During a jam-packed SXSW panel about his career, director Steven Spielberg talked everything from Disclosure Day to aliens to President Barack Obama. And yes, all these topics are related.
Disclosure Day follows a cybersecurity administrator (Josh O’Connor) who decides to expose a massive secret: that humans aren’t alone in the universe. It marks Spielberg’s return to UFOs and aliens, subject matter he’s already well-versed in thanks to films like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
The film’s story of a government cover-up of alien activity comes at a pertinent time, as President Obama recently discussed his own belief in aliens on Brian Tyler Cohen’s No Lie podcast.
“They’re real, but I haven’t seen them,” Obama said in a speed round portion of the interview, before clarifying the aliens are “not being kept in Area 51.”
As Spielberg told panel host Sean Fennessey, “When President Obama made that comment, I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is so great for Disclosure Day.“
Days later, Obama walked back the comments in an Instagram post, writing: “Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there. But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we’ve been visited by aliens is low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!”
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For Spielberg, that’s the exact same belief he’s held since childhood.
“[Obama] said what he believed in was life in the cosmos, which, of course, everybody should believe in, because no one should ever think that we are the only intelligent civilization in the entire universe,” Spielberg said at the SXSW panel. “I’ve always believed, even as a kid, that we were not alone, so that just goes without saying.”
Spielberg was “reinvigorated” to return to the world of UFOs by a 2017 New York Times article by Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean about the Pentagon’s UFO program and the possibility of a government coverup.
“I have a very strong sneaking suspicion that we are not alone here on Earth right now,” Spielberg said.
However, he lamented, he himself has never had an extra-terrestrial experience.
“Half my friends have seen UFOs, now called UAPs,” Spielberg said. “I haven’t. I made a movie called Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I haven’t even had a close encounter of the first or second kind. Where’s the justice of that?”
Disclosure Day hits theaters June 12.
Kristy Puchko contributed to this reporting on the ground at SXSW.
