*This article contains spoilers for Disclosure Day*
Disclosure Day a perfectly entertaining, fun blockbuster movie built around the wildly flawed premise that the human race could be brought together by being shown blurry videos of aliens on primetime news programming—or that they would believe it at all.
Its core delusional fantasy is not that aliens exist but that human beings would believe the disclosure of them as real, or be moved by their suffering. We live in a cynical age where people believe nothing, where AI videos abound, and empathy is derided by people in power as a destructive force in civilization. Steven Spielberg’s latest summer blockbuster asks the audience to believe a better world is possible.
It’s a premise that feels hopelessly naive in 2026 and Disclosure Day ends up feeling like a film calibrated for viewers who believe in the power of Rachel Maddow to change the world. It’s Aaron Sorkin’s Newsroom through a Spielberg lens, complete with a John Williams score.
In UFO circles, the idea of “Disclosure” is a powerful one, the idea being that someday a whistleblower or the government will disclose the existence of either advanced technology or aliens to humankind. Imagining how humanity would react to disclosure is perfectly good fodder for a movie, and it’s also what the characters of Disclosure Day spend much of their time discussing. Can humanity handle the truth? Will learning that we’re not alone bring us together, shatter people’s faith in religion, or tear us apart? In the end, Spielberg imagines a world in which all of humanity credulously and serenely watches evidence of aliens. It’s this idea that people would believe these are real videos at all that feels so hopelessly out of touch with our current information ecosystem.
“I will say that this film is more about humanity and people and community and the things that divide us and what could be occurring that possibly could bring us a little closer together,” Spielberg told The Daily. “Such as realizing that the thing that we need to preserve in our society more than anything else, which is something which I believe is as fragile as democracy, is empathy.”
In the world of Disclosure Day, aliens crashed at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947 and the Pentagon and defense contractors have been covering up their existence as part of a vast conspiracy. The black vehicle driving bad guys exploit alien tech, torture the extraterrestrials, and keep the world in the dark.
In the end, an Edward Snowden-type whistleblower and a Kansas City TV meteorologist band together to share footage of the aliens. In the fiction of the film, North Korea and the West are about to begin World War III, but the revelation of alien life stops all that.
This being a movie, it’s OK to build a script around a false premise, but the ending sequence where the entire world stops to credulously watch videos of extraterrestrials—on cable news of all places—is so wildly implausible that it deserves to be deconstructed. Based on everything we have seen about human nature and trust in our information ecosystems, it feels so flawed that it undermines Spielberg’s entire point. We can say this because the public has been shown videos similar to the ones shown in Disclosure Day’s ending montage, and they have been met with a collective yawn, conspiracy theories, and the same news fatigue that accompanies other should-be world shifting occurrences. The only plausible response to videos of aliens on television, at this point, would be cries of “that’s AI,” “fake,” and propaganda flowing in all directions. Also funny: the cable news networks run the videos through some AI detector and determine that the videos are real; in practice, deepfake detectors are also AI tools that are often wrong or can be made to portray any narrative you want, depending on the detector.
One does not really need to imagine the public response to the type of disclosure shown in Disclosure Day, we’ve already basically seen this play out in real life. Many of the videos shown in the movie are not dissimilar to the UFO videos we’ve gotten from the U.S. military; the tic-tac video in particular is obviously referenced in Disclosure Day. Other videos in the montage are similar to a hoaxed alien autopsy Fox aired in the 1990s and recently declassified Pentagon videos of floating orbs of light.
The world didn’t stop then, and in an age in which no one believes anything they see, in which there is zero trust in cable news, and in which we are constantly being barraged with AI-generated video, the idea that even a miniscule percentage of the population would stop what they’re doing to take this disclosure seriously is laughable. Also laughable: That people would be able to instantly stream cable news on their phones without endless popups, ads, paywalls, geoblocking, etc. The idea that literally anything could capture the entire world’s undivided attention feels less realistic than anything else in the movie. Spielberg’s Disclosure Day imagines a utopian information environment and an internet that is not utterly poisoned with all the things we know it’s poisoned with, a noble thought.
Spielberg has said in interviews that Disclosure Day was inspired by both Pentagon UFO disclosures and the testimonies of people who claim to have seen UFOs or extraterrestrials. It’s wild, then, that he seems to have not learned anything from the response to any of these videos. The government’s own UFO disclosures have been a mix of genuinely interesting information and videos buried under the not-even-veiled fact that most of these disclosures have been made to advocate for additional funding for the Pentagon, to sow Sinophobia, and have, like everything else, experienced diminishing returns as people see another UFO video and report and collectively say tl;dr.
The film’s ending relies on an inciting incident that occurs before the film even begins that also strains credulity. Hacker turned defense contractor Daniel Keller is happy to run cyber operations for the UFO conspiracy until he watches a video of the US government torturing an alien. The audience sees only fleeting glimpses of the torture. The video is obscured and filmed at a bad angle, but we hear the screams of the alien and see the disgust on Kellner’s face. The movie asks us to believe this video of degradation and abuse made Kellner and several other hardened government contractors turn against the project.
In the theater all we could think about at that moment was the Ukraine sledgehammer video. In 2022, the mercenary Wagner Group used a sledgehammer to execute a man. They filmed it and published it on Telegram. In the years after the killing, Wagner incorporated the sledgehammer into its brand. The mercenaries sold T-shirts and patches bearing the bloody hammer and the video of the man’s murder was mixed and remixed endlessly across Telegram.
Right now humans have access to hundreds of hours of footage of torture and violence committed against other human beings. It’s hard to believe that video of an alien being opened up on camera would move people more than, say, ISIS beheading videos, videos of destruction and suffering in Gaza, or cartel execution footage.
Again, the movie is a perfectly fun summer romp. Spielberg films a great action scene and Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, and Colin Firth turn in wonderful performances. But there’s a signature Spielberg naivety to the film that feels more out of touch than ever, the sense that an older generation does not understand the function of the internet, conspiracy, and the concept of truth in the modern world.
