Steven Spielberg’s returning to the alien visitation theme of Close Encounters for Disclosure Day. We take a look at the details in the new trailer. “If you found out we weren’t alone, if someone showed you, proved it to you, would that frighten you?” – Disclosure Day’s tagline. The words ‘alien’ or ‘extra-terrestrial’ don’t come ... Disclosure Day | Dissecting the new trailer and its connections to UFO lore
Steven Spielberg’s returning to the alien visitation theme of Close Encounters for Disclosure Day. We take a look at the details in the new trailer.
“If you found out we weren’t alone, if someone showed you, proved it to you, would that frighten you?” – Disclosure Day’s tagline.
The words ‘alien’ or ‘extra-terrestrial’ don’t come up in the first trailer for Disclosure Day, the next film from Steven Spielberg, but still, those early rumours are right: this is the filmmaker’s first true film about alien visitors since 2005’s War Of The Worlds. It also appears to be a return to the UFO theme of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.
That 1977 classic took a wide-eyed look at the theory that aliens are secretly visiting our planet – and suggested that government agencies are hiding the truth from us. Spielberg took the subject of UFOs seriously, hiring astronomer and ufologist J Allen Hynek – who’d investigated flying saucer cases on behalf of the US military – as the film’s advisor.
Disclosure Day, if the trailer is anything to go by, will explore what’s happened in ufology circles in the decades since Close Encounters came out. The promo shows a brief glimpse of a crop circle – a phenomena that only really popped into wider consciousness in the 1980s. Then there’s that word ‘disclosure’ – a term which emerged in the early 1990s among a group of people who believe that the truth about extra-terrestrials will one day be revealed.
In terms of plot specifics, the Disclosure Day trailer is pleasingly vague. What it points to is a varied group of ordinary people encountering inexplicable phenomena, much like Close Encounters. There’s Emily Blunt’s Kansas weather presenter, who’s seemingly possessed by an unseen force on live television one day.
That possession, which makes her speak in some unearthly tongue, appears to turn her into a subject of curiosity among the public, at least if the spooky image of people lined up outside the TV studio, phones held aloft, is anything to go by. We also meet Josh O’Connor’s character, who has evidence of what’s going on and plans to leak it to the entire planet – perhaps by broadcasting it at Blunt’s TV network.
On the other side of the fence, there’s some sort of clandestine group keeping an eye on world events via gigantic video screens. The leader of this group – perhaps Spielberg’s riff on the ‘Men in Black’ of UFO lore – is played by Colin Firth, who appears to be in possession of a technology which allows him to remotely control human targets. There’s a quite eerie sequence where he moves his hand, causing a woman in some other location to move her hand, and so on. It’s a fair bet, we’d say, that Firth is the villain of the piece.
Beyond that, there’s a Spielbergian little girl who can seemingly manipulate animals – or perhaps even conjure them up out of her own imagination. The girl – who may or not be the daughter of O’Connor’s character – has a mobile in her room composed of little red paper birds, which look identical to the feathered friend that hops into Blunt’s apartment in an earlier shot. That bird, not to mention the various deer that keep popping up, must have some significance in the plot, since they’re also a motif in Disclosure Day’s teaser posters.
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There’s also a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment when a blonde woman somehow morphs into Blunt as the camera tracks around the back of Firth’s head. Plus a shot of Blunt holding a device in her hand that looks an awful lot like the one Firth used to control his female victim. And hints that at least part of the film will see our heroes trying to escape from the black clad operatives (with matching black cars) in hot pursuit.
What’s surprising is how low-key it feels. Universal previously talked about a summer event movie; screenwriter David Koepp’s earlier work with Spielberg (Jurassic Park, Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull) also suggested we’d be in for something a bit more grand and action-packed. But then again, there’s a fair likelihood that Spielberg has kept the bigger surprises firmly out of view for this initial glimpse of his 2026 opus.
The sequences glimpsed here could be from the first act up to the midpoint; certainly, the teasing final shot, of the little girl walking towards a benighted house with a group of animals in tow, suggests we’re in for something even more dreamlike than we’ve seen so far.
It does feel like a work of science fiction with a bit of thematic heft about it, too, which is undoubtedly a good thing. There are suspicions of a religious angle, perhaps akin to the science-versus-faith theme in Contact – a heady 1997 sci-fi thriller directed by Spielberg’s old friend, Robert Zemeckis.
The general eeriness of the film’s tone, from the clicking alien language emanating from Blunt’s horror-struck face to O’Connor’s typically intense facial performance, imply we’re in for something that’s less like Jurassic Park and more like director Jeff Nichols’ underrated 2010s thriller, Midnight Special – also about extra-terrestrials, kids with special powers, and a cross-country pursuit involving government agencies.
There’s nothing here to corroborate rumours that Spielberg might have made a direct sequel of some sort to Close Encounters (something he considered in the early 80s, but abandoned in favour of E.T.). But there’s every sign that it’s at least a return to the subject that has fascinated Spielberg since he was a boy, running around making movies with an 8mm camera.
It’s fascinating to think that the modern flying saucer age was only 30 years old when Close Encounters lit up cinemas towards the end of the 1970s. In 1947, American pilot Kenneth Arnold made headlines with his claimed sightings of mysterious, disc-shaped objects over Mount Rainier. Weeks later came a newspaper report that a crashed flying saucer had been recovered by the army in Roswell, New Mexico. The military later changed its statement: the debris, it said, was a crashed weather balloon, not an alien spacecraft. The story only grew in the decades that followed, though, and is now an indelible part of UFO lore.
Interestingly, there’s a chance that Disclosure Day might also revisit the Roswell incident. Glance through the film’s IMDb page, and you’ll see that one of its less starry actors, Jonathan Noah Esposito, is listed as playing ‘1947 Excavating Soldier (New Mexico).’
Theoretically, just about anyone can edit IMDb’s listings, so this could be incorrect; on the other hand, it’s a page devoted to one of Universal’s biggest films of 2026, so you’d be forgiven for thinking that the studio would be keeping an eye on it for inaccuracies.
Whether it’s correct or not, it’ll be fascinating to see how Spielberg handles a subject that has long captured his imagination. He once said he had a “deep-rooted belief that we had been visited in this century,” and that “for me, it was science.”
All these years after Close Encounters, the debate over UFOs – now going under the less catchy name, UAPs, or Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena – still rages. Interest in the subject seems to spike whenever there’s fear and loathing in the wider world; the reports in 1947 came just two years after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the UFO flap ebbed and flowed right through the Cold War. We’re now in the middle of another peak of sightings and fascination, with footage from fighter jets triggering new claims that the US military is keeping something from us.
Does Spielberg still believe all this? Has he been swayed by the purported evidence laid out in a recent documentary on the subject, rather curiously called The Age Of Disclosure? Whether he’s still a faithful or now a skeptic, Disclosure Day promises to be one of 2026’s must-see genre films.
Disclosure Day is in UK cinemas from the 12th June 2026.
