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What’s Behind Steven Spielberg’s Lifelong Obsession With Flying Saucers and Extraterrestrial Visitors?
Half a century after “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” the director returns to the subject of UFOs with “Disclosure Day.” His science fiction films are informed by his fascination with alien encounters in American suburbia
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April 17, 1966. Before dawn.
Two deputies were hot off a coffee run when they first crossed paths with the cosmic unknown.
Near the end of a late-night patrol in Portage County, Ohio, the men stumbled across an abandoned vehicle facing the wrong direction. One of them cautiously approached the driver’s side before scanning the nearby woods. Nothing. Suddenly, a bright light emerged directly above the treetops, filling the air with a heavy electric hum.
The glow appeared to come from a strange egg-shaped object as “big as a house,” the officers later recalled. Back in their cruiser, they radioed the sheriff’s office. A sergeant instructed them not to let the unidentified flying object out of their sight.
The pair chased the UFO across some 70 miles of eastern Ohio and Pennsylvania. Two more officers from neighboring towns joined the pursuit, which lasted nearly an hour. At daybreak, the four men stood together outside a gas station in Conway, Pennsylvania, watching in disbelief as the craft shot into the sky and vanished from view.
If this scene sounds familiar, that’s because Steven Spielberg borrowed it for an early sequence in his 1977 film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The Portage County incident was one of several purported UFO encounters that inspired the movie, for which Spielberg drew on decades of reports and research.
“If you believe, it’s science fact; if you don’t believe, it’s science fiction,” Spielberg told Sight and Sound ahead of the film’s release. “I’m an agnostic between the two beliefs, so for me it’s science speculation. It’s not ten light-years away. It’s right in the heart of American suburbia.”
Close Encounters cemented Spielberg as one of Hollywood’s pre-eminent directors and laid the foundation for his lasting association with stories about aliens and UFOs. Nearly 50 years later, he has built one of the most successful careers in American cinema—and it’s populated with visitors from the stars.
Now, Spielberg’s latest project, Disclosure Day, revisits the subject once again. Arriving in theaters on June 12, the director’s new movie imagines humanity receiving definitive proof of alien life and discovering the measures that powerful groups have taken to keep this fact hidden.
“He wanted to make a film about What’s the truth, and how does it come out?” David Koepp, the film’s screenwriter, tells Smithsonian magazine. “He viewed this as the summation of what he had to say on what is perhaps the single most important subject to him.”
Flying saucers
June 14, 1947. Morning.
America’s most famous UFO case began just after a spring storm swept across the high plains outside Roswell, New Mexico. Rancher W.W. Brazel had driven out to inspect his property for damage, but what he found scattered across the sand didn’t look like storm debris.
Brazel decided that the expansive pile of metallic scrap might be worth reporting to the nearby Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF). On July 8, the Roswell Daily Record published the Army’s assessment under the headline “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region.”
The military ultimately concluded that the wreckage was a weather balloon. But the Roswell incident was far from the only UFO encounter reported that summer. On June 24, a pilot spotted nine objects in the skies near Washington’s Mount Rainier, setting off a frenzy of similar reports. Newspapers called them “flying saucers.”
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Spielberg had been born just six months earlier, in December 1946. During the first year of his life, Americans reported more than 800 UFO sightings.
“Carl Jung suggested that a belief in UFOs stems from ‘an emotional tension having its cause in a situation of collective distress or danger, or in a vital psychic need,’” film historian Joseph McBride writes in Steven Spielberg: A Biography. “The Cold War and collective anxieties about the dangers of nuclear war helped stimulate that tension in Spielberg’s formative years.”
McBride also points to other tensions that may help explain Spielberg’s affinity for aliens. The director’s father, Arnold, was a workaholic electrical engineer who helped design early computers. His mother, Leah, was an eccentric concert pianist with a love of the arts. Both were the children of Jewish immigrants. More than a dozen of Arnold’s relatives died during the Holocaust.
“Spielberg is always interested in the rewards and problems involved in the meeting of cultures,” McBride tells Smithsonian. “With his immigrant family background, that comes naturally to him, and growing up Jewish in progressively more WASPish communities heightened that concern for him. UFOs and other forms of aliens fascinate him for that reason.”
For a kid growing up in the 1950s, those anxieties came packaged as flying saucer movies. Spielberg devoured UFO classics like The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and It Came From Outer Space (1953). But for the would-be director, movies weren’t simply something to be watched. After seeing Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) in theaters, he began making his own films with his father’s eight-millimeter camera. Arnold often assisted behind the scenes, building miniature sets and designing lighting rigs.
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When Spielberg was 17, he produced his first feature-length film, Firelight. Made on a budget of about $500, the science fiction thriller follows a group of scientists investigating strange lights in the skies above Arizona. Spielberg screened the movie during a sold-out, one-night run at a local theater, ultimately earning $1 in profit.
After graduating from high school, Spielberg enrolled at California State University, Long Beach, but grew restless and dropped out before earning a degree. Soon after, in 1969, he became the youngest director ever signed to a long-term studio contract.
Kindred seekers of truth
October 18, 1973. Night.
As far as UFO witnesses go, the men inside the helicopter were unusually credible: four United States Army reservists, all experienced air crewmen and self-described flying saucer skeptics.
Captain Lawrence Coyne was flying the crew to Cleveland when he nearly collided with a cigar-shaped craft with a red light on its nose. The object stopped directly above the helicopter, bathing the cockpit in an eerie green glow. The crew attempted to descend but instead found themselves rising more than 3,500 feet into the sky. Then, the object released the helicopter and vanished.
By the early 1970s, UFO reports had fallen sharply in the U.S. Aliens had become the domain of amateur investigators and sensationalist tabloid publications like the National Enquirer. In a 1971 essay for the Saturday Evening Post, science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, who co-wrote the screenplay for the Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey, declared that “flying saucers are dead.”
As it turns out, Clarke’s assertion arrived too early. The Coyne incident was part of a wave of UFO reports in 1973 that revived interest in the strange events.
“There’s this absolutely stunning spate of sightings that comes out of nowhere and kind of shocks everybody,” says Greg Eghigian, a historian at the Pennsylvania State University and the author of After the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon. “That ushers in a renaissance in the UFO world. There’s this generation of young people starting to get into UFOs.”
Spielberg was an enthusiastic member of this new generation of UFO devotees. By then a professional filmmaker, he hoped to return to the ideas he’d first explored in Firelight. But he found that, wunderkind or not, he lacked the clout to get such an unusual movie off the ground. Even after striking a deal with Columbia Pictures in 1973 to direct a science fiction feature, he struggled to secure the creative freedom required to make a serious-minded UFO film. “Everybody thought, ‘What, you want to make a movie about the National Enquirer?’” Spielberg recalled earlier this year.
The studio changed its tune after Spielberg released Jaws (1975), a movie so successful that it created the summer blockbuster. Columbia gave the director free rein to make his passion project.
Spielberg pored over magazine and newspaper articles about UFOs and interviewed people who claimed to have seen them. He also sought access to the classified archives of Project Blue Book, a government program tasked with investigating reports of UFOs, and studied the work of J. Allen Hynek, the project’s famous defector.
Quick facts: The government’s take on Close Encounters of the Third Kind
- According to Spielberg, NASA sent him a 20-page letter denouncing the movie. The Department of Defense and the U.S. Air Force also declined to assist with the production.
- “The proposed film leaves the distinct impression that UFOs, in fact, do exist,” officials wrote in a memo. “It also involves the government and military in a big cover-up of the existence of UFOs. These two points are counter to Air Force and Department of Defense policy and make support to the production inappropriate.”
Hynek, an astronomer, had joined the program as a skeptic, but he grew increasingly troubled by how easily the military dismissed cases that he believed were credible. He went public with his doubts, publishing The UFO Experience in 1972. The book describes the Portage County chase as “a fine example … of a Close Encounter of the First Kind.”
Under Hynek’s system, a First Kind encounter refers to a UFO observed at close range. A Second Kind encounter involves a UFO that leaves behind physical evidence. Close Encounters of the Third Kind concern sightings that feature “animated creatures.” Spielberg cribbed the phrase for the title of his new UFO film.
When Hynek learned that his work was being used without permission, he wrote to the director. Spielberg apologized and pledged to make The UFO Experience required reading for his creative team. The production later hired the astronomer as a technical consultant and gave him a cameo in the film.
“That shows that Spielberg’s heart was in the right place,” says Mark O’Connell, Hynek’s biographer. “I strongly believe that Hynek perceived Spielberg as a fellow traveler, a kindred seeker of truth.”
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The Hopkinsville goblins
August 21, 1955. Dusk.
After spending an evening playing cards with family and friends near Kelly, Kentucky, Billy Ray Taylor stepped outside to gather some water from the backyard well. When he returned, he claimed that he’d seen something “real bright, with an exhaust all the colors of the rainbow,” pass over the farmhouse.
Taylor and his companions later said that they saw a small figure emerge from the thick darkness outside. About three and a half feet tall, it had long arms and large, luminous eyes. Another followed. And then another. The creatures circled the property, appearing at the farmhouse’s windows, floating among the trees and easily avoiding gunfire.
During a break in the chaos, the group fled to the nearby Hopkinsville police station to report what they’d seen. But officers found no evidence of the so-called Hopkinsville goblins.
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“The Kelly-Hopkinsville case, if considered entirely apart from the total pattern of UFO sightings, seems clearly preposterous, even to offend common sense,” Hynek wrote in The UFO Experience. “The latter, however, has not proved a sure guide in the past history of science.”
When Columbia Pictures asked for a follow-up to Close Encounters, Spielberg once again mined Hynek’s case files for inspiration, gravitating toward the Hopkinsville incident. The proposed sequel, titled Night Skies, would have focused on a group of aliens terrorizing a rural family.
An emphasis on families in peril was emerging as a recurring motif in the director’s films. When Spielberg was a teenager, his parents’ marriage began to unravel, and they divorced in 1966.
In a 1999 interview on “Inside the Actors Studio,” host James Lipton theorized that Close Encounters’ famous musical exchange between humans and aliens was an attempt to resolve the tensions within Spielberg’s own family. “Your father was a computer scientist. Your mother was a musician,” Lipton said. “When the spaceship lands, how do they communicate? They make music on their computers, and they are able to speak to each other.”
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Spielberg eventually abandoned the sequel to Close Encounters—but he salvaged one major element. The cadre of evil aliens included a gentle being named Buddee who befriended the family’s son. Buddee became the basis for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), which would prove to be another hit for Spielberg.
E.T. stars a lonely boy named Elliott who helps a stranded alien find his way home. The plot follows a family in peril, but this time, the danger comes from something more personal: the fallout of a divorce. The movie begins with Elliott and his siblings mourning the collapse of their family. The audience never meets the children’s father, but his presence looms large, haunting conversations around the dinner table.
“How do you fill the heart of a lonely child, and what extraordinary event would it take to fill Elliott’s heart after losing his dad?” Spielberg said in a 2017 documentary. “It would take something as extraordinary as an extraterrestrial coming into his life.”
Ancient aliens and absent fathers
3500 B.C.E. The dawn of civilization.
In Mesopotamia, the Sumerians told stories of benevolent gods who emerged from a cosmic ocean to share their knowledge. Ancient Indian texts described surreal encounters with flying machines powered by quicksilver.
In his 1968 book, Chariots of the Gods? Unsolved Mysteries of the Past, Swiss author Erich von Däniken argued that such myths were the consequence of encounters with aliens. He proposed that these beings were responsible for much of human progress, from the construction of Egypt’s pyramids to the creation of Peru’s Nazca Lines. Mainstream scientists, including Carl Sagan, dismissed von Däniken’s theories. Nevertheless, his pseudoscientific books sold nearly 70 million copies.
When Spielberg and fellow filmmaker George Lucas started developing the Indiana Jones movie Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), they briefly considered drawing from von Däniken’s book. What if the Ark of the Covenant was not a biblical miracle, Lucas mused during early story sessions, but rather “some kind of super high-powered radio from one of Erich von Däniken’s flying saucers?”
The pair scrapped the concept but returned to it decades later, with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008). In the film’s mythology, the titular skull once sat inside the head of an ancient interdimensional alien. Spielberg had flirted with the idea elsewhere. War of the Worlds (2005), his adaptation of the 1898 H.G. Wells novel of the same name, features alien machines buried beneath the earth long before modern civilization arose.
But a deeper connection links Spielberg’s alien films beyond von Däniken’s theories and Hynek’s research.
Fractured families and distant fathers continued to haunt the director’s filmography. When Spielberg’s parents announced their separation, Arnold claimed responsibility for the breakup. Years later, Spielberg realized that the gesture was meant to protect Leah from her children’s anger. “I simply took him at his word when he said, ‘It’s my idea that we separate,’” Spielberg recalled in 2022. “And I lived with that, and I blamed my dad for that, for years.”
In Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford), an archaeologist who was once estranged from his father, discovers that he has unwittingly repeated the pattern with his own son. In War of the Worlds, Tom Cruise plays a divorced dad named Ray who tries to keep his children alive during an alien invasion. In both films, the fathers make amends.
Close Encounters’ protagonist (Richard Dreyfus) abandons his family to explore the stars, whereas Indy builds a relationship with his son, and Ray goes to great lengths to keep his children safe. These artistic choices reflected events in Spielberg’s own life: In the intervening decades, he’d married and become a father himself.
“Today, I would never have the guy leaving his family and go on the mothership,” Spielberg said in 2005. “I would have the guy doing everything he could to protect his children.”
An age of disclosure
July 26, 2023. Morning.
In a packed hearing on Capitol Hill, lawmakers listened to witnesses describe the existence of “nonhuman biologics” and objects in the sky that could outfly any American jet. Another 100 people crowded into the overflow room, gasping at each revelation.
The House Oversight Committee had convened the hearing to examine what the U.S. government refers to as unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). The Senate and NASA were conducting similar inquiries. For decades, UFO reports had been treated as fodder for tabloids and trade paperbacks. Now, they were the subject of sworn testimony before Congress and front-page headlines in the New York Times.
Eghigian, of the Pennsylvania State University, credits the heightened attention to a 2017 Times article about a secret government program investigating UAPs. The article helped kick off an “age of disclosure,” in which UFO truthers anticipate that the U.S. government will finally reveal what it knows. Spielberg has said that the same story rekindled his own interest in UFOs after years spent working on other projects.
“We’ve gone in a straight line back to the beginning,” Eghigian says. “It’s very much akin to the late 1940s and early ’50s, a time in which you get a lot of discussion about the military knowing this information but not sharing it with us.”
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Disclosure Day builds on this renewed interest, following a whistleblower (Josh O’Connor) running from a shadowy government contractor while carrying a backpack filled with evidence that aliens have visited Earth. A TV weather reporter in Kansas City (Emily Blunt) is pulled into the conspiracy after she inexplicably begins speaking an alien language live on air.
The film mines 70 years of UFO mythology, including famous episodes like the 1947 Roswell crash. But it also features deeper cuts, such as a supposed incident in which President Richard Nixon showed actor Jackie Gleason the recovered bodies of dead aliens.
“We were looking for a unified theory of the UAP phenomenon,” says screenwriter Koepp, who also wrote War of the Worlds and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. “So we decided consciously to include as much of the lore as possible and not debunk or cherry-pick, but figure out, ‘How does this all go together?’”
Much of the material was drawn from Spielberg’s lifelong study of the subject. As he tells Empire magazine, he has “seven solid decades of a vast personal interest in what lies beyond our atmosphere, in the cosmos, and what is within our atmosphere right here on planet Earth.”
The director’s thinking about UFOs has evolved over those decades. During a 2023 episode of “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” the television host pressed Spielberg to theorize what these mysterious objects could be. “What if they’re not from an advanced civilization 300 million light-years from here,” the director mused, but rather human anthropologists from the future who are exploring the past?
Spielberg could very well have been describing his own career. Throughout his filmography, he has used cinema to revisit moments in history, from the abolishment of slavery to the horrors of the Holocaust. In 2022, he turned this anthropological lens toward himself in the semi-autobiographical film The Fabelmans, a project he has described as “$40 million of therapy.”
But Spielberg hardly needed a biopic to excavate his past. His UFO films have always given this impulse a particularly vivid form, pairing broken families and absent fathers with the realization—as terrifying as it is comforting—that we are not alone in the universe.
A first encounter
The 1950s. Before dawn.
Depending on the telling, the story sometimes takes place in a field in New Jersey. Other times, it’s a desert outside Phoenix. Sometimes Spielberg is 5 or 6. Other times, he’s 10 or 11. But the emotion of the moment is always the same.
Spielberg’s father wakes him in the middle of the night and rushes him to their car without explanation. This wasn’t like his dad. Arnold was a reserved man, a calm counterpoint to his free-spirited wife. “My heart was beating,” Spielberg told critic Roger Ebert in 1998. “I didn’t know what he wanted to do. He wouldn’t tell me, and he put me in the car and we went off.”
The pair drove until the warm lights of the suburbs faded into darkness. At their destination, Arnold spread a blanket on the ground, and the two lay down. He pointed to the stars as a meteor shower streaked across the sky. Suddenly, the young Spielberg was aware of the vastness of outer space. Before him stretched a universe of immense scale and endless possibility.
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“I think he was just overcome with wonderment, and that influenced his storytelling—not just in this film, but in all his films,” Koepp says. “Nobody captures wonderment quite the way he does.”
Many have speculated about Spielberg’s lifelong fascination with UFOs. With the impending release of Disclosure Day, online conspiracy theorists have added to the pile, proposing that the director is quietly working with the government to “soft launch” the existence of aliens to a public that might otherwise panic. But the real reason may be simpler.
Perhaps Spielberg returns to stories about aliens and UFOs not because he’s in on an intergalactic secret, but because they transport him to a powerful moment from his childhood—the night his father told him to look up and handed him a key to the cosmos.