The long road to ‘Disclosure Day’: How first-contact cinema taught us to imagine the Third Kind

W hen Steven Spielberg releases Disclosure Day this week, his first alien film in over two decades, he will be returning to the obsession that helped define his career. The veteran American filmmaker who transformed Devils Tower, Wyoming into a beacon for cosmic pilgrims in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and turned a homesick alien into a beloved cultural icon in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial , now finds himself at a curious moment in history. Unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), the bureaucratically sanitised successor to the UFO, have migrated from grainy VHS footage to very serious U.S. congressional hearings and Pentagon investigations. The border between conspiracy theories and institutional scrutiny has grown increasingly porous of late, placing Spielberg’s prodigal return alongside a broader public reckoning with the oldest question in the cosmos: are we alone?