'Disclosure Day' is overshadowed by JD Vance and Joe Rogan alien talk.
This image, from the Universal Pictures film Disclosure Day, is ho-hum considering the outlandish talk coming from government channels these days, writes Will Clarke.Universal Pictures and Amblin EnUFOs are having a moment.Last month, the President of the United States “Truth Socialed” an AI image of himself perp-walking a grey alien across a tarmac. The federal government has dumped tranche after tranche of UAP files. (If you’re new to all this, UAP stands for Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena which just means UFO.) Joe Rogan and his podcast bros are breathlessly pumping out episodes with “UFO whistleblowers and insiders.” There was recently a Jesse Watters segment on Fox News in which one commentator discussed different species of aliens the U.S. government has allegedly identified. The most common list includes four: the Greys, the Tall Nordics, the Mantids, and the Reptilians. And now, Steven Spielberg is bringing back alien movies with the release of Disclosure Day.Ironically enough, the last name on that list may be the one I’m least interested in hearing from on this topic. Because when you have Hollywood-level UFO antics in your real life newsfeed, you don’t need to pay to see them in a theater. Article continues below this adWhich must be hard news for movie studios to hear. Because in every marketing metric for this film, I would be the ideal audience — the bull's-eye demographic who would see it four or five times in the theater. Spielberg’s E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind informed my entire childhood ontology. I loved E.T. so much that when I was 12 I owned the plastic E.T. finger that lit up when you touched people with it. But even Spielberg, with his cinematic genius and Emily Blunt with Oscar-level emoting, can’t compete with the vice president of the United States riffing about the extraterrestrial and supernatural on a podcast. “I don’t think they’re aliens. I think they’re demons anyway,” JD Vance said confidently about UFOs on Benny Johnson’s podcast in March.This stunning sound bite from our vice president/amateur demonologist was quickly out-weirded by Pastor Larry Ragland of Solid Rock Church who went viral for claiming soon-to-be-released UFO files would reveal aliens as humanity’s true creators, and Jesus and the Bible as basically alien inventions.Article continues below this adThe aliens “seeded us here,” Ragland claimed, and believers should “study the days of Noah.” Ragland later recanted and apologized, which somehow made the story even stickier and stranger.Then, as predicted by just about everyone on Reddit, there was an avalanche of UFO files dumped on May 8, christened, of course, with another presidential Truth Social post. Trump announced that people could finally decide for themselves by going through the newly declassified documents and videos, and then he asked, in all caps: “WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?”Well, glad that you asked, Mr. President. Let me explain.In 2025, I covered “The Archives of the Impossible” — Rice University’s academic conference on UAPs — for this paper. One presenter, retired Army Col. Karl Nell, predicted that January 2026 would begin “Phase II” of “non-governmental UAP disclosure lines of effort.” The data approach would be persistent. The analytic approach, forensic. The objective: academic acceptance.And here we are in 2026 with persistent UFO media coverage, forensic files being released and academic acceptance already coming from prestigious institutions like Stanford’s SOL Foundation and Rice’s “Archives of the Impossible.”Article continues below this adThat’s why Spielberg can make a movie about little green men and claim it’s not imaginary. “It’s my first film that will be considered science fiction that I do not consider to be science fiction,” Spielberg told ABC News. “It’s much more reflective of the world as it is evolving and discoveries that are being made as we speak.”Spielberg, it seems, is a true believer, which makes it hard to separate his well-funded alien catechism, which I got to preview Monday night, from other powerful interests telling us what and what not to believe. In other words, this does not feel entirely accidental. Not the UFO file dump. Not the timing of Spielberg’s Disclosure Day. Not even JD Vance’s comments about demons.But this isn’t the first time our government has tried to shape the UFO narrative. The 1953 CIA Robertson Panel formally recommended that mass media and motion pictures be used to debunk UFOs and strip them of their mystery. They even recommended using Walt Disney to do it. Article continues below this adWhich brings us right back to Hollywood, the institution that taught several generations how to imagine aliens while the government spent those same decades telling us not to imagine them at all.And now, suddenly: www.war.gov/UFO. The Department of War is posting grainy videos on a spy-movie styled website. So the real question is not whether Spielberg has been preparing us for disclosure since the '70s. The real question is whether our government is now using its own social media channels along with influencers like podcast bros and “UFO whistleblowers” to do what Hollywood once did: tell us how to imagine the unimaginable.Which begs the question: What does the government actually know? My educated guess is they don’t know as much about UFOs as we probably need them to know.The best evidence for this annoying hunch is yet another slide that Nell presented at the Rice UFO conference: “Taxonomy of UAP Origin Hypotheses.” According to that slide, our government appears to have 92 hypotheses as to what UFO/UAPs might be — from “Emanations of the Godhead” and “Demonic Forces” to “Humans from the Future.”Article continues below this adJust to be clear, when I have even a preliminary grasp on a topic or a threat, I generally do not have 92 guesses about what it might be. So for everyone convinced that our government has this whole UFO thing on lock — bunkers full of secret tech, recovered craft, biologics and reverse-engineered anti-gravity machines — Nell suggests the people in charge of these programs are probably about as spooked and in the dark as your average anal-probed UFO abductee.Look, I know this is a lot. And as someone who has tried to make a living writing fiction, I deeply resent that this is our consensus reality. It makes it very hard to write novels stranger than this.It also keeps me from enjoying movies like Disclosure Day in a theater. Not because I don’t love Spielberg. I do. But because the movie has already started. Article continues below this adWill Clarke is a Dallas novelist who welcomes our alien overlords. Have thoughts about this? Send a letter to the editor using our letters form or email letters@dallasnews.com. Letters should be no more than 200 words and include the first and last name of the writer and city of residence.
