Fifty years of serious engagement
Disclosure Day is not the work of a filmmaker who read about UAP in the news and decided to make a movie. It is the culmination of five decades of direct engagement with the people who have studied the phenomenon most seriously.
When Spielberg made Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977, he worked with two of the most significant figures in UAP research history. The first was Dr. J. Allen Hynek — the astronomer who had served as the Air Force's scientific consultant on Project Blue Book, the official government UAP investigation programme. Hynek began as a sceptic hired to debunk sightings. He ended his career convinced there was a genuine unexplained phenomenon. He coined the term "close encounters" and its classification system. Spielberg brought him on as a technical consultant for the film — and gave him a cameo in the final scene. At SXSW in 2026, Spielberg recalled:
The second was Jacques Vallée — the French-American scientist, computer pioneer and UAP researcher whose rigorous, sceptical approach to the phenomenon has made him one of its most credible investigators. Vallée was not just an influence on the film. The character of Claude Lacombe — the French scientist played by François Truffaut who pursues the phenomenon with calm, methodical curiosity — was directly modelled on Vallée. Spielberg specifically wanted a character who embodied a kind of scientific openness that American military bureaucracy could not: someone who treated the phenomenon as genuinely complex rather than something to be explained away or classified.
Vallée met Spielberg approximately halfway through the final shoot, introduced through journalists. They had lunch twice. At that point, the script had a gap Spielberg had not been able to fill: the team in the film knew the mothership was coming and sending signals, but they could not decode the signals to find where it would land. Spielberg had visited the Jet Propulsion Laboratory looking for inspiration but found their mathematical models too complex for cinema.
Vallée solved the problem by sharing a real story from the history of space research. He told Spielberg about a photograph on Dr. Hynek's desk — taken in October 1957, the night the first Soviet Sputnik satellite was launched. There were no computers capable of calculating trajectories at the time, so the Harvard Observatory was woken at 3am by the New York Times. Three researchers in formal dress broke into a lobby, climbed ladders around a giant globe, and manually calculated the satellite's path using strings.
When Spielberg heard this, he said: "That's it."
The story became the film's famous scene in which Lacombe and his interpreter realise the mysterious signals are longitude and latitude coordinates — and the team breaks into a neighbouring building to steal a large globe to work out where the landing will happen. Vallée has since said he was proud to have contributed that moment of humour and urgency to the film.
Vallée's intellectual framework also shaped the film's deeper register. Where most popular UFO narratives of the 1970s assumed physical spacecraft from other planets, Vallée had argued since his 1969 work Passport to Magonia that the phenomenon was far more complex — something that interacts with human consciousness and culture, that does not behave like conventional technology, and that resists simple extraterrestrial explanation. That layered, genuinely mysterious quality is precisely what separates Close Encounters from the science fiction of its era.
Nearly five decades later, Vallée has addressed public speculation about whether he is involved in Disclosure Day. No confirmed role has been announced — but the fact that his name is part of the conversation again reflects his enduring standing as one of the few researchers who has approached the phenomenon with both scientific rigour and genuine intellectual honesty.
These were not background consultants. They were two of the most serious researchers the field has produced, and Spielberg sought them out at the beginning of his career. That foundation has informed everything that followed.
What reignited the film: two recent events
After nearly 50 years, two specific events moved Spielberg to return to the subject. Both are part of the documented public record — and both are covered in detail on this site.
The first was the December 2017 New York Times investigation that exposed the Pentagon's secret Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) and published authenticated infrared footage of UAP encounters by U.S. Navy pilots.
The second was the July 2023 House Oversight Committee hearing, in which former intelligence officer David Grusch, Navy pilot David Fravor, and commercial pilot Ryan Graves testified under oath about UAP encounters and alleged government concealment programs. Spielberg called it "a fascinating exchange" that "reinvigorated his decision to make the movie." At SXSW 2026, he told the audience:
Spielberg's own words on UAP — on record
Across three major public appearances, Spielberg has moved from diplomatic curiosity to near-declarative statement. The progression is notable.
In March 2023, appearing on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert during his The Fabelmans press tour, Spielberg said he believed people who reported encounters with things they could not explain, called government secrecy around sightings something requiring "extraordinary due diligence," and offered what has become known as the "future humans" hypothesis:
In February 2026, in his first on-camera comments specifically about Disclosure Day, Spielberg framed public curiosity as having reached a threshold:
At SXSW in March 2026, Spielberg made his most direct statement yet:
His connection to James Fox
Spielberg's engagement with UAP documentation goes back further than the 2017 NYT moment. He has a multi-decade relationship with documentary filmmaker James Fox — one of the most rigorous researchers in the field, whose films include I Know What I Saw (2009) and The Phenomenon (2020).
In 2009, after watching I Know What I Saw, Spielberg wrote a letter to Larry King that Fox later made public. In it he stated:
The phrase "total disclosure" — written in 2009 — is now the title of his 2026 film. Fox has described Spielberg as "an advocate of government transparency on the phenomena."
What the film is actually about
Disclosure Day is not primarily a film about alien arrival. Spielberg and his collaborators have been consistent about its real subject: what happens to human institutions — political, religious, cultural — when a decades-long cover-up collapses.
At SXSW he elaborated on the thematic core:
In Empire magazine's cover story, Spielberg described the film as resolving a question he first posed nearly 50 years ago with Close Encounters of the Third Kind:
Emily Blunt, who stars as a Kansas City TV meteorologist who becomes entangled in the events of disclosure, confirmed the thematic continuity in the same issue:
Disclosure Day is a work of fiction. What it draws on is not. The congressional hearings Spielberg cited, the declassified Pentagon footage, the testimony of military pilots — all of it is part of the documented public record. This archive exists to make that record accessible: not as advocacy, not as speculation, but as sourced documentation of what has actually been stated, officially investigated and formally published. Spielberg found it compelling enough to spend three years making a film about it. We think it is compelling enough to read.
The real documentation behind the story
The events that inspired Disclosure Day are covered in detail across this archive. The 2017 NYT reporting, the AATIP programme, the Navy pilot encounters, the 2023 congressional hearings — all of it is sourced, traceable and part of the institutional record. The film is fiction. The documentation it grew from is not.