Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day draws on two real-world UFO legends for inspiration. Spielberg’s latest blockbuster is as much about human beings as it is about aliens; by the end of Disclosure Day, it’s clear this is a film about empathy as an evolutionary advantage. The film’s last word is addressed not to its own world, but to audiences; a call to listen to others rather than simply to speak, and in so doing to find a way forward.
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It’s not the first time Spielberg has used extraterrestrial encounters to comment on modern culture. Close Encounters of the Third King is as much a commentary on post-Nixon cynicism as it is a tale of UFOs, and even E.T. exists in a very specific social setting. Spielberg’s genius lies in the way he blends real-world issues with sci-fi fiction, and he achieves this by drawing on two very familiar UFO legends indeed.
The Roswell Incident is the Most Famous UFO Legend Of All
It’s impossible to separate UFO legends and lore from the Cold War, which led to a culture of secrecy in the military and public paranoia that the truth was being concealed. According to the Smithsonian Institution, the 1947 Roswell incident is a perfect example; a long-standing conspiracy theory that the US military retrieved a crashed alien spacecraft at Roswell, New Mexico. A local newspaper ran a simple, to-the-point headline that echoes through history: “RAAF [Roswell Army Air Field] Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region.” The military insisted it was actually an experimental weather balloon from Alamogordo, but the truth was already out there.
Fast-forward to the late 1970s, and a retired USAF officer revealed what true believers had insisted for a long time: the weather balloon was a cover story. This became the basis for long-standing, and increasingly convoluted, conspiracy theories involving grey aliens, crashed UFOs, and alien autopsies. It all led to a full-scale government investigation in 1995, which concluded the debris was associated with the secret Project Mogul balloon program. In the real world, there’s no evidence any UFO artifacts were ever found.
Disclosure Day makes Roswell, New Mexico, real. According to the film, this was indeed a first contact situation; humans learned aliens were real, and didn’t react well. It led to an innovative partnership between the Department of Defense and key companies in the private sector, who reverse-engineered alien technology to give the U.S. a military advantage. At first presidents were aware (linking Disclosure Day to a Hollywood legend involving President Nixon), but that changed as the decades passed. Presidents become civilians after just eight years, after all, so the truth needed to be contained.
The Kechsburg UFO Incident is a “Real” UFO Legend as Well
This brings us to the Kecksburg UFO incident, where a fireball was reported in December 1965. Often called “Pennsylvania’s Roswell,” the Kecksburg incident was initially said to be a meteor burning up in the atmosphere, although NASA later clarified they’d found fragments of a Soviet satellite in the area. Unlike Roswell, the fireball was both visible and well-recorded, with several scientific papers published in academic journals as academics researched it. One study even managed to calculate the object’s orbit before it entered the earth’s atmosphere.
One thing’s for sure: the US military took claims of some sort of crash-landing very seriously indeed. They roped off a large area, and any citizens who wandered into the woods to investigate were turned away. With hindsight, that kind of reaction is catnip for conspiracy theorists, guaranteeing this legend would run. The Army reported finding nothing in the woods, but some witnesses dispute this; they speak of a 10-foot-long acorn-shaped object burning in the ground, with one volunteer firefighter describing it as covered in hieroglyphics. It was reportedly taken away on a flatbed truck, and nobody knows what happened to it afterwards.
Ironically, studies into the Kecksburg UFO incident have just made things even more confusing. Trajectory analysis revealed the object should never have landed at Kecksburg in the first place, but it was later discredited. Soil analysis shows damage around the crash, but not enough to suggest a major impact. One study looked at a pattern of broken tree branches to propose the object’s path, but these may simply have been damaged by ice. Kecksburg now treat the UFO legend as a tourist attraction, which seems oddly appropriate.
We’ll likely never know the truth for sure (even after Trump’s declassifications). In Disclosure Day, this was indeed a crashed alien spaceship, and humans took the debris away from Kechsburg. It’s reasonable to assume In Vivo 17, the alien who turned up at the KCXE news studio, is a Kechsburg survivor who’s been kept in isolation ever since. Fortunately, these extraterrestrials focus in on empathy – which means Disclosure Day‘s aliens aren’t going to seek revenge for incarceration and experimentation.
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