

Paradigm Shift. Interestingly, the film refuses to answer its own central question. The credits roll just as humanity receives revelation. Disclosure occurs, the veil is lifted, and the narrative effectively stops. Spielberg is less interested in depicting the consequences than in presenting the moment itself. The burden of interpretation is transferred to the audience. This is a fairly compelling dramatic choice. But culturally speaking, the question is perhaps less destabilizing than the film assumes.

The idea that intelligent extraterrestrial life may exist has been part of popular consciousness for generations. Americans have spent nearly eighty years imagining aliens through novels, films, television, comic books, conspiracy theories, documentaries, and internet culture. The extraterrestrial is no longer shocking. In many respects, it has become familiar.

Indeed, if definitive evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial life were revealed tomorrow, the dominant response would probably not be panic — it would likely be relief. Millions of people already assume such life exists. For decades, the question in popular culture has been less about whether aliens are real and more about whether governments are hiding that knowledge. A disclosure event would therefore function as a confirmation of suspicions many people already hold, not so much a paradigm-shattering revelation.

This is one reason I think the film’s most interesting question lies elsewhere — it’s not whether aliens exist, but what category we place them in once they do, which is profoundly theological. One of the most common assumptions of modern secular culture is that the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence would somehow challenge traditional religious beliefs. Yet historically, Christianity is perhaps one of the least threatened by the possibility.⁸ This is largely because Christianity has never described reality as consisting only of God and humanity.

The biblical worldview emerges from an ancient Near Eastern context in which the cosmos was understood to be populated. Angels (messengers), cherubim, seraphim, heavenly hosts, principalities, powers, rebellious spiritual beings — Scripture presents a reality crowded with intelligences that are not human. The modern secular imagination often pictures an empty universe punctuated only by matter and energy. The biblical imagination never did.

In this sense, Christians already believe that humanity is not alone. We simply do not call those beings extraterrestrials. As I’ve noted elsewhere, the nonhuman spiritual intelligences spoken of in Scripture exist within God’s created order and are categorically different from hypothetical biological life originating on other planets. The Bible leaves room for realities beyond the world accessible to ordinary human perception without conflating those realities with extraterrestrial life.⁹ As such, the Christian theological tradition possesses categories for understanding nonhuman intelligences that many secular worldviews lack. Indeed, the Christian cosmos has always been larger than the material world immediately visible to us.

In fact, one of the ironies of contemporary UFO culture is how closely it sometimes resembles older religious thought while simultaneously imagining itself as an alternative to religion. Superior intelligences, apocalyptic disclosure, and the promise that humanity’s understanding of reality is incomplete are not new ideas; rather, they are ancient ones. The difference is that modern culture often relocates them from “heaven” to “outer space.”

In true Spielbergian fashion, Disclosure Day is more about transcendence than extraterrestrials. It is about the suspicion that reality is larger than we currently perceive and the desire for some final revelation that will make sense of everything. Even if intelligent extraterrestrial life were discovered tomorrow, the fundamental theological questions would remain unchanged. What is humanity? What is our purpose? What constitutes goodness? What deserves worship? What is ultimately real?

The existence of other creatures would not eliminate those questions, but it would not answer them, either. The mythological alien therefore functions as a remarkably revealing symbol, representing modern humanity’s longing for transcendence in an age that often struggles to speak the language of transcendence. The extraterrestrial has become the vessel into which contemporary culture pours many of the hopes, fears, and religious instincts that previous generations directed elsewhere. Christianity does not deny that the universe may contain other intelligences. What Christianity denies is that any creature can bear the weight of assigning ultimate meaning. The extraterrestrial cannot tell us why the cosmos exists, what humanity is for, or what constitutes the good. Those questions belong not to astronomy, but to theology. And they remain as pressing after “disclosure” as they were before it.

Cole Burgett is a graduate of Dallas Theological Seminary and the Moody Bible Institute. He currently serves as the Assistant Director of Online and Nontraditional Learning at Corban University, as well as an Assistant Professor of Theology. He writes extensively about theology and popular culture.

NOTES

1. The contemporary “disclosure movement” refers to social activists pushing for the declassification of supposed secret information withheld by governments regarding “non-human intelligences” and other UFO-related phenomena. See Alex Seitz-Wald, “Disclosure or Deception? New UFO Pentagon Office Divides Believers,” NBC News, January 8, 2022, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/disclosure-or-deception-new-ufo-pentagon-office-divides-believers-n1287199.
2. See Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned (Boni and Liveright, 1919). Writing during the height of modernity’s confidence in scientific progress and rational explanation aided by technological advancement, Fort became fascinated by reports and observations that seemed excluded from accepted systems of knowledge. His project was a challenge to the assumption that reality could be fully explained by contemporary scientific and institutional authorities. His influence lies not in proving any particular theory, but in cultivating suspicion toward “official” explanations and by suggesting that modernity’s confidence in mastery may have overlooked anomalies that resisted easy classification.
3. See “1947: Year of the Flying Saucer,” Smithsonian, June 24, 2022, https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/1947-year-flying-saucer. This article by the National Air and Space Museum gives an excellent overview of Arnold’s reported sighting.
4. See Nick Pope, “Roswell UFO Incident Facts and History,” BBC Sky at Night Magazine, June 26, 2025, https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-science/roswell-ufo-incident. The BBC Sky at Night is a monthly astronomy magazine published by Our Media, an independent publisher that manages the official print and digital subscriptions for BBC-branded magazines.
5. See J. Allen Hynek, The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry (H. Regnery Co., 1972). Hynek, who served as scientific consultant to Project Blue Book, argued that while many UFO reports had conventional explanations, a residual category of cases warranted further scientific investigation. The book is particularly significant for its attempt to move the subject beyond both uncritical belief and reflexive dismissal, helping establish modern ufology as a field of inquiry rather than a collection of extraordinary claims.
6. See Gray Barker, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers (University Books, 1956). One of the most influential works in early UFO literature, Barker’s book helped popularize the mythology of the Men in Black. Emerging from the fertile folklore traditions of Appalachia, Barker’s work was instrumental in mythologizing the UFO.
7. See John A. Keel, Operation Trojan Horse (Putnam, 1970). This, Keel’s second major work, is perhaps the best primary source for understanding his “ultraterrestrial hypothesis,” which argued that UFOs might not be extraterrestrial spacecraft at all, but different manifestations of an underlying (and perhaps naturally occurring) phenomenon.
8. See my own series of articles addressing the topic, beginning with Cole Burgett, “God, Us, and Them — Part I: A Case for Exotheology,” Christ and Pop Culture, July 18, 2025, https://christandpopculture.com/god-us-them-part-1-case-for-exotheology/. See also Guillermo Gonzalez, “Would Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life Spell Doom for Christianity?” Christian Research Journal 35, no. 01 (2012), https://www.equip.org/articles/would-extraterrestrial-intelligent-life-spell-doom-for-christianity/.
9. Cole Burgett, “God, Us, and Them — Part III: Theological Reflections on Extraterrestrial Life,” Christ and Pop Culture, August 11, 2025, https://christandpopculture.com/god-us-them-part-3-theological-reflections-extraterrestrial-life/.